Santé Publique France – Preserving nature to protect the health of populations

17 October, 2024.

In a new edition of its journal La Santé en action, Santé publique France publishes a dossier devoted to nature and biodiversity, common goods that are essential to the physical and mental health of human beings.

Making the protection of biodiversity a public health issue, in the same way as an environmental issue, is an imperative, as “healthy nature” is essential to the (survival) of human beings. However, it is clear that contemporary societies, through their modes of existence and production, mistreat nature, and distance themselves from it… often looking at the living world as a source of potential aggressions from which we should defend ourselves, such as the invasive tiger mosquito.

The ambition of this issue of Health in Action is to shed light on the multiple and complex links between biodiversity and health in the light of the scientific publications of recent years, which echo the concept of “One Health” born in the 2000s: it defends the idea that the health of humans, animals, of plants and ecosystems is closely linked and interdependent. It is more or less the same approach for “Planetary Health”, whose interdisciplinary work studies the environmental and social determinants of health.

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