Earth’s degradation threatens major health gains
- July 23, 2015, 9:28 pm
- Breaking News
- 53 Views
HQ City Desk
QUETTA: The unprecedented degradation of Earth´s natural resources coupled with climate change could reverse major gains in human health over the last 150 years, according to a sweeping scientific review published.
"We have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present," said the report, written by 15 leading academics and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet.
"By unsustainably exploiting nature´s resources, human civilisation has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature´s life support systems in the future."
Climate change, ocean acidification, depleted water sources, polluted land, over-fishing, biodiversity loss -- all unintended by-products of humanity´s drive to develop and prosper -- "pose serious challenges to the global health gains of the past several decades", especially in poorer nations, the 60-page report concludes.
The likely impacts on global health of climate change, ranging from expanded disease vectors to malnourishment, have been examined by the UN´s panel of top climate scientists. But the new report, entitled Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch, takes an even broader view.
The "Anthropocene" is the name given by many scientists to the period -- starting with mass industrialisation -- in which human activity has arguably reshaped Earth´s bio-chemical make-up.
"This is the first time that the global health community has come out in a concerted way to report that we are in real danger of undermining the core ecological systems that support human health," said Samuel Myers, a scientist at Harvard University and one the authors.
Danger of bee decline:
A companion study on the worldwide decline of bees and other pollinators, led by Myers and also published in The Lancet, illustrates one way this might happen.
The dramatic decline of bees has already compromised the quantity and quality of many nutrient-rich crops that depend on the transfer of pollen to bear fruit.
Pollinators play a key role in 35 per cent of global food production, and are directly responsible for up to 40 per cent of the world´s supply of micro-nutrients such a vitamin A and folate, both essential for children and pregnant women.
The complete wipe-out of pollinating creatures, the study concludes, would push a quarter of a billion people in the red-zone of vitamin A or folate deficiency, and cause an increase in heart disease, stroke and some cancers, leading to some 1.4 million additional deaths each year. A 50 loss of pollination would result in roughly half that impact, the researchers found.
