A systems lens to evaluate the compound human health impacts of anthropogenic activities

Diverse anthropogenic activities are changing our natural environment, with important implications for human health. Successfully managing their impacts requires an understanding of the compounding hazards resulting from multi-faceted environmental changes. Here, we propose a human-environment systems lens comprising public health, climate, air quality, and agricultural land-use land management to characterize the combined health risks of anthropogenic environmental changes. Interactions within this system can amplify, diminish, or generate additional hazards associated with changes in any individual element. Using South Asia as an example—where rapid industrialization and the Green Revolution aided economic development and food production but inadvertently compromised multiple human health dimensions—we synthesize the influence of human-environment system interactions on environment-sensitive health outcomes. We further demonstrate the utility of this lens for evaluating the health outcomes of existing and planned regional policies and interventions to identify unintended negative consequences and solutions that realize co-benefits and minimize trade-offs.