Globalization and Environmental Health

Following advances in environmental health science through the twentieth century, societies have a growing appreciation of the extent to which human health depends on nonpolluted, balanced natural ecosystems on local and global scales. Globalization has increased the economic interconnection of nations, increasing the flow of goods, capital, people, and pollution across international borders. Policies to sustain and improve environmental health in some areas have successfully grown in ambition and scope, but international structures to effectively regulate the negative environmental health consequences of globalization have not yet been developed. Many global-scale environmental health challenges exist, most notably the task of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert the most damaging impacts of climate change, which can be cast as the ultimate globalized environmental health crisis. Some high-emitting nations have refused to provide leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, driven largely by concerns about costs to local economies. By neglecting the costs of long-term environmental health damages and minimizing the planetary scale of the climate change problem, meaningful progress toward a ‘global commons’ sensibility has been delayed. To move toward sustaining human and ecosystem health, societies must include short- and long-term environmental health costs into economic valuations of globalization activities.