Healthy Communities Across Generations: A lifespan Perspective

The food, built, chemical, natural, and psycho-social-economic environments, across a life-course, all play important roles in determining health. Positive and negative features of the biological, social and natural environments, alone and in combination, can affect health at any time in the life continuum, beginning before conception. Opportunities for health promoting interventions occur at multiple life stages in multiple environments. We can expect benefits if we understand and address the interrelationships of health and the environment throughout life, and explore common sense and also innovative approaches that may prevent chronic disease, foster health, and sustain local and global economies. Interventions that address the structural, systemic origins of many diseases can also be designed to benefit ecosystems more generally, thereby linking human health to planetary health. This session will address the environmental determinants of health that express themselves from the societal to the biological level, and cross-cutting measures to help build resilience and health across generations.