We are today encountering numerous sustainable health concerns in relation to the existential threats caused by ecological and global changes. This book illustrates the ways in which health is being affected by anthropogenic human impacts on the environment, as well as climate change. It highlights synergistic, interventional approaches towards sustainable healthcare, together with innovative conceptual frameworks and models for facing the changing demands of our health needs under these current epidemiological and health transitions. It also sets out a vision of ecological principles to guide our professional directions with regards to sustainable health developments as legacy-based values across generations.

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world. Students of public health will gain a solid grounding in the new challenges their profession must confront, while those in the environmental sciences, agriculture, the design professions, and other fields will become familiar with the human consequences of planetary changes. Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.

This book focuses on the emerging health issues due to climate change, particularly emphasizing the situation in developing countries. Thanks to recent development in the areas of remote sensing, GIS technology, and downscale modeling of climate, it has now become possible to depict and predict the relationship between environmental factors and health-related event data with a meaningful spatial and temporal scale. The chapters address new aspects of environment-health relationship relevant to this smaller scale analyses, including how considering people’s mobility changes the exposure profile to certain environmental factors, how considering behavioral characteristics is important in predicting diarrhea risks after urban flood, and how small-scale land use patterns will affect the risk of infection by certain parasites, and subtle topography of the land profile. Through the combination of reviews and case studies, the reader would be able to learn how the issues of health and climate/social changes can be addressed using available technology and datasets. The post-2015 UN agenda has just put forward, and tremendous efforts have been started to develop and establish appropriate indicators to achieve the SDG goals. This book will also serve as a useful guide for creating such an indicator associated with health and planning, in line with the Ecohealth concept, the major tone of this book. With the increasing and pressing needs for adaptation to climate change, as well as societal change, this would be a very timely publication in this trans-disciplinary field.

How will the ecological and economic crises of the 21st century transform health systems and human wellbeing?

Planetary Health is a solution oriented transdisciplinary field and a global movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to Earth’s natural systems on human health and all life on Earth. A core insight of the field is that the current Earth crisis is so extensive that it is now driving a global humanitarian crisis (Planetary Health Alliance © 2022). The nature of our current problems, with global and local implications, requires that voices from all geographies, genders, and cultures be heard, and that those people be involved in the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA). With that in mind, the PHA proposed that the 4th Planetary Health Annual Meeting (PHAM2021) would be hosted for the first time in the Global South. After a selection process, the University of São Paulo (USP) was chosen to host the PHAM2021, in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. USP and PHA worked together to develop the program. The meeting motto reflects the overall concept: Planetary Health for all - bridging communities to achieve the Great Transition. Also on our minds was a sense of urgency to promote actions, as the Earth crisis continues to intensify all around the globe. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak to emphasize the importance of spreading the word about PH as a comprehensive framework to understand our current situation and to promote change. Intended to be held in-person at the USP main campus, we had to shift to a virtual meeting due to the pandemic. We took that as an opportunity to expand the program across an entire week, to declare the last week of April Planetary Health Week, and call our event PH Meeting and Festival, including arts sessions in the program, as arts are an important way to connect people around PH. Our audience increased tremendously, while lowering our environmental footprint: we had more than 5,000 registrants from 130 countries. The narrative of the event was especially tailored to be aligned with the underlying event concept, bringing foundations of PH - values and knowledge, and PH in action in the private sector, government and civil society. Each of them was the main theme of a day that week. Finally, we felt it was time for the global PH community to issue a call-to-action for a deep change and urgent response: the São Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health was developed openly and collaboratively by the global community with assistance from the United Nations Development Program and was released after the event. At the end, and after all the hard work, we felt very satisfied with the results, the ample participation, and with an innovative event that will certainly inspire the next editions.

Global health is a rapidly emerging discipline with a transformative potential for public policy and international development. Emphasizing transnational health issues, global health aims to improve health and achieve health equity for all people worldwide. Its multidisciplinary scope includes contributions from many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences, including clinical medicine, public health, social and behavioral sciences, environmental sciences, economics, public policy, law and ethics. This large reference offers up-to-date information and expertise across all aspects of global health and helps readers to achieve a truly multidisciplinary understanding of the topics, trends as well as the clinical, socioeconomic and environmental drivers impacting global health. As a fully comprehensive, state-of-the-art and continuously updated, living reference, the Handbook of Global Health is an important, dynamic resource to provide context for global health clinical care, organizational decision-making, and overall public policy on many levels. Health workers, physicians, economists, environmental and social scientists, trainees and medical students as well as professionals and practitioners will find this handbook of great value.

We live in unprecedented times - the Anthropocene - defined by far-reaching human impacts on the natural systems that underpin civilisation. Planetary Health explores the many environmental changes that threaten to undermine progress in human health, and explains how these changes affect health outcomes, from pandemics to infectious diseases to mental health, from chronic diseases to injuries. It shows how people can adapt to those changes that are now unavoidable, through actions that both improve health and safeguard the environment. But humanity must do more than just adapt: we need transformative changes across many sectors - energy, housing, transport, food, and health care. The book discusses specific policies, technologies, and interventions to achieve the change required, and explains how these can be implemented. It presents the evidence, builds hope in our common future, and aims to motivate action by everyone, from the general public to policymakers to health practitioners.