FYS Biodiversity and Health

This open access book identifies and discusses biodiversity’s contribution to physical, mental and spiritual health and wellbeing. Furthermore, the book identifies the implications of this relationship for nature conservation, public health, landscape architecture and urban planning – and considers the opportunities of nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation. This transdisciplinary book will attract a wide audience interested in biodiversity, ecology, resource management, public health, psychology, urban planning, and landscape architecture.

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.

High Library offers this book as an ebook and in print.

The Earth's biodiversity-the rich variety of life on our planet-is disappearing at an alarming rate. And while many books have focused on the expected ecological consequences, or on the aesthetic, ethical, sociological, or economic dimensions of this loss, Sustaining Life is the first book to examine the full range of potential threats that diminishing biodiversity poses to human health. Edited and written by Harvard Medical School physicians Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein, along with more than 100 leading scientists who contributed to writing and reviewing the book, Sustaining Life presents a comprehensive-and sobering-view of how human medicines, biomedical research, the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, and the production of food, both on land and in the oceans, depend on biodiversity.

Exploring the interconnectedness of human health, biodiversity, and bioethics. We all depend on environmental biodiversity for clean air, safe water, adequate nutrition, effective drugs, and protection from infectious diseases. In Wounded Planet, Henk A.M.J. ten Have argues that the ethical debate about healthcare has become too narrow and individualized. We must, he writes, adopt a new bioethical discourse—one that deals with issues of justice, equality, vulnerability, human rights, and solidarity—in order to adequately reflect the serious threat that current loss of biodiversity poses to planetary health. Exploring modern environmental challenges in depth, ten Have persuasively demonstrates that environmental concerns can no longer be separated from healthcare challenges, and thus should be included in global bioethics.