News from the IAEH

Letter from the New IAEH President, Jakob Zinsstag: Health & Ecology:
Let us Join Forces

My parent’s generation, 50 years ago, still assumed that

the capacity of resilience of the planet could not be

exhausted and that human activity was negligible com-

pared to the gigantic force of ‘‘mother nature’’. They

perceived nature often as hostile to humans through

floods, earthquakes, avalanches, or volcanic eruptions.

Such perceptions maintained a rather defensive attitude

against our natural environment, seeing it only as a risk

to human health. However, with the exponentially

growing world population, increasingly noticeable water,

soil, and air pollution led to the development of envi-

ronmental laws, a converging international consensus,

and ultimately the Rio summit and Kyoto protocols of

the past decades.

The current global status is highly dynamic, socially,

economically, or ecologically. We approach 2015 with

many unfulfilled promises of the Millenium Development

Goals amidst an unsolved economic crisis. There is per-

sistent disappointment over the lack of more tangible

international environmental consensus as seen at the

Rio+20 conference this year. There is less and less doubt

about the anthropogenic drivers of climate change, leading

among others to a doubling of natural disasters in the last

decade as compared to those before. The looming energy

crisis is not only about reducing carbon emissions or

attempting to walk out of the nuclear threats that we have

witnessed dramatically in Fukushima. Access to affordable

and renewable energy is critical to social development, with

the poorest nations relying the heaviest on fossil fuels.

Demographic growth remains strongest in the poorest areas

of the world, mainly in Africa.

We recognize more and more the inextricable linkage

of health of humans and animals and their ecosystems and

understand that neither humans nor animals can lead a

healthy life on a threatened planet, unable to provide any

longer its necessary ecosystem services such as clean water

and fertile land. Attempts to mitigate these syndromes of

global change cannot be achieved by single disciplines and

require us to join forces. Less than a decade ago, a handful

of scientists from many different fields converged to take

the Ecosystem Health movement forward, creating a

scholarly association, the International Association for

Ecology and Health (IAEH, www.ecohealth.net). The aims

of the IAEH in linking health and wellbeing of all species

with ecosystem determinants have moved our field clearly

beyond linking human and animal health as ‘‘one health’’,

and beyond an environmental health approach that is

limited to environmental risk assessment. Scientists

engaging with ecohealth thinking have opened new inte-

grative research pathways across academic disciplines,

EcoHealth 9, 376–377, 2012
DOI: 10.1007/s10393-013-0811-0

News from the IAEH

� 2013 The Author(s). This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

http://www.ecohealth.net


linking science and society through participatory stake-

holder processes. They defy reductionism of individual

disciplines and promote reflexive and systemic approaches

to the complex problems of the contemporary world

including its necessary philosophical underpinnings.

However, this new and innovative way of looking at

the complexity of contemporary health and ecological

issues is still represented by only a small and scattered

group across the world. Health and wellbeing of humans

and animals act as a seismograph of our planet Earths

moods and tempers. Ecosystem integrity is about the health

of us all. Our adolescent IAEH needs to stand upon

stronger institutional feet and to unite forces with as many

related movements as possible. My vision for a maturing

IAEH is that over 100 hundred academic and research

institutions may join forces as institutional members of the

association, so that we can raise our political profile and

influence analogous to the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC), and actively contribute to the

shaping of international policy. This can be achieved

through excellence in integrative health and ecological

research, mirrored through our journal EcoHealth, which

continues to raise its scientific quality. This is a wide open

field for innovation. For example, could we move towards

ecological certification of health systems, providing ade-

quate and equitable health care within a 2,000 W energy

limit world wide? Could we act as the guiding organization

for re-focusing One Health efforts in a more ecological

context? Could we provide the background for policy makers

concerned about pandemic prevention to demonstrate that

most pandemics originate in the interplay between envi-

ronmental change, human behaviour and pathogen evo-

lution? These goals cannot be achieved alone and I look

forward to all your collaborations, contributions, and

constructive criticisms during my biennial term as IAEH

President.

With kind regards

Jakob Zinsstag

Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel

President, International Association for Ecology & Health

OPEN ACCESS

This article is distributed under the terms of the

Creative Commons Attribution License which permits

any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original author(s) and the source are

credited.

Published online: February 5, 2013

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