Environmental health: Assessing risks to society

摘要

Natural and built environment systems that sustains lives by providing healthy living surroundings is under a tremendous pressure from various stressors such as rapid population growth, urbanisation, commercialisation of agriculture, industrialisation, psychosocial factors and the like. Environmental health is now a global issue wherein humans act both as the destroyers and the victims. All types of environmental pollutions (air, water, soil, for example) have deleterious effects on human health in manifold magnitudes across the globe. Therefore, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the nature and extent to which a country is running a risk of environmental health hazards to its society. Considering this in mind, the present paper introduces a new way of looking and assessing the health effects of environmental hazards and pollutions. This new measure, based on a holistic view and system modelling approach, conceptualises, measures and facilitates the management of the multifarious phenomenon of environmental health. It develops, constructs and validates a robust model of management with measurement and thus provides a management strategy to control and improve environmental health. This Kanji-Chopra environmental health model has been especially devised and developed to assess and manage environmental health risks to society by using and constructing a latent variable structural equations model within the certain boundaries of the country's natural and built environment system. It provides a measurement or index of environmental health indicating the extent to which a particular society is experiencing environmental health hazards. Path coefficients indicate the strength of causal relationships among different dimensions of environmental health. The scores of manifest variables of different dimensions of the model pinpoint what exactly is required from the authorities and individuals to improve environmental health in order to mitigate its risks to society.