ABSTRACT

Human health and well-being are inextricably linked to the quality of their surrounding environmental conditions. In cities, the predominantly artificial settings that encompass urban inhabitants are critiqued through global rankings of ‘livability’ and quality of life. Cities are given low marks for detrimental attributes—such as air pollution and water contamination—which correlate to adverse health clusters in their respective populations (van Kamp and Leidelmeijer, 2003). Beyond urban boundaries the capacity for ecosystem services to sustain and enhance the global population’s well-being and health is now in question. Of nine fundamental Earth system processes, human activity has already contributed to three ‘safe’ operating boundaries being crossed—thresholds of biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle extraction and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (Rockström et al., 2009). Urban areas, as consumption nodes of our socio-economic networks, are intensifying these global patterns, acting as biodiversity dead zones, augmenting climate change through urban ‘heat islands’ and increasing nutrient runoff into waterways and catchments (Wu, 2014). The consequences of these changes for human health at a global scale are largely unknown; however, the need to balance human consumption with the ecosystem services upon which human health and well-being depends is self-evident.