Healthy ecosystems, healthy people: Using ecosystem services to link ecosystem processes to human health impacts

Background/Question/Methods

Changes in ecosystems have the potential to exert significant pressures on human health. Attributing morbidity and mortality impacts to specific ecological processes and functions, however, has proven difficult. Research efforts in both the ecological and health sciences have provided evidence for many elements linking ecosystem change and human health. Here, we connect these often disconnected, but intrinsically interrelated, research efforts into a comprehensive framework that allows us to assign human health impacts to specific ecosystem changes. There is a strong desire to link health effects of ecosystem change into ecosystem service assessments, but this has seldom been done. Our framework allows health impacts to be integrated into ecosystem service assessments. This work is a product of a multi-disciplinary working group sponsored by the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

Results/Conclusions

Our framework connects empirical research across diverse fields in the health sciences using an ecosystem services framework. This allows us to identify multiple causal pathways between ecosystem change and specific health outcomes. Here, we address the interdisciplinary aspects of susceptibility and risk that mediate the influences of human-land use on health-related ecosystem services. We present a template for aligning multiple human health categories, including both communicable and non-communicable diseases, with proximate and distally connected ecosystem changes. In support of this, we devise an interdisciplinary lexicon to improve communication across fields and guide future research efforts. By developing a set of common assessment metrics, we define how ecosystem services can be used as a framework to describe ecosystem influences on human health.