It’s a Consumptagenic World

This chapter identifies a system in which some of the key drivers of health inequity fuel climate change, which in turn fuels further inequity. This process is based on excessive production and consumption; it constitutes a consumptagenic system. The chapter tracks the evolution of the consumptagenic system through the globalization of a market-based and fossil fuel–dependent economic system. It describes the addiction of this system to economic growth as the ultimate goal and to forms of consumption that are highly polluting. The last parts of the chapter focus on the roles of an industrial food system and urbanization as two central cogs in the consumptagenic system that is pushing our planet toward irreparable destabilization. The subsequent impacts, from climate change and health equity, of both of these systems (industrial food system and urbanization) are then described.

Climate Change, Global Justice, and Health Inequities

This chapter explains the role of human activities in driving climate change, and some of its most significant impacts. It discusses justice issues raised by climate change, including causal responsibility, future development rights, the distribution of climate change harms, and intergenerational inequity. The chapter also provides a status update on current health inequities, noting the now recognized role of political, economic, commercial, and social factors in determining health. This section also discusses environmental epidemiology and the shift to eco-social approaches and eco-epidemiology, noting that while eco-epidemiologists have begun to research the influence of climate change on health, this research has not yet considered in depth the influence of social systems. The chapter concludes with an overview of how climate change exacerbates existing health inequities, focusing on the health implications of significant climate change impacts, including extreme weather events, rising sea levels, heat stress, vector-borne diseases, and food insecurity.

Challenges and Future Prospects

This chapter in the book looks forward. It begins by calling for a wider conceptual and methodological toolkit among public health researchers—one that includes systems science, social sciences as well as a focus on policymaking processes. The next part of the chapter proposes a policy vision. It considers how progressive policy systems might be created and deployed to reign in consumption, and it sets out some options for intersectoral action designed to achieve greater equality, environmental sustainability, and health equity. A focus is on how reducing material inequity produces systemic effects that are preconditions for responding to climate change as well as for achieving health equity. The chapter also reviews some of the existing global policy responses to climate change and health inequity. While acknowledging that the proposed policy vision and actions to achieve it will confront stubborn resistance, the chapter describes how change is possible through the redemptive possibilities of complexity.