A systems lens to evaluate the compound human health impacts of anthropogenic activities

By Deepti Singh, Alexandra Karambelas, Ashwini Chhatre, Ruth DeFries, Patrick Kinney, Kyle Davis
One Earth | September 2021

DOI

doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.08.006

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Citation

Singh, Deepti., Karambelas, Alexandra., Chhatre, Ashwini., DeFries, Ruth., Kinney, Patrick., Davis, Kyle. A systems lens to evaluate the compound human health impacts of anthropogenic activities One Earth doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.08.006.

One Earth, 2021

Abstract

Diverse anthropogenic activities are changing our natural environment, with important implications for human health. Successfully managing their impacts requires an understanding of the compounding hazards resulting from multi-faceted environmental changes. Here, we propose a human-environment systems lens comprising public health, climate, air quality, and agricultural land-use land management to characterize the combined health risks of anthropogenic environmental changes. Interactions within this system can amplify, diminish, or generate additional hazards associated with changes in any individual element. Using South Asia as an example—where rapid industrialization and the Green Revolution aided economic development and food production but inadvertently compromised multiple human health dimensions—we synthesize the influence of human-environment system interactions on environment-sensitive health outcomes. We further demonstrate the utility of this lens for evaluating the health outcomes of existing and planned regional policies and interventions to identify unintended negative consequences and solutions that realize co-benefits and minimize trade-offs.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre