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Ecological Changes and their Consequences on Human Health

Majelantle Perah^{* *}Correspondence: Majelantle Perah, Department of Population Studies, University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana, Email:

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The environmental sciences have evidenced large and concerning changes in earth systems, ranging from climate change and species extinction to changes in hydrological, nutrient cycles and natural resource depletion. These global environmental changes have the potential to have significant negative consequences for future human well-being, and they raise concerns about whether global civilization is on a sustainable path or is "consuming too much" by depleting vital natural capital.

The increased scale of economic activity, and increasing the consequences on a Earth, results from both major demographic changes such as population growth, shifts in age structure, urbanisation, and spatial redistributions through migration and rising per capita income, as well as shifts in consumption patterns such as increases in meat consumption with rising income. In 2015, 10% of the world's population (736 million people) lived in extreme poverty, with daily incomes of less than $1.90.

In 2017, 821 million people were malnourished, representing a rise in the number of undernourished people reported since 2016. More economic development is urgently needed to lift people out of poverty. Furthermore, rising inequality, which leads to increased polarisation of society, is a threat to achieving sustainable development. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals emphasise eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, and reducing inequality. The challenge of sustainable development, according to a recent special issue of PNAS on natural capital, is to develop "economic, social, and governance systems capable of ending poverty and ensuring sustainable levels of population and consumption while securing the life-support systems underpinning current and future human well-being."

The field of economics, it is argued, should play a vital role in addressing the problem of sustainable development. The central dilemma at the heart of sustainable development is how to manage the planet's finite resources to fulfil "the requirements of the present without jeopardising future generations' ability to meet their own needs." The study of how to distribute scarce resources to fulfil desired goals is a primary emphasis of economics; fact, a typical definition of economics is the study of allocation under scarcity. More precisely, economics analyses the production, distribution, and consumption of products and services, which are both a fundamental engine of development (raising living standards by providing food, shelter, and other basic human needs) and a major cause of present environmental changes.

Economics, in combination with earth system sciences, is critical for comprehending both the positive and negative effects of choices, as well as the trade-offs involved. Economics, in collaboration with other social and behavioural disciplines, is critical for understanding how human behaviour may be changed to achieve sustainable development. Economics has well-developed disciplines such as development economics, ecological economics, environmental economics, and natural resource economics, all of which have considerable bodies of research pertinent to the problem of sustainable development. The application of economic concepts and scientific results should be a major component in the attempt to achieve humanity's goals for a good life.

Indeed, economists' wide corpus of work gives critical insights into facets of sustainable development. At its finest, this study integrates work from other natural and social disciplines into a policy-relevant framework and highlights the tremendous potential for cooperation on sustainable development concerns among economists, natural scientists, and other social scientists. Economists, for example, have created integrated economic and climatic models to answer critical climate change policy concerns, such as how much and how quickly greenhouse gas emissions should be decreased.