Search

As a collective organized to address the education implications of calls for public health engagement on the ecological determinants of health, we, the Ecological Determinants Group on Education (cpha.ca/EDGE), urge the health community to properly understand and address the importance of the ecological determinants of the public's health, consistent with long-standing calls from many quarters-including Indigenous communities-and as part of an eco-social approach to public health education, research and practice. Educational approaches will determine how well we will be equipped to understand and respond to the rapid changes occurring for the living systems on which all life-including human life-depends. We revisit findings from the Canadian Public Health Association's discussion paper on 'Global Change and Public Health: Addressing the Ecological Determinants of Health', and argue that an intentionally eco-social approach to education is needed to better support the health sector's role in protecting and promoting health, preventing disease and injury, and reducing health inequities. We call for a proactive approach, ensuring that the ecological determinants of health become integral to public health education, practice, policy, and research, as a key part of wider societal shifts required to foster a healthy, just, and ecologically sustainable future.

No abstract available.

The Canadian Journal of Public Health is launching a new section entitled Innovations in Policy and Practice, which will be a showcase for and reflection on innovative public health policy and practice in Canada. The section will focus on articles that describe the development and implementation of innovative policies and practices in Canada and/or that reflect on the experience of practitioners in implementation. The section is explicitly intended to attract practitioners as both readers and authors. This will involve a number of innovations for the Journal that will make the role of author easier for practitioners and result in published material that is attractive and useful, while retaining a scholarly approach. In addition, the review process for this section will be oriented to the reality of practice and undertaken by 'practitioner-scholars' in a collegial and non-anonymous manner.

Humanity is both an animal species that evolved within and is dependent upon natural ecosystems and a social animal that exists within the social systems we have created. Our health is dependent upon both these systems - natural and social - functioning well, and indeed upon their interactions. Yet our approach to improving the health of the population over the past few decades has been largely, if not exclusively, focused on the social determinants of health. A recent Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) Discussion Document and the technical report on which it is based seek to strike a more balanced approach. First, they document the dramatic and rapid global ecological changes that humans have created and argue that they are a significant threat to the health of the population in the 21st century. Second, they identify the underlying social, cultural and economic forces that are driving these changes. Third, they argue that we need to take an eco-social approach in population health promotion, recognizing the interactions between the ecological and social determinants of health. Such an approach could be considered to be 'Population health promotion 2.0', and it has profound implications for the practice of public health.

The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was created 25 years--a whole generation--ago, and this tribute to the Charter and some of its key authors was given at the CPHA Conference in June 2011. The Charter placed on the agenda for health promotion and public health a set of issues and challenges that we are still a long way from fully addressing. Among the key ideas and values in the Charter are peace, social justice and equity, ecosystem health, empowerment, a 'whole of government' approach and the settings approach. The implementation of these concepts are now challenges for the next generation of health promoters.

The North American population is approximately 80% urbanized and spends almost 90% of the time indoors. Accordingly, the built environment is the most important--one might almost say "natural"--human environment. Urban settlements incorporate within their boundaries natural ecosystems of plant and animal life (often highly adapted to the urban environment), and are in turn incorporated within wider bioregions and global ecosystems. But urban settlements are not just built and natural physical environments, they are social, economic, cultural and political environments; the whole constitutes an urban ecosystem. These ecosystems have profound implications for the physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual well-being of their human inhabitants, as well as for human beings remote from these urban ecosystems. Therefore, this paper discusses urban ecosystems and human health and presents a framework for indicators of environmental health in the urban setting based on such an understanding. The concepts of environmental viability, ecological sustainability, urban livability, community conviviality, social equity, and economic adequacy are discussed in relation to human health and are used to organize proposed candidate indicators for urban ecosystems and public health.