A range of different conceptual frameworks have been developed over recent years, aimed at summarising the relationships between environment and health.  Many of these have been devised to help identify and select environmental health indicators, others to give structure to thinking about policies, others to help frame epidemiological studies.  They can also be useful as a basis for issue-framing in integrated environmental health impact assessment, though care is needed to ensure that they are not applied too rigidly, and thus limit thinking.

One of the earliest, yet also most influential, frameworks in the area of environmental health was that proposed by Lalonde in 1974.  This recognises four determinants of health: human biology, environment, life style and health care organisation. The framework has been adopted as an underpinning model for a number of environmental health initiatives, including that of the Dutch Centre for Public Health Forecasting. Subsequently, however, a more complex framework was proposed by Dahlgren and Whitehead (1991), distinguishing different layers of influence within the health sphere. The inner core consists of factors which are more or less fixed and immutable (age, sex and hereditary factors); surrounding layers define the factors (e.g. individual lifestyle and wider social, community and environmental influences) that could theoretically be modified.

A separate approach to framing environmental health issues emerged from work to develop state of environment reports and associated indicators, and later as a basis for environmental assessment.  In the 1970s, a simple framework was developed which recognised environmental impacts as a consequence of pressures (mainly from human activities), which cause changes in the state of the environment, and in turn led to policy responses.  This Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model was widely adopted (e.g. by OECD and the US-Environmental Protection Agency).  In time, however, it was extended to incorporate additional elements, relating to driving forces and impacts (the DPSIR model), and this was in turn modified to represent health issues more effectively by including exposures and health effects (the DPSEEA framework). More recently, also various other frameworks have been developed, targetted at more specific issues (see references below).