Opinion
Biodiversity, cultural pathways, and human health: a framework

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2014.01.009Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Humans have placed cultural importance on biodiversity for thousands of years.

  • We know that biodiversity can directly affect human health.

  • Indirect cultural pathways between biodiversity and human health are poorly understood.

  • We argue that biodiversity loss will negatively impact human health via cultural pathways.

  • We provide a framework for linking biodiversity, cultural values, human well-being and health.

Direct contact with biodiversity is culturally important in a range of contexts. Many people even join conservation organisations to protect biodiversity that they will never encounter first-hand. Despite this, we have little idea how biodiversity affects people's well-being and health through these cultural pathways. Human health is sensitive to apparently trivial psychological stimuli, negatively affected by the risk of environmental degradation, and positively affected by contact with natural spaces. This suggests that well-being and health should be affected by biodiversity change, but few studies have begun to explore these relationships. Here, we develop a framework for linking biodiversity change with human cultural values, well-being, and health. We argue that better understanding these relations might be profoundly important for biodiversity conservation and public health.

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