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CONNECTIVITY OF ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN HEALTH AND SOCIOECONOMICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR SCIENCE AND POLICY
Citation:
Munns Jr., W R. CONNECTIVITY OF ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN HEALTH AND SOCIOECONOMICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR SCIENCE AND POLICY. Presented at Symposium on Environmental Change and Human Health, Chapel Hill, NC, April 14-15, 2003.
Description:
Environmental and public health policy continues to evolve in response to new and complex social, economic and environmental drivers. Globalization of commerce, evolving patterns of land use, and technological advances in such areas as manufacturing and genetically modified foods have created new and complex classes of stressors and risks. The current media-specific and uni-disciplinary focus of science and policy is ill equipped to address these risks relative to protection and sustainability of human health and the environment. At the heart of this issue is the fact that human living standards are inextricably linked through the economy to the integrity of the natural resources from which they derive. The complex trade-offs needed to shape sustainable living standards require a much greater ability to predict the consequences of public policy on environmental and socioeconomic conditions. To address this challenge, we need to understand the causal linkages between policy decisions and their consequences on economic productivity and environmental quality, and to develop methods to evaluate policy options for their consequences. The science needed to support this understanding includes evaluating the impacts of human activity on human well-being as mediated through the environment, and the information and tools needed to support decisions affecting human and environmental health.