One Health Movement News / One Health Topics 'in' the News

Without knowing what changes will occur or the impact these changes may have, we are left with many unanswered questions and a large unmapped area of risk. It is certain, however, that the prediction and solutions to these issues will require an interdisciplinary approach. Experts across multiple disciplines will need to come together to ensure that the changes in the ecosystem are not diminishing the quality of life of animals and humans. This will only be possible using One Health principles.

Excerpt: "Boulder, Colo. — IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

To comprehend how this could occur, picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation."

"Obama Administration Releases Scientific Assessment on Impact of Climate Change to Human Health in the United States

Today, delivering on another commitment in the President’s Climate Action Plan, the Obama Administration released a new final report called The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment, which significantly advances what we know about the impacts of climate change on public health, and the confidence with which we know it."

"Climate change will contribute to a wide array of public health issues in the United States in the coming decades, including everything from the spread of vector borne illness to the diminished nutritional content of food, according to a new White House report.

The report, the product of a three-year collaboration between a number of federal agencies, suggests that extreme heat alone will drive more than 11,000 additional deaths in the summer of 2030 and 27,000 additional deaths in the summer of 2100, barring an accelerated effort to address climate change."

Ethics is a particularly relevant if underreported topic of conversation at the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. While technical disputes grab the lion’s share of attention, we should not forget the moral reasons we must address global warming – because of the substantial harm it does and will do to the human and nonhuman world.