Planetary Health: Safeguarding Human Health and the Environment in the Anthropocene

We live in unprecedented times - the Anthropocene - defined by far-reaching human impacts on the natural systems that underpin civilisation. Planetary Health explores the many environmental changes that threaten to undermine progress in human health, and explains how these changes affect health outcomes, from pandemics to infectious diseases to mental health, from chronic diseases to injuries. It shows how people can adapt to those changes that are now unavoidable, through actions that both improve health and safeguard the environment. But humanity must do more than just adapt: we need transformative changes across many sectors - energy, housing, transport, food, and health care. The book discusses specific policies, technologies, and interventions to achieve the change required, and explains how these can be implemented. It presents the evidence, builds hope in our common future, and aims to motivate action by everyone, from the general public to policymakers to health practitioners.

Sir Andrew Haines is Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health at the Centre for Climate Change and Planetary Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he was previously director between 2001 and 2010. He was member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the Second, Third, and Fifth Assessment Reports. He was chair of the Rockefeller/ Lancet Commission on Planetary Health in 2014–15, and chair of the Task Force on Climate Change Mitigation and Public Health in 2008–9. He is an international member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Howard Frumkin is Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health in Seattle, where he was dean from 2000 through 2006. He was previously head of the Wellcome Trust 'Our Planet, Our Health' initiative, and director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.