Program on Global Sustainability and Health

Consensus has been reached within the scientific community that global climate change is real, caused by human behavior and occurring faster than previously thought.

Humans are exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth at current levels of consumption and standards of living. The ways we produce food, travel, and use water, land and energy resources, combined with a growing world population, have severely compromised the environmental resources upon which we depend. Global environmental change, including climate change, ecosystems degradation, and species and biodiversity losses, has been so extensive that we now risk major impacts on human health and well-being. In fact, evidence indicates that these health impacts are already occurring.

Those who are the most vulnerable will be affected earliest, and most: children, elders and those with the fewest resources.

About the Program

The complex, interrelated nature of the problems facing us requires a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach.

At the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Program on Global Sustainability and Health marshals extensive expertise in a wide range of disciplines to:

• Focus research on solutions to these challenges
• Educate the public, policy makers, health professionals and students about the challenges and solutions
• Provide resources to the public health practice community to aid them in developing strategies to handle these challenges
• Effect policy change

The Johns Hopkins Program on Global Sustainability and Health is engaged in examination of the drivers, consequences and implications of global environmental change in light of the three main complicating challenges of shrinking supplies of inexpensive conventionally extracted petroleum, and financial and political obstacles to achieving a more sustainable future. The program’s name and its focus on global environmental change, as opposed to climate change, for example, is meant to highlight the myriad connections among energy, water, food, and land use, population, ecosystem and species impacts, climate change, and health impacts. Climate change cannot be addressed without incorporating these other connections.