Healthy ecosystems, equals healthy humans - Professor Philip Weinstein - Knowledge Works

Lecture details

Healthy ecosystems provide various services to humans, including maintenance services such as food, fuel and shelter, regulating services like climate control and disease suppression, and cultural services containing recreation and wellbeing. Ecosystem functionality and resilience is also fundamental to biodiversity maintenance, and when human activities such as land clearing and greenhouse gas emissions occur, ecosystem services can fail.

Biodiversity maintenance is essential because it can prevent the emergence and re-emergence of a variety of public health problems including infectious disease, exposure to toxins, and lifestyle diseases.

In this Knowledge Works lecture, Professor Philip Weinstein will discuss examples of recently 'created' public health problems, including ciguatera fish poisoning, birth defects and Ross River virus infection, demonstrating that there is a quantifiable link between healthy ecosystems and healthy humans.

These examples support the idea that biodiversity and disease regulation are ecosystem services that synergise to benefit both the environment and human health concurrently.

Professor Weinstein will also examine the need to provide a better evidence base for policy generation in this area, where more multidisciplinary research is required, including an analysis of the linkages between environmental change, biodiversity conservation, and human health.

Professor Philip Weinstein is Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of South Australia and maintains a research supervisory role through the Barbara Hardy Institute and the School of Pharmacy.

Professor Weinstein has been Professor of Public Health at the University of Queensland and at the University of Western Australia, and is a medical graduate of the University of Adelaide. He is a specialist in public and environmental health (FAFPHM) and holds a PhD in ecology, as well as having worked as a zoologist at James Cook University.

He has contributed to over 200 publications on the environmental determinants of infectious disease, and has led a major research program on air quality and respiratory health through the Cooperative Research Centre for Asthma and Airways. Professor Weinstein's previous memberships include the Board of Review Editors for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and he has been Co-Chair of the International Medical Geology Association.

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