Human well-being is often viewed through a rather narrow economic lens. The market values of goods produced and consumed are routinely used to rank people, countries, and indeed the world as a whole as it changes over time. These economic valuations were not designed to measure well-being, but they are often used for that purpose, particularly in the media. Income figures are readily available and have a certain popular and bureaucratic appeal, as they are expressed in the same units that measure personal and government budgets ― money. As indicators of human well-being, however, they also have widely acknowledged flaws,...

Not only do health indicators provide a different perspective from economic indicators, they also relate differently to countries’ development trajectories. Industrializing and urbanizing countries are often described as going through a set of interrelated transitions. There is the economic transition from agricultural to industrial and commercial production, and the urban transition from predominantly rural to urban living. A related transition posits a shift from traditional to modern environmental health risks (Smith, 1990). This is linked in turn to epidemiologic transition from a situation where health problems are dominated by infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria and acute respiratory infections, to...

As indicated above, the environmental contribution to the current global burden of diseases is closely linked to conditions in and around people’s homes and workplaces. When the World Health Organization focused itsWorld Health Report on risks to health, the only two environmental risks that figured in their top ten risks were unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene and indoor air pollution (WHO, 2002). It is estimated that in the year 2000, unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene accounted for about 1.7 million deaths (3.1 per cent of all deaths), and the loss of 54 million disability-adjusted life-years (3.7 per cent of DALYs...

Economic globalization is widely credited with bringing prosperity, albeit very unevenly. Unfortunately, economic globalization also brings global environmental changes that can pose a wide range of health risks, from new outbreaks of infectious diseases to crop failures and famine. Urban centres are critical to many such risks, because of the environmental burdens they (can) impose and the vulnerable populations they (can) contain. This is nothing new. Most familiar infectious diseases emerged only after people settled and began to live in cities (May, 2006). Urban development and trade helped to spread the plague through Europe, killing off an appreciable share of...