A Future for All to INHERIT: Taking Integrated Action on the Environment, Health and Equity

Abstract The need to act on climate change, and to modify how we live, move and consume is urgent; failure to do so will have catastrophic effects on health and wellbeing over the medium and long term. INHERIT, a large multi-sectoral research initiative (2016-2019) has explored what can be done to seize this as an opportunity to encourage and enable people to modify their behaviours towards ones that simultaneously protect the environment and promote health and health equity (the ‘INHERIT triple-win’). One strand of INHERIT’s work has involved the identification, implementation and evaluation (qualitative, quantitative and cost-benefit) of 15 promising ‘triple-win’ interventions across the EU. INHERIT has also developed four positive scenarios of more sustainable futures, questioned 183 people about these, and surveyed 10,288 people from five countries across the EU about their current behaviours and incentives for change. The results of these investigations paint a complex picture of what can be done to encourage and enable more people across the socio-economic gradient to adapt their behaviours. They reflect that improving health is a powerful motivator for action to protect the environment, yet there is often confusion about what is considered ‘sustainable’, whether this is always ‘healthy’ and vice-versa, let alone equitable. There is resistance in some countries to modifying some behaviours, like meat consumption. Many people fear that technological solutions will drive up isolation and inequities, and desire stronger community ownership over processes like food and energy production. INHERIT outcomes reflect that it is possible to conjure common visions of the kinds of societies we want to transition to, and a willingness and potential to work across sectors to achieve these. This requires stronger individual and collective leadership, also from public health actors, who can play a key role in bringing together different actors and sectors to achieve these visions. Key messages The urgent need to address the environmental crisis presents an opportunity to simultaneously manage closely related societal challenges linked to health and equity. Public health actors can play a key role by bringing together the sectors, evidence and examples to instigate change, around the common interest of promoting human, which depends on planetary, health.