ABSTRACT
Public health scholars have increasingly demonstrated the wide range of current and possible future health impacts of climate change, through discourses emphasizing the links between public health, environmental instability, and international relations. At the same time, policymakers and civil society representatives have called for greater attention to the links between population growth and climate change, often drawing on discourses that position the fertility and childbearing of poor communities as a threat to local and global environmental sustainability. This chapter explores these parallel approaches through the lens of structural violence. It analyses the role of public health research in shaping broader anxieties around national security, health threats, and population fears – particularly in the context of global ecological crisis. The chapter argues that the ways in which policymakers and publics take up and circulate public health research may have unintended consequences in the form of structural and discursive violence. The chapter concludes with a discussion of alternative framings that resist these forms of violence and call for centring social justice in the links between human health and environmental change.
