Environmental Health, Why Is It Important?

Today, climate change permanently affects health on a global scale. Precisely, the importance of environmental health is an absolutely decisive issue when making significant decisions for the future of society  since it will determine well-being at the individual level.

In this way, Bernstein says that everything that entails migration, trauma, violence, infectious diseases, mental health problems and nutritional deficiencies has become a pattern that we will continue to see. It also continues to warn that these severe droughts are expected to become more common as climate change unfolds.

The impact of climate change on environmental and individual health

The director of Chan School, Aaron Bernstein, assures that climate change affects health in all areas. Precisely, Chan School is the postgraduate institution of public health of Harvard University, founded in 1913, but which became a School of Public Health in 1922.

Aaron Bernstein talks about the health effects of climate change. In this sense, it also focuses on the  increase in public spending on health derived from the harmful effects of this climate change. A situation that will finally make us abandon fossil fuels as a source of energy.

In this way, an excellent solution is sought to significantly and permanently reduce the damage caused by climate change. Harvard says that to obtain an improvement in the quality of life, policies should focus on the emission of greenhouse gases.

Researchers look at how climate change directly affects the well-being of all humanity and threatens our continuity as a species. Precisely, environmental health is decisive to reduce our quality of life or even avoid extinction.

Studies reveal the importance of environmental health

A study carried out by Samuel Myers,  principal investigator of the Department of Environmental Health, called Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition , predicted, based on the evolution of emissions in recent years, the levels of carbon dioxide that will be in the atmosphere in the year 2050.

In this way, they discovered a 9% decrease in the zinc content of wheat and a decrease of almost 8% in the amount of protein in rice, which would harm the nutritional values ​​of our diet.

In this sense, if the deficiency of zinc and proteins in food is observed in detail, it is a very harmful effect.  Consider zinc is a determining factor in the morbidity and mortality associated with many childhood diseases, specifically infectious ones.

If the necessary measures are not taken in this regard, nutritional deficiency will cause irreversible damage on a global scale, paying a very high price as a polluting species. In this sense, Aaron Bernstein, in an interview conducted by Madeline Drexler, editor of Harvard Public Health, affirms that “reducing greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere may be the largest / best public health intervention”, bringing really beneficial consequences for all humanity already in the near future.

In this way, becoming aware of the importance of environmental health is the first step to make a radical change effective that will have a direct impact on the well – being of humanity. Therefore, in ours.