Air pollution is a significant problem in cities across the world. It affects human health and well-being, ecosystem health, crops, climate, visibility and human-made materials. Health effects related to air pollution include its impact on the pulmonary, cardiac, vascular and neurological systems (Section 2). Trees affect air quality through a number of means (Section 3) and can be used to improve air quality (Section 4). However, air pollution also affects tree health and plant diversity (Section 5). Bioindicators can be useful for monitoring air quality and indicating environmental health (Section 6). Understanding the impacts of vegetation biodiversity on air quality and air quality on vegetation biodiversity is essential to sustaining healthy and diverse ecosystems, and for improving air quality and consequently human health and well-being.

Connecting global priorities: biodiversity and human health: a state of knowledge review.

Food systems must operate within environmental constraints to avoid disastrous consequences for the biosphere. Such constraints must also take into account nutritional quality and health outcomes. Given the intrinsic relationships between the environmental sciences and nutritional sciences, it is imperative that public health embraces environmental nutrition as the new frontier of research and practice and begins a concerted focus on the new discipline of environmental nutrition, which seeks to comprehensively address the sustainability of food systems. We provide an overview to justify our proposition, outline a research and practice agenda for environmental nutrition, and explore how the complex relationships within food systems that affect public health could be better understood through the environmental nutrition model.

Environmental Nutrition: A New Frontier for Public Health.

Human health and diseases are determined by many complex factors. Health threats from the human-animal-ecosystems interface (HAEI) and zoonotic diseases (zoonoses) impose an increasing risk continuously to public health, from those emerging pathogens transmitted through contact with animals, food, water and contaminated environments. Immense challenges forced on the ecological perspectives on food and the eco-environments, including aquaculture, agriculture and the entire food systems. Impacts of food and eco-environments on human health will be examined amongst the importance of human interventions for intended purposes in lowering the adverse effects on the biodiversity. The complexity of relevant conditions defined as factors contributing to the ecological determinants of health will be illuminated from different perspectives based on concepts, citations, examples and models, in conjunction with harmful consequential effects of human-induced disturbances to our environments and food systems, together with the burdens from ecosystem disruption, environmental hazards and loss of ecosystem functions. The eco-health literacy should be further promoting under the “One Health” vision, with “One World” concept under Ecological Public Health Model for sustaining our environments and the planet earth for all beings, which is coincidentally echoing Confucian’s theory for the environmental ethics of ecological harmony.

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Ecological determinants of health: food and environment on human health.

Biodiversity and Health

The linkages between human health, biodiversity, ecosystems, and the life-supporting services that they provide are varied and complex. The traditional neglect of this nexus by policy-makers perpetuates threats posed to ecosystems with potentially critical impacts on global health. The Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Health Organization recently co-convened two regional workshops on these intricate but vital linkages. From discussions held with policy-makers and experts in the biodiversity and health sectors, spanning some 50 countries in Africa and the Americas, we derive a broad framework for the development of national and regional public health and biodiversity strategies relevant to strategic planning processes in the emerging post-2015 development context.

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From Manaus to Maputo: Toward a Public Health and Biodiversity Framework

Summary A better understanding of the links between biodiversity, health and disease presents major opportunities for policy development, and can enhance our understanding of how health-focused measures affect biodiversity, and conservation measures affect health. The breadth and complexity of these relationships, and the socio-economic drivers by which they are influenced, in the context of rapidly shifting global trends, reaffirm the need for an integrative, multidisciplinary and systemic approach to the health of people, livestock and wildlife within the ecosystem context. Loss of biodiversity, habitat fragmentation and the loss of natural environments threaten the full range of life-supporting services provided by ecosystems at all levels of biodiversity, including species, genetic and ecosystem diversity. The disruption of ecosystem services has direct and indirect implications for public health, which are likely to exacerbate existing health inequities, whether through exposure to environmental hazards or through the loss of livelihoods. One Health provides a valuable framework for the development of mutually beneficial policies and interventions at the nexus between health and biodiversity, and it is critical that One Health integrates biodiversity into its strategic agenda.

Cooper Hd

Papers

The integration of biodiversity into One Health.