Earth's Degradation Threatens Major Health Gains: Study

https://www.yahoo.com/health/earths-degradation-threatens-major-health-gains-124204503917.html


The dramatic decline of bees has already compromised the quantity and quality of many nutrient-rich crops that the health of women and children depend on. (Photo: Corbis)



The unprecedented degradation of Earth’s natural resources coupled with climate change could reverse major gains in human health over the last 150 years, according to a sweeping scientific review published late Wednesday.

“We have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realize economic and development gains in the present,” said the report, written by 15 leading academics and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet.

“By unsustainably exploiting nature’s resources, human civilization has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature’s life support systems in the future.”

Climate change, ocean acidification, depleted water sources, polluted land, over-fishing, biodiversity loss — all unintended by-products of humanity’s drive to develop and prosper — “pose serious challenges to the global health gains of the past several decades,” especially in poorer nations, the 60-page report concludes.

The likely impacts on global health of climate change, ranging from expanded disease vectors to malnourishment, have been examined by the UN’s panel of top climate scientists. But the new report, entitled Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch, takes an even broader view.

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