ABSTRACT
This edition of Vital Signs presents a three-dimensional, integrated picture of Earth’s health—environmental, human, and economic. Today’s economy—thriving on massive resource use, generating large amounts of pollutants, and disrupting natural cycles—imposes increasingly unsustainable burdens on the environment. And the deterioration of critical ecosystems like wetlands and coral reefs can boomerang: communities have less protection against extreme weather events, and disease vectors are able to spread more easily, compromising human health and well-being. Measures taken in the name of furthering public health, on the other hand, can sometimes throw natural balances out of kilter: the escalating use of antibiotics, for instance, helps produce more virulent infectious disease strains. Environmental crises and health epidemics translate into rising economic costs—in the form of property losses from natural disasters and skyrocketing health care bills.
