Global climate change is altering the world’s environment profoundly and threatening the Earth’s vital natural resources including land, oceans and air. These changes threaten the livelihoods, health and well-being of human communities around the world.. Since the issues surrounding climate change issue continue to evolve, there is a pressing need for more research, discussion and testing of the potential for PHE approaches to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation activities, in both coastal and terrestrial environments. Documents in this section address the links and relationships between population, health and climate change.

Changing population and health dynamics, such as the youth bulge in developing countries, can generate undesirable economic, political and social impacts and worsen conditions in a country or region—sometimes leading to instability and violent conflict. Understanding the complex, underlying factors in environmental security and the links to the improved health of humans and ecosystems is essential for ensuring greater social stability.

The world food crisis and rising food prices manifest themselves in areas of high biodiversity. Field practitioners, researchers and global policymakers are exploring new strategies and approaches to improving food production in ways that both address a fundamental human need and are compatible with biodiversity conservation and water and land conservation.

In biodiversity-rich areas such as East Africa, there is only recently an emerging understanding of the links between the impacts of HIV/AIDS on human populations and biodiversity conservation. This includes understanding how HIV/AIDS negatively impacts a community’s ability to manage its natural resources—i.e., as individuals die from HIV/AIDS, the community loses important local knowledge about the resources and loses the opportunity for the person-to-person transfer of skills and practices. This section highlights issue analysis, research and recent experience that examines the potential relevance of PHE approaches to field work.

Human migration is often a primary driver of biodiversity loss in remote rural areas and a source of great stress to people when it occurs. While there has been some research on the potential interventions to reduce these pressures on biodiversity, questions remain as to how policymakers and local authorities can influence human migration patterns and the complex social and economic "push and pull" factors that cause human migration.

"Scaling-up" refers to efforts to take successful local community-based PHE interventions and applying PHE approaches to broader scales, such as to regional and district levels. Scaling-up also refers to geographic diffusion of approaches and adoption of integrated strategies.

The transmission of disease between humans and animals is an emerging concern for public health professionals worldwide. These include HIV, avian influenza, ebola among other diseases. This section contains documents and links on organizations and efforts to prevent this type of disease transmission and break the parasite and pathogen cycles. Many of these diseases result from pathogens originating in rural, remote environments. Documents in this section focus on zoonosis and environment (or ecohealth)