Biodiversity and the importance of environmental literacy in medical education
doi:10.7244/cmj.2018.04.001
Dominic O'Neill
Doctors have an important role in the protection and promotion of human health, from individual to global scales. As our climate changes and ecosystems are degraded, the protection of nature is becoming increasingly important for public and global health efforts. There is an increasingly large body of evidence highlighting the environment and human health as critically connected -- the variety of ecosystems on Earth provide human populations with many necessities for health and wellbeing. Future doctors, the healthcare leaders of tomorrow, should therefore be competent when considering environmental determinants of health in their practice, as these have a huge impact on health at community and population levels.