Planetary Health and Neuroarts

Human health has improved substantially over the past century through water and sanitation, maternal and child care, infectious disease control, and vaccinations, increasing life expectancy to about 71 years by 2021 and reducing child mortality. Ecological systems that support health are now deteriorating due to rapid population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and technological advances that expand travel, manufacturing, extraction, and consumption. Increased consumption is affecting major Earth systems, with climate change occurring alongside forest loss, species extinction risk, and collapsing fish populations. Environmental changes are increasingly linked to health outcomes, including reduced nutritional content of staple crops from higher CO₂, faster spread of infectious diseases from disrupted water systems, and pollution contributing to deaths from heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.

"Over the past century, humanity has achieved extraordinary gains in human health. Advances in water and sanitation, maternal and child care, infectious disease control, vaccinations, and other public health achievements have vastly improved human longevity and quality of life, reducing global child mortality significantly and increasing life expectancy to about 71 years as of 2021 ( WHO, 2024)."

"Rapid population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and technological advances in transportation, communication, agriculture, and manufacturing are transforming patterns of human consumption on an unprecedented scale ( Globaia, 2024). Since the 1950s, people have acquired vast new capacities to travel, manufacture, extract, and consume. Cars and airplanes are reshaping how we move, plastics and paper production have expanded into the hundreds of millions of metric tons annually, and freshwater use is surging to meet the increased demands of agriculture, industry, and our growing cities."

"The consequences of increased consumption are now visible across every major Earth system. It is not only the climate that is changing-everything is changing. Alongside record-high temperatures, the planet has lost roughly one-third of its forests, approximately one million species face extinction, and global fish populations are collapsing ( Myers, 2017)."

"Evidence is building on the ways these changes come back to affect every dimension of human health: for example, rising CO₂ levels are reducing the nutritional content of staple crops, disrupted water systems are accelerating the spread of infectious diseases like malaria, and pollution is contributing significantly to deaths from cardiac disease, stroke, and lung cancer. What once seemed like distant, unrelated environmental problems are increasingly understood as urgent threats to huma"

Read at Psychology Today