Health and Environment

Reducing the environmental degradation caused by human activities is essential if we are to limit the health threats posed by global warming. At the same time, many of the interventions needed to mitigate and adapt bring enormous benefits for human health and well-being. These benefits, known as ‘co-benefits’, are directly linked to environmental policies and can help to make them more acceptable.

It is therefore essential to reconcile environmental and socio-economic objectives, by identifying possible synergies with public health. This makes it easier to understand the positive impacts of environmental policies, particularly in terms of public health. In economic terms, taking these short- and medium-term co-benefits into account could justify the investment needed to implement ambitious environmental policies.

It is therefore important to highlight the direct and immediate benefits of these public policies, particularly in terms of health. For example, promoting a diet that is both healthier and more sustainable offers real opportunities to improve public health. Similarly, the health benefits of measures to reduce dependence on motorised mobility are numerous. Combating the loss of biodiversity and strengthening the resilience of local areas through measures that enhance green spaces and facilitate contact with nature have also been shown to have beneficial effects on public health. These three areas will be explored in more detail in this chapter.

At institutional level, mobilising the co-benefits approach makes it possible to design public policies based on collaboration between sectors in the name of health. The challenge is to create win-win solutions that enable several policy objectives to be achieved, and to design policies that bring co-benefits for several sectors while supporting common objectives.

It is no longer a question of limiting ourselves to a one-way relationship in which the health sector benefits from any positive spin-offs generated by other sectors. Instead, we need to broaden our thinking so that the relationship is bidirectional, meaning that the health and other sectors mutually benefit from collaboration.

Through this concept, called ‘Health for all policies’, health is placed at the centre, and serves as a spur in the design and implementation of cross-sectoral public policies by highlighting what the health sector can contribute to other sectors while obtaining co-benefits for its own sector. With this in mind, measures and policies that are unfavourable to health must eventually be reassessed and replaced.