The Wildlife Conservation Society organized a December, 2009 forum to explore the question, “Can health be economically quantified as an ecosystem service, correlated with ecosystem intactness and if so, under what circumstances?” To provide for a richer discussion, WCS compiled an illustrative (not exhaustive) set of annotated readings exploring five dimensions of this question.

This report documents the process through which a Ugandan conservation organization,Conservation through Public Health (CTPH), successfully integrated interventions -traditionally seen as from different “domains” or “sectors”—for the dual purposes of i) reducing threats to mountain gorillas and their habitat and ii) improving the well-being of local communitiesdirectly dependent upon the health of the former (for ecotourism and natural resourceuse). John Snow Inc. (JSI), with the U.S.

Large-scale anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, including land-use change, climate change, and the deterioration of ecosystem services, are all accelerating. These changes are interacting to generate five major emerging public health threats that endanger the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. These threats include increasing exposure to infectious disease, water scarcity, food scarcity, natural disasters, and population displacement. Taken together, they may represent the greatest public health challenge humanity has faced.

There had been growing concern over a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza, HPAI H5N1 that could spark the next influenza pandemic as traditional public health measures had limited success. Not taken into consideration however, was the necessity to redress ecological imbalances that had given rise to the threat in the first place. This gap calls for adopting an ecohealth perpective-one that focuses on the upstream causes of emerging diseases, with are at root questions of ecosystem degradation and ecological imbalance.