Integrating health and environmental impact analysis

Abstract

Scientific investigations have progressively refined our understanding of the influence of the environment on human health, and the many adverse impacts that human activities exert on the environment, from the local to the planetary level. Nonetheless, throughout the modern public health era, health has been pursued as though our lives and lifestyles are disconnected from ecosystems and their component organisms. The inadequacy of the societal and public health response to obesity, health inequities, and especially global environmental and climate change now calls for an ecological approach which addresses human activity in all its social, economic and cultural complexity. The new approach must be integral to, and interactive, with the natural environment. We see the continuing failure to truly integrate human health and environmental impact analysis as deeply damaging, and we propose a new conceptual model, the ecosystems-enriched Drivers, Pressures, State, Exposure, Effects, Actions or 'eDPSEEA' model, to address this shortcoming. The model recognizes convergence between the concept of ecosystems services which provides a human health and well-being slant to the value of ecosystems while equally emphasizing the health of the environment, and the growing calls for 'ecological public health' as a response to global environmental concerns now suffusing the discourse in public health. More revolution than evolution, ecological public health will demand new perspectives regarding the interconnections among society, the economy, the environment and our health and well-being. Success must be built on collaborations between the disparate scientific communities of the environmental sciences and public health as well as interactions with social scientists, economists and the legal profession. It will require outreach to political and other stakeholders including a currently largely disengaged general public. The need for an effective and robust science-policy interface has never been more pressing. Conceptual models can facilitate this by providing theoretical frameworks and supporting stakeholder engagement process simplifications for inherently complex situations involving environment and human health and well-being. They can be tools to think with, to engage, to communicate and to help navigate in a sea of complexity. We believe models such as eDPSEEA can help frame many of the issues which have become the challenges of the new public health era and can provide the essential platforms necessary for progress.

Beyond Climate Change and Health: Integrating Broader Environmental Change and Natural Environments for Public Health Protection and Promotion in the UK

“…If we compare the achievements reviewed in this paper with research agendas such as those promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international agencies, the task has only barely been outlined by work conducted so far [5,6,[129][130][131]. The assessment of health risks attributable to climate and other environmental change has only just started, including some initial evaluation of indirect effects such as infectious diseases.…”

Minería en áreas de protección ambiental. Distrito de manejo integrado páramo Güargua y Laguna Verde

“…Los resultados del estudio coinciden con otros dirigidos a demostrar objetivamente los nexos entre condiciones del medio y salud pública (Pulido, 2014;Riojas-Rodríguez, Schilmann, López-Carrillo, y Finkelman, 2013), este aportará al desarrollo de más esbeltos modelos de análisis de riesgos sobre la salud de los sistemas ecológicos y el bienestar (Reis, 2013). Aspectos culturales, económicos, sociales e incluso los medios de vida que están al alcance de las personas influyen en la magnitud del efecto que los cambios del ambiente podrían generar sobre la salud de las personas, y ello deberá tenerse en cuenta a la hora de estimar qué tan vulnerable y frágil es un territorio y sus habitantes.…”

Using DPSIR and Balances to Support Water Governance

“…This inevitably results in a more complex tool, but meets the criticism of, amongst others, Maxim et al [13] (p. 12) that DPSIR does not address "multiple dimensions of causality inherent in complex environmental and socio-economic systems". This could be a reason why the embedding of DPSIR within a more holistic approach, in particular including socio-economic and governance aspects, has been pursued for about a decade (see [10,12,13,[25][26][27][28]). …”