Is Public Health Environmentally Sustainable?
Martin Marchman Andersen, Michael Z. Hauschild, Sigurd Lauridsen

TL;DR
This paper examines whether public health interventions and policies are environmentally sustainable, challenging the assumption that they are always win-win.
Contribution
The paper introduces the concept of environmental 'budgets' and argues against increasing individual shares over time for sustainability.
Findings
Environmental sustainability in public health requires considering both impact and budget shares.
Increasing individual environmental shares over time is incompatible with maximizing health within sustainability limits.
Some public health interventions may not be environmentally sustainable, contradicting the win-win assumption.
Abstract
In this paper we discuss whether effective public health interventions and policies are environmentally sustainable. First, we suggest that the environmental impact from public health interventions and policies should be considered in the perspective of a human lifecycle. Second, we spell out in greater detail what we take it to mean for a public health intervention or policy to be environmentally sustainable. Third, environmental sustainability regards not only environmental impact, but also shares of our environmental “budgets”, also referred to as environmentally safe operating spaces. Such budgets represent the limits of the sustainability of a group of individuals, e.g. a population. Each individual is assigned a share of the budget for each category of environmental impact, which represents how much the individual may impact the environmental category in question without doing so…
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Taxonomy
TopicsClimate Change and Health Impacts · Agriculture Sustainability and Environmental Impact · Air Quality and Health Impacts
