Author Description

The health of Australians, indeed the health of most sections of the world's population, is at an all-time high. Over the past century, improvements in social and environmental conditions have been responsible for much of the gain in life expectancy. Meanwhile, however, continuing population growth, industrialisation, consumerism and the marketdriven deregulation of international trade and investment are having increasingly widespread impacts on the world's environment. These include global changes such as depletion of stratospheric ozone, the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere, and the pole-to-pole dispersal of persistent organic pollutants. Hence, in addition to continuing the well-established public health task of minimising exposures to local environmental hazards, a larger question now arises: Is the maintenance and further improvement of population health ecologically sustainable? [...] We propose an environmental health strategy for Australia which would recognise that the quality and functional integrity of the environment is of fundamental importance to the longterm future of population health. There is a need to direct government funds to activities that will integrate environment, health and sustainable development. The proposed EcoHealth Program should be funded, initially, by a 0.1 per cent levy across several Commonwealth government departmental budgets. It would draw upon existing subventions, and thus be cost-neutral. This would support an innovative grants scheme to develop new Australian approaches to ecologically sustainable health. It should primarily focus on environmental problem issues and locations within Australia, and should seek to demonstrate the many different health benefits of an ecologically sustainable approach to social and economic development. It should also seek to improve awareness and understanding of the links between environment and health.