Nature Matters

By Loise Ng'ang'a and Sumedha Roy

Industrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation have brought about revolutionary advances to the human race. These advances have resulted in increased food security, reduction in poverty rates, access to better health care and availability of more domesticated land. However, these have been achieved through intense exploitation of the earth’s natural resources, which has in turn jeopardised the health of our planet and its ability to sustain healthy human life. The writing on the wall has been evident for a long time, but has only recently gained public recognition after the publication of the report by the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health. 

Source: http://www.elementshealthspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/WHO-climate-change-chart.jpg

Scientists have mapped out nine planetary boundaries within which human development must occur for our continued survival on earth. The shocking revelation is that four out of the nine boundaries have already been crossed, which just reiterates that we have reached a point where the depletion of natural resources poses immeseaurable danger to human health and the future of generations to come.

Source: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/research-programmes/planetary-boundaries/planetary-boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html

Dr. Subhrendu Pattanayak’s recent lecture highlighted the effect of various environmental damages and depletion of natural resources on health of the population. For example, frequent and intense forest fires started manually for clearing land for production has caused rising carbondioxide levels in the atmosphere, ultimately resulting in the infamous Indonesian haze. Such grave are the implications of this haze, that it has been shown to stunt height and lung function of children in conception or in their first few months. Breathing polluted air has also been correlated with an increased incidence of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and respiratory illnesses. According to WHO, approximately 7 million premature deaths were attributed to air pollution in 2012 alone.

Dr. Pattanayak also emphasized on the need to design and implement strategies that can ameliorate the situation, rather than simply acknowledging the problem of planetary health. Starting with a hypothesis and strategy at a smaller scale would allow testing of scalability and better utilization of resources. It is important to remember that the worst outcomes of this environmental destruction will have to be borne by the poor, as the wealthy and middle income populations have other means of escaping. This is just one of the many challenges in attracting funding and research towards a seemingly distant problem that disproportionately affects the population. He listed three main challenges that need to be adressed to protect human health against the threat posed by environmental changes. These include the lack of imagination, knowledge gap, and innovative research, all of which could be better utilized to identify the social and environmental drivers of health. Also, in order to overcome implementation failures, he suggested critically identifying how the various players in planetary health are interacting with drivers of the problem. For instance, promoting collaboration between governments, private sectors, non govermental organisations (NGOs) and the local community is absolutely fundamental for finding a solution to this omnious threat.

The fate of nature is intricately linked with ours. The state of nature, health of people, and economy of nations have always been inter-dependent, and hence there is an urgent need for all policies to take that into account. For the sake of the present and future generations, we must consciously devise strategies to conserve nature.