Background Information

Why EcoHealth?

Life-support systems are deteriorating on a global scale, we experience climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, ocean pollution and other problems.

The complex interdependence of humans, animals and their natural environments means that human health will be affected by these changes.

Science is highly fragmented, uses mostly a reductionist approach and produces an ever-increasing amount of information but little overview and guiding knowledge.

This is not conducive to solving our complex problems. We run the risk of making wrong “diagnoses” and “therapy choices”.

What is EcoHealth?

= Eco-systems approach to health

There are three defining features: EcoHealth is transdisciplinary, participatory and action-oriented.

1) Transdisciplinarity

EcoHealth integrates a wide ranges of disciplines, including human and veterinary medicine, public health, sociology, anthropology, economics, education, biology, ecology, engineering, as well as many others. It is grounded in complexity theory.

Transdisciplinarity (as opposed to multidisciplinarity) means that disciplines merge into something new, creating new concepts and methodologies. This does not imply any concession on disciplinary excellence.

The aim is to better understand the causal links between ecological, social and health factors and to gain a “systems knowledge”.

2) Community participation

Academic and non-academic knowledge are equally valued. All stakeholders are actively involved in the process from problem identification, over research and assessment, to concrete problem-solving action.

3) Action-orientedness

The aim is to solve real-world problems. These are often characterised by high uncertainty, conflicts of interests and values and institutional barriers.

The EcoHealth approach identifies a so-called "entry point" which is the presenting problem (and which may be only a symptom of other underlying problems) and then proceeds to analyse the system and to transform it.

More information:
Pre-eminent ecohealth researcher David Waltner-Toews explains how ecohealth research provides a rich multidisciplinary understanding of the complex factors affecting human health. (YouTube): David Waltner-Toews — Ecohealth in a complex world