Biodiversity, health science, and the human right to a healthy environment

Abstract

Planetary health agendas need a strong human rights focus. Both public health and the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment depend on biodiversity, ecosystems, and a healthy biosphere. Targeted transdisciplinary health research, action, and communication on biodiversity-health linkages can clarify and reinforce the human rights obligations of public authorities whose decisions might negatively affect the environment. However, our observations across law, policy, science, and advocacy show that there is a void of transdisciplinary guidance on how to apply the human right to a healthy environment to impact policy and law. We introduce a biodiversity-health roadmap to the UN Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment. This roadmap is only a starting point to co-develop and mobilise knowledge and policy-driven research and action agendas across the health-environment nexus, and among science, policy, and law professionals. In this Personal View, we invite knowledge co-development among health and environmental sciences, environmental law, human rights, and policy advisors to steer, mobilise, and focus the health-environment nexus on human rights to support more effective and coherent public decisions.

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