Samuel S Myers

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health | JHSPH · Environmental Health and Engineering

Dietary deficiencies of zinc and iron are a substantial global public health problem. An estimated two billion people suffer these deficiencies, causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. Most of these people depend on C3 grains and legumes as their primary dietary source of zinc and iron. Here we report that C3 grains and legumes have lower...

Human activity is rapidly transforming most of Earth's natural systems. How this transformation is impacting human health, whose health is at greatest risk, and the magnitude of the associated disease burden are relatively new subjects within the field of environmental health. We discuss what is known about the human health implications of changes...

Large-scale anthropogenic changes to the natural environment, including land-use change, climate change, and the deterioration of ecosystem services, are all accelerating. These changes are interacting to generate five major emerging public health threats that endanger the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. These threats inclu...

Global climate change threatens the health of hundreds of millions of people. While much has been written about the direct impacts of climate change on health as a result of more severe storms, more intense heat stress, changes in the distribution of infectious disease, and reduced air quality, we are concerned that the indirect impacts of a disrup...

Background: Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, that provide key nutrients and protect against noncommunicable disease. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of limited abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Animal pollinators are cur...

Background Animal pollination supports agricultural production for many healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, which provide key nutrients and protect against non-communicable diseases. Today, most crops receive suboptimal pollination because of reduced abundance and diversity of pollinating insects. Methods We modelled the...

Projections of future food security require careful interpretation because they are often based on models that include only a subset of biophysical variables and have inherent uncertainties, caution Samuel Myers and colleagues

Despite recent advances in understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem-service provision, the links between the health of ecosystem-service providers and human health remain more uncertain. During the past decade, an increasing number of studies have argued for the positive impacts of healthy pollinator communities (defined as functionally...

Our article describes the Clinicians for Planetary Health Initiative within the Planetary Health Alliance

Smallholder farmers are some of the poorest and most food insecure people on Earth. Their high nutritional and economic reliance on home‐grown produce makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors such as pollinator loss or climate change which threaten agricultural productivity. Improving smallholder agriculture in a way that is en...

Discusses the release of the Sao Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health

Most global dietary forecasts predict a reduction in nutritional deficiencies over the next several decades driven by significant increases in environmentally unsustainable livestock and animal source food consumption. Here, we explore a more environmentally sensitive alternative to improve global nutrition, consuming insects. Our study focuses on...

Understanding and responding to adverse human health impacts of global environmental change will be a major priority of 21st century public health professionals. The emerging field of planetary health aims to face this challenge by studying and promoting policies that protect the health of humans and of the Earth's natural systems that support them...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intricately linked to food systems. Addressing challenges in food systems is key to meeting the SDGs in Africa and South Asia, where undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies persist, alongside increased nutrition transition, overweight and obesity and related chronic diseases. Sub-optimal diets are...

Recent analyses indicate that global fruit and vegetable (F&V) production will need to increase by 50%-150% by 2050 in order to achieve sustainable and healthy diets for 10 billion people. Although global production of F&V has grown by 50% during the last two decades alone, simply scaling up current systems of F&V production, supply chains, and con...

In Ethiopia, children and adults face a double burden of malnutrition, with undernutrition and stunting coexisting with non-communicable diseases. Here we use a framework of comparative risk assessment, local dietary surveys and relative risks from large observational studies to quantify the health and environmental impacts of meeting adult and chi...

Sustainable development of India’s food system must ensure a growing population is fed while minimizing both widespread malnutrition and the environmental impacts of food production. After assessing current adequacy of nutrient supplies at the national level, associated natural resource use (land, fresh water) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we...

Introductory chapter to book Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves

In this concluding chapter, Myers and Frumkin describe an aspirational future world in which human population has stabilized, the energy system is decarbonized, and human beings are living on Earth with a dramatically reduced ecological footprint—a world where every passing decade brings more room for the rest of the biosphere. They draw from the r...

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these...

Perhaps no single sector of human activity is responsible for greater disruption of Earth’s natural systems or is more important to human health than global food production. This chapter explores the current state of human nutrition and the impacts of food production on climate, biodiversity, water scarcity, arable land degradation, land use change...

A freely downloadable anthology of case studies in planetary health accompanied by case teaching notes for each of ten cases. Downloadable here: https://planetaryhealthalliance.org/case-studies

Introductory chapter to Planetary Health Case Studies: An Anthology of Solutions available freely at www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/case-studies.

The impacts of climate change are not equally distributed globally. We examined the global distribution of CO2 emissions and the ensuing distribution of increases in the risk of zinc and protein deficiency resulting from elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We estimated cumulative per capita (2011–2050) CO2 emissions for 146 countries using exi...

Dams provide energy and irrigation water, but also alter natural water flows that support fisheries. This tradeoff presents a risk for human nutrition in regions dependent on aquatic foods, including the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), where over 100 dams are planned or in construction. Previous models estimate significant reductions in fishery productio...

Carbon dioxide levels are rising globally. The increasing CO2 levels reduce the concentration of nutrients in many of the crops that are consumed worldwide (wheat, rice, barley, maize, legumes, and potatoes). The larger effects for human health are concentrated in regions that heavily rely on these crops for their nutrition such as South and Southe...

An Amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Background: To date, the effects of extreme weather events on nutrient supply within the population have not been quantified. In this study, we investigated micronutrient, macronutrient, and fibre supply changes during 175 extreme weather events within 87 countries in the year that a major extreme weather event occurred, with a targeted focus on l...

Abstract A growing literature has documented that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere threaten to reduce the iron, zinc, and protein content of staple food crops including rice, wheat, barley, legumes, maize, and potatoes, potentially creating or worsening global nutritional deficiencies for over a billion people worldwide. A...

Abstract Emissions of particulate matter from fires associated with land management practices in Indonesia contribute to regional air pollution and mortality. We assess the public health benefits in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore from policies to reduce fires by integrating information on fire emissions, atmospheric transport patterns, and popu...

The Madagascar Health and Environmental Research-Antongil (MAHERY-Antongil) study cohort was set up in September 2015 to assess the nutritional value of seafood for the coastal Malagasy population living along Antongil Bay in northeastern Madagascar. Over 28 months of surveillance, we aimed to understand the relationships among different marine res...

Background: Increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) affect global nutrition via effects on agricultural productivity and nutrient content of food crops. We combined these effects with economic projections to estimate net changes in nutrient availability between 2010 and 2050. Methods: In this modelling study, we used the Inter...

Objective We collected dietary records over the course of nine months to comprehensively characterize the consumption patterns of Malagasy people living in remote rainforest areas of north-eastern Madagascar. Design The present study was a prospective longitudinal cohort study to estimate dietary diversity and nutrient intake for a suite of macron...

Background: India has made important strides in reducing nutritional deficiencies over the past several decades. However, for micronutrients such as zinc, previous studies have suggested a worsening situation, contrary to most other dietary indicators. Adding to this burden, higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels of 550 ppm, projected to potentially o...

The case for endangerment In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the so-called “Endangerment Finding.” This defined a suite of six long-lived greenhouse gases as “air pollution.” Such air pollution was anticipated to represent a danger to the health and welfare of current and future generations. Thus, the EPA has the au...

Human food and nutrition security is dependent on marine ecosystems threatened by overfishing, climate change, and other processes. The consequences on human nutritional status are uncertain, in part because current methods of analyzing fish nutrient content are expensive. Here, we evaluate the possibility of predicting nutrient content of ray-finn...

Atmospheric CO2 is on pace to surpass 550 ppm in the next 30–80 years. Many food crops grown under 550 ppm have protein, iron and zinc contents that are reduced by 3–17% compared with current conditions. We analysed the impact of elevated CO2 concentrations on the sufficiency of dietary intake of iron, zinc and protein for the populations of 151 co...

Background: Production of rice and wheat increased dramatically in India over the past decades, with reduced proportion of coarse cereals in the food supply. Objective: We assess impacts of changes in cereal consumption in India on intake of iron and other micronutrients and whether increased consumption of coarse cereals could help alleviate an...

In June 2013, the Malay Peninsula experienced severe smoke pollution, with daily surface particulate matter (PM) concentrations in Singapore greater than 350 μg/m³, over 2 times the air quality standard for daily mean PM10 set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Unlike most haze episodes in the Malay Peninsula in recent decades (e.g., the...

The impact of human activities on our planet's natural systems has been intensifying rapidly in the past several decades, leading to disruption and transformation of most natural systems. These disruptions in the atmosphere, oceans, and across the terrestrial land surface are not only driving species to extinction, they pose serious threats to huma...

BACKGROUND: Crops grownunderelevatedatmosphericCO2 concentrations (eCO2) contain less protein.Crops particularly affected include rice and wheat, which are primary sources of dietary protein for many countries. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to estimate global and country-specific risks of protein deficiency attributable to anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 205...

Aquaculture now supplies half of the fish consumed directly by humans. We evaluate whether aquaculture, given current patterns of production and distribution, supports the needs of poor and food-insecure populations throughout the world. We begin by identifying 41 seafood-reliant nutritionally vulnerable nations (NVNs), and ask whether aquaculture...

Iron deficiency reduces capacity for physical activity, lowers IQ, and increases maternal and child mortality, impacting roughly a billion people worldwide. Recent studies have shown that certain highly consumed crops — C3 grains (e.g., wheat, rice, barley), legumes and maize — have lower iron concentrations of 4-10% when grown under increased atmo...

Great progress has been made in addressing global undernutrition over the past several decades, in part because of large increases in food production from agricultural expansion and intensification. Food systems, however, face continued increases in demand and growing environmental pressures. Most prominently, human-caused climate change will influ...

Concern has been spreading across scientific disciplines that the pervasive human transformation of Earth's natural systems is an urgent threat to human health. The simultaneous emergence of “GeoHealth” and “Planetary Health” signals recognition that developing a new relationship between humanity and our natural systems is becoming an urgent global...

Background The integrity of ocean ecosystems are currently under threat from a suite of anthropogenic drivers including climate change, over-fishing, land-based pollution, and resource exploitation. Recent research has shown that this degradation is likely to lead to negative, long-term livelihood, biodiversity, and economic impacts. In view of the...

Background Since the preindustrial era, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been rising steadily at a pace that is projected to continue unless concerted action is taken to reduce anthropogenic emissions. Meanwhile, several studies have shown that the edible portions of many food crops—namely, wheat, rice, field peas, and potatoes—contain 4–10% les...

Background Animal pollinators provide vital ecosystem services that sustain biodiversity and support agricultural yields. Declining pollinator populations threaten to affect human health outcomes by decreasing crop yields and human nutrient intake, and there is a well-recognised need to understand how environmental stressors such as pesticides affe...

Background Across Indonesia, fires are frequently used to clear forests and manage land for plantations and smallholder farms. The smoke from these fires contain particles that can work their way deep into the lungs and cause premature mortality from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and lung infections, along with many other health effects. These pa...

In September–October 2015, El Niño and positive Indian Ocean Dipole conditions set the stage for massive fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), leading to persistently hazardous levels of smoke pollution across much of Equatorial Asia. Here we quantify the emission sources and health impacts of this haze episode and compare the source...

Christopher Golden and colleagues calculate that declining numbers of marine fish will spell more malnutrition in many developing nations.

Wildlife populations provide harvestable meat to people and contribute to local food security. Throughout the year, and particularly at times of agricultural food shortages, wildlife and other wild foods play a critical role in supporting food security and enhancing local human nutrition. We explored the distribution of food security benefits of ag...