The impacts of global environmental change have precipitated numerous approaches that connect the health of ecosystems, non-human organisms and humans. However, the proliferation of approaches can lead to confusion due to overlaps in terminology, ideas and foci. Recognising the need for clarity, this paper provides a guide to seven field developments in environmental public health research and practice: occupational and environmental health; political ecology of health; environmental justice; ecohealth; One Health; ecological public health; and planetary health. Field developments are defined in terms of their uniqueness from one another, are historically situated, and core texts or journals are highlighted. The paper ends by discussing some of the intersecting features across field developments, and considers opportunities created through such convergence. This field guide will be useful for those seeking to build a next generation of integrative research, policy, education and action that is equipped to respond to current health and sustainability challenges.
ABSTRACT. Resilience thinking and ecosystems approaches to health (EAH), or ecohealth, share roots in complexity science, although they have distinct foundations in ecology and population health, respectively. The current articulations of these two approaches are strongly converging, but each approach has its strengths. Resilience thinking has developed theoretical models to the study of socialecological systems, whereas ecohealth has a vast repertoire of experience in dealing with complex health issues. With the two fields dovetailing, there is ripe opportunity to create a dialog centered on concepts that are more thoroughly developed in one field, which can then serve to advance the other. In this article, we first present an overview of the ecohealth and resilience thinking frameworks before opening a dialog centered on seven themes that have strong potential for cross-pollination between the two approaches: scale interactions, regime shifts, adaptive environmental management, social learning, participation, social and gender equity, and knowledge to action. We conclude with some future research suggestions for those interested in theoretical and practical applications at the intersection of environment and health. In particular, closer collaboration between these two fields can lead to addressing blind spots in the ecosystem services framework, complementary social-network analysis, the application of resilience heuristics to the understanding of health, and the development of a normative dimension in resilience thinking.
Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetypes for identifying resilience surrogates and apply it to land-use systems using seven case studies spread across Latin America. The approach relies on expert knowledge and literature-based characterizations of key processes and patterns of land-use change synthesized in a data template. These narrative accounts are then used to guide development of causal networks, from which potential surrogates for resilience are identified. This initial test of the method shows that deforestation, international trade, technological improvements, and conservation initiatives are key drivers of land-use change, and that rural migration, leasing and land pricing, conflicts in property rights, and international spillovers are common causal pathways that underlie land-use transitions. Our study demonstrates how archetypes can help to differentiate what is generic from context dependant. They help identify common causal pathways and leverage points across cases to further elucidate how policies work and where, as well as what policy lessons might transfer across heterogeneous settings.
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