Environmental Health, Climate Change and Population Health!

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What does climate change have to do with population health and preventative health care programmes in Australia? How is this macro view of our planet’s health linked to the micro world of population and individual health and wellbeing?

Apart from the obvious answer that drastic climate change could destroy us all, even minor changes to our planet’s climate could have dramatic impacts upon the overall ability of individuals and communities to sustain their health and wellbeing at current levels. The availability of clean water and safe food will ultimately determine the social and economic structures upon which our daily lives depend. The social and economic conditions of human existence determine the nature and prospect of our lives. For modern society, the overwhelming material and economic determinant of existence is climate stability or instability and what this will mean for the daily lives and health status of the world’s population.

A new health science paradigm would focus on sustaining the essence of healthy life and not just on re-proving old theories in epidemiology. What is needed is healthy air and water and a safe place in which to nurture it young, naturally. If we can not guarantee these fundamentals for future generations, we will have made a sad mockery of our concepts of population health. Our efforts to manage the wellbeing of populations will be lost because we will have lost control of the fundamentals. There will be no point then in talking about subtle concepts such as social determinants, managing depression, dealing with obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease and other socially determined ills in order to improve our overall health status. It will be too late for all of this if the very rivers we depend upon for our basic security cease to exist.

Stream: Human Impacts

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Since becoming involved in health systems development in Australia I have led research into the more effective management of patients with chronic and complex illness. Currently I am involved in education and population-based prevention programmes for patients with chronic illness and our teams are developing a range of interventions to manage existing conditions better and to prevent the early onset of preventable chronic illness. In the past 10 years the Australian Government has invested heavily in the management of chronic illness and our task now is to manage our programmes for chronic illness care sustainably and within the new and innovative sources of funding now available for care planning, education and self-management support.