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Focus on Connections Between Health and the Environment

IDRC Photo: P. Bennett

2003-08-12

What sort of environment are we going to leave behind for our children? How can we exploit nonrenewable resources without harming our health? What are the realistic compromises needed between the short-term benefits of exploiting natural resources and the long-term costs to the environment and human health? How can we live in overcrowded cities without poisoning each other?

In developing countries, the longstanding environmentally harmful effects of deforestation and overgrazing are now being aggravated by industrialization and modernization. The ecosystems suffer the combined assault. At the beginning, exploiting an ecosystem automatically reduces its resilience or ability to rebound. When that ecosystem also has to sustain a rapidly growing human population reduced to adopting basic survival strategies, the ecosystem's resilience can be lethally undermined. But even before that, a domino effect can be set in motion, endangering the health of populations.

The issue that ecosystem approaches to human health — the Ecohealth approach — address is no less than humanity's place in its environment. As Mariano Bonet, the leader of a rehabilitation project in the oldest section of Havana, puts it: "The Ecohealth approach recognizes that there are inextricable links between humans and their biophysical, social, and economic environments that are reflected in an individual's health."

This collection presents a selection of stories of how an ecosystems approach to research is being applied.

Features

From Forests to Fields in Côte d’Ivoire

What happens when policies and programs to promote economic growth unexpectedly wreak havoc with the environment and people’s health? In Côte d’Ivoire, researchers are looking at ways to reduce the harmful health impacts of unbridled agricultural development and of a large hydroelectric dam. But rather than focusing on health services, they are trying to improve people’s health by better managing the local resource base.

Taking Control of Air Pollution in Mexico City

Located in a pollutant-trapping valley, Mexico City — one of the world’s largest cities — has had limited success in battling suffocating air pollution. A new understanding of the health impacts of this pollution — and of people’s role in both the problem and the solution — could lead to better targeted, more effective air improvement programs.

A Golden Opportunity for Better Health

Gold has been mined for centuries in the hills of southwestern Ecuador. Today, the mining is smallscale but the problems it brings are large — unsafe conditions, environmental contamination, and harm to human health. Researchers are studying the impact of mining activities in several communities along the Puyango River. They have found that the effects extend beyond the immediate area to farming families living downstream. Two communities are now taking steps to address the problem.

Cause and Solution: A New Perspective on Malaria and Agriculture

Malaria is thought to have emerged as a virulant disease at the same time as the early practice of agriculture — about 7,000 years ago. Today, a project supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is taking a new look at the links between agriculture and malaria. The goal is to reduce the incidence of the disease.

Healthy Collaboration Cleans up Kathmandu

An entrenched system of social organization, environmental degradation, and poverty have conspired to create a public health crisis in Kathmandu. Waterborne and helminthic diseases are rampant, as are respiratory and digestive illnesses. But the situation is improving dramatically for the city's poor, thanks to a unique collaboration between Nepalese and Canadian researchers and the work of a local nongovernmental organization.

News

When researchers probing two well-known health problems in different parts of the developing world unearthed surprising results, a new approach to problem-solving — the ecosystems approach — led them far beyond usual solutions, an international conference sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) heard on May 20.

Going from Research to Policy with an Ecosystems Approach

D.D. Joshi laboured 10 years to convince Nepal’s parliamentarians to adopt a law governing how food animals were slaughtered. One of the sticking points was that the proposed new rules would allow female animals to be eaten — a commonplace practice, but one that was actually outlawed in the country’s religious-based National Code.

Resource

Can people remain healthy in a world that is sick?

This Web site assembles a variety of resources on the ecosytem approach to human health. Including slide presentations, short stories, case studies, research reports, books, etc., the site presents an overview of the Ecohealth approach, results of IDRC-supported research, and the important lessons that have been learned.

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