Science and technology must urgently be deployed to help reverse negative health trends, linked to nutrition and environment, according to a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, and launched yesterday, 25th March.
The report explores how the growing human population is placing severe pressure on food, water, climate and biodiversity systems. It reviews how advances in health over the past seventy years are threatened by rising obesity, infectious diseases, respiratory diseases and immune dysfunctions – many of which are linked to environmental deterioration. The report also examines how recent and extraordinary scientific and technological advances – and ‘Big Data’ in particular – must be used to prevent further decline in human health, concludeing that financial, political, social efforts need to be redirected to achieve this common goal, and identifies five steps to make this happen:
- Corporations, NGOs, governments and academics must work across institutional, sector and disciplinary boundaries
- Markets, politicians and individuals must think and act in longer timeframes
- Powerful individuals and institutions must commit to new, collaborative leadership
- Young and marginalized people must be included in the design of any solutions
- Citizens must engage in public debate on how to address the gap between what it is possible to do and what it is ethical to do
This report is the result of a twelve-month dialogue. It was commissioned of Meteos by the Wellcome Trust as an input to its Sustaining Health work, connecting environment, nutrition and health. Meteos convened a Core Group of experts from academia, NGOs, social enterprise, business and government to contribute to the Dialogue, which ran from October 2013 to November 2014. Its conclusions are the result of two face-to-face workshops, substantial desk research, the academic submissions of many of the Core Group members, and a multi-stakeholder consultation held in New York to coincide with the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit and Climate Week. You can read the public version of the final report to the Wellcome Trust here, published as a contribution to wider debates about how to successfully address, health, nutritional and environmental challenges.
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