The World Health Organization Recently reported99 percent of people in the United States breathe harmful levels of air pollution.
That means that your breath could be causing harm to your body, damaging cells, accumulating within your organs, and cutting down on your life expectancy.
More than 8.7 millions people die prematurely each year from air pollution. Due to the global dependence on fossil fuels, industrial processes that pollute the air, soil, and water, the vast majority of these deaths could be avoided.
The fact that people continue to die from polluted indoor air shows that there is a profound disconnect between modern society and the environment. However, this has also led to the development of a multidisciplinary field called planetary health that seeks out to stop and reverse the current catastrophe.
Advocates of planetary wellness and practitioners seek to transform the status quo through the promotion of Indigenous perspectives on the environment that emphasize interconnectedness of all living things. It is clear that harm leads into more harm in a vicious loop, but that flourishing can also be achieved.
Planetary health encompasses many areas that are connected to the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis. This includes people involved in food security, water access, and those working on urgent racial justice issues.
As the health effects of environmental decline have become more severe, this field has been gaining prominence.
This year’s World Health Day is dedicated promoting planet health and calling for urgent climate action to usher into a new era of environmental conservation, restoration, and restoration.
Is it possible to imagine a world in which clean air, clean water, and healthy food are all available to all? The World Health Organization asks peopleAs part of the World Health Day efforts. Where economies are focused upon health and well-being Where cities can be lived in and residents have control over their own health and that of the planet.
3 Things You Should Know About Planetary Health
- Climate-related causes are responsible for more deaths than 13 million annually.
- People are dying every day from environmental pollution.
- Climate action and conservation are public health interventions.
Planetary Sickness
The various systems on Earth are just as interconnected as the systems in the human body.
These systems include the biosphere (biosphere), cryosphere (hydrosphere), and atmosphere. You may have learned this from your early science lessons. Each of these systems has been severely affected by human activity in ways that threaten human health.
Human waste and pollution have so altered the geosphere that a new era of rock records has emerged. Archaeologists are now able to identify this new era. The Anthropocene was officially named(The prefix “anthropo” refers to human activity). Diverse industrial activities, including fracking, construction, industrial agriculture, and plastic production, have greatly degraded the environment. More than 75% are found on the planet’s surface.
These trends are worsening as groundwater supplies become polluted and soil fertility decreases, making it more difficult to grow food. Further, as more land becomes desert, human communities are becoming more vulnerable to extreme storms, natural disasters, such as landslides, forest fires, and landslides.
Extreme losses have also been suffered by the biodiversity that makes up our biosphere. For example, over the past 50 years, Wild species have declined worldwide by 68%. More than 1 million animal and plant speciesIn the years to come, we will all be extinct.
Biodiversity is a key ingredient in our global food system. Insects pollinate a large portion of the world’s crops and are the basis of our diets. Infectious diseases such as COVID-19 are becoming more prevalent as humans disrupt more wildlife.
Few systems have been more affected than the cryosphere. This refers to the planet’s vast and rapidly melting ice stores. Between 1994-2017, the earth lost More than 28 Trillion Tons of IceSince then, the rate of melting has increased exponentially. All the water that is projected to enter the ocean in this century could cause sea levels to rise by several feet, displacing many billions of people and disrupting fragile ecosystems in polar regions and elsewhere.
The hydrosphere, the planet’s waterways, is closely related to the cryosphere. These waterways have been overexploited by countries around the world and polluted. Only one-third the world’s rivers still flow freely, with the rest being dammed or otherwise impaired. Despite the fact that the earth has plenty of water, misuse and chronic misuse will result in 3.6 billion people living without it. Safe access to it by 2050.
The atmosphere, which is the area above you, is the most closely linked to the climate crisis. The atmosphere has become more dense with particulate material and is also absorbing heat from the earth’s surface. There are currently 420 carbon dioxide particles per millionThe atmosphere has the highest concentration for millions years.
The greenhouse effect is the phenomenon where temperatures rise higher than the surrounding environment. This is why greenhouse gas is used. The heating effect is causing all of the earth’s systems to become more unstable, with increasingly devastating results.
Warming temperatures, for example, have changed the global rain patterns. Flooding some areas with biblical-sized floods has resulted in other areas being dry and without any moisture. Warming temperatures are also making it more difficult to obtain water (hydrosphere), melting remaining ice caps and drying out soil (geosphere), as well as killing animal and plant life.
These impacts have a cascading effect on public health anddisproportionately affect the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities, who lack the resources to adapt. Already, more that Climate impacts cause the deaths of 13 million people each year.These are just a few deaths that can be directly attributed. It is likely that there will be many more deaths due to water and food shortages. We must also address the pollution problem that will only worsen over time.
The actions that can be taken to end this crisis are well-known, and easily accessible.
Planetary Health
As the planet heals so does our health.
However, to make the planet a source for continuous health, it will take transformational actions in human society and the development new value systems. Planetary Health AllianceIndigenous leaders all over the globe.
Primarily, the fossil fuels which are heating up the planet. need to be phased down and replaced by alternative sources of clean electricityWhile countries work to improve energy efficiency in their infrastructure, they also do so. If countries can reduce their emissions by at least half by 2030, then there is still hope for a way to prevent temperatures from rising more that 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The worst aspects of the climate crisis could be avoided.
Health benefits of moving away from fossil fuels It would be immediateIn the form of cleaner air and water, and less dangerous heat waves.
The second major way to improve the planet’s health is to conserve and restore wildlife. This means protecting 50% of the earth’s land and sea environments from excessive human exploitation. Robust biodiversity provides food, water, and medicine to humanity, as well as protecting them from natural disasters that could otherwise cause damage. According to the World Health Organization.
The vast majority In cities by the middle century, they will beThe planetary health community and advocates for urban development call for the transformation of urban centers into wildlife refuges that provide green spaces, food production and recreational opportunities. Because of their dependence on gasoline-powered cars and lack of regulation of factories many of the largest cities are places of extreme pollution. By replacing cars with buses, bikes, trains, and ridesharing electric vehicles, cities can become healthierenvironments that ease rather than inflame asthma.
The transformation of food systems is another way that we can improve our human and planet health. Currently, the main modes of food production are industrial agriculture, factory farms, and trawling oceans. They are destroying wildlife and natural resource and degrading the environment. These practices are driven by short-term gain, with little consideration for long-term resilience, so they have no place in our future.
Regenerative agriculture allows countries to produce more food while also healing the planet’s forests, grasslands and water bodies. Fish populations can recover and thrive by creating global marine regulations. The factory farm model, which is extremely harmful, can be phased away by adopting plant-based diets.
Scientists have actually created a planetary nutrition diet that, if widely adopted, will ease the planet’s stress while still generating enough calories for all of humanity.
The planet is remarkable resilient and can heal if humans are a partner, not a foe. All aspects of human health and wellbeing are influenced by Earth. These include the oxygen we inhale, the nutrients we eat, the water we drink, and the medications we take. And All of us have a part to playby championing the vision of planet health
The moment demands more than rapid innovation in technologies and practices. Sam Meyers, director of the Planetary Health Alliance. “Under the ecological crisis that we have created, and the global health crisis it is precipitating is a spiritual crisis.”
He said: We will need a new fabric with threads from Indigenous knowledge and the worlds faith traditions, literatures, and the arts that reaffirms our spiritual connection with the natural world. Our story of human exceptionalism, which has seen us extract, domination, scarcity, and eventually extinction, must be replaced by new stories and values that emphasize interdependence, equity and abundance, regeneration, and renaissance.
