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.
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.
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.
