Basic Information about ACE

ACE Factsheet

ACE Factsheet (pdf) (1.38 MB)

America's Children and the Environment (ACE) is EPA's report presenting data on children's environmental health. ACE brings together information from a variety of sources to provide national indicators and related information on the environment and children's health.

Children may be more vulnerable to environmental hazards then adults. Understanding and improving their living conditions can protect children and women of childbearing age, which can lead to improved health throughout their lives.

On this page:

• About ACE
• ACE Indicators
• ACE History
• Historical Reports and Data
• Retired Indicators

About ACE

The main purposes of ACE are to:

• Compile vetted data from a variety of high-quality sources to present informative and reliable indicators on children's environmental health in the United States
• Inform and enhance discussions on key children's environmental health issues, and how EPA works to impact children's environmental health
• Track trends in children's environmental health and help identify opportunities for EPA to further our core mission to protect the nation's children and families

The information in ACE should not be used on its own for planning or policy making. EPA and other federal agencies use information from many different sources to understand and protect children’s health. 

ACE presents national findings vetted and authoritative data sources that provide important insights into children's environmental health, but  ACE does not independently establish a causal relationship between particular environmental exposures and a health effect. ACE is not a summary of all research, nor does it represent a conclusion about the weight of scientific evidence. As the state of the science continues to evolve and new data become available, ACE will grow and adapt.  

ACE Indicators

ACE defines an indicator as “a quantitative depiction of an aspect of children’s environmental health that summarizes the underlying data in a relevant, understandable, and technically appropriate manner.” Simply put, ACE indicators present national data from surveys and studies in a format that is easy to interpret. 

The indicators highlight key information about children’s environmental health collected by multiple federal agencies. These data can be complex and detailed, but ACE combines and summarizes them into clear graphics and highlights key findings. 

ACE indicators are organized into four categories:

Environments and Contaminants

Pollutants or contaminants that if ingested, inhaled or touched, may affect the health of children. These contaminants and pollutants can be can be found in air, water, food, and soil. The indicators describe contaminants in the air children breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat. It also describes conditions of children’s surroundings by considering indoor environments, and contaminated lands.

See the Environments and Contaminants indicators.

Biomonitoring

Biomonitoring refers to the measurement of chemicals in human bodies, such as in blood or urine.  The indicators  present information on selected chemicals and pollutants measured in the bodies of women of child-bearing age and children.

See the Biomonitoring indicators.

Health

The Health indicators present information on children's diseases, conditions, and health outcomes that may potentially be influenced by environmental exposures. 

See the Health indicators.

Supplementary Topics

The Supplementary Topics section of ACE covers additional topics for which adequate national data are not available, but more targeted data collection efforts could be used to illustrate children’s environmental health issues of interest. 

See the Supplementary Topic indicators.

ACE History 

EPA's first report, America's Children and the Environment: A First View of Available Measures, was published in December 2000 and presented the results of EPA's initial effort to collect and analyze existing, readily available data on measures relevant to children's health and the environment.

The second report, published in February 2003, improved on the first edition by adding new measures for important contaminants, exposures, and childhood illnesses, including data for additional years. The report also provided more analysis of these measures by race/ethnicity of children and family income.

The third report, referred to as ACE3, published in January 2013, includes extensive revisions and updates to topics included in the previous editions as well as several new topics of importance to children's environmental health. For example, many additional chemicals were added to the biomonitoring section including PCBs, PBDEs, phthalates, BPA, perchlorate and PFAS.

Updates to indicators hosted online were made in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025 and will continue to be made periodically. This website presents the most recent data and analyses prepared by EPA.

Historical Reports and Data

• Download past versions of the ACE series.

Retired Indicators

Retired indicators are no longer accessible from the ACE website, but historical data is linked in the table below.