Global environmental change and health: integrating knowledge from natural, socioeconomic and medical sciences

Environmental problems, such as air quality, pollution and toxicity, have historically strongly been linked with health issues. The earliest environmental policies were targeted to negate health impacts. This focus has become less obvious during the last decades when environmental problems became more diffuse and covered larger areas and regions. Nowadays, degradation of natural resources, climate change and the decline in biodiversity are the major environmental problems. To deal effectively with these problem international conventions and national policies strong ly relate also to developmental issues, equity and improved human well-being. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA; www.millenniumassessment.org), a four-year international work programme designed to meet the needs of decision-makers for scientific information on ecosystem change, has taken up the challenge to comprehensively assess the consequences of environmental change for ecosystems, ecosystems services and human well-being. The MA focuses on how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and what types of responses can be adopted at local, national or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. Health is one of the central themes in the Millennium Assessment.