Ensuring a Sustainable Future: Making Progress on Environment and Equity

There is very little argument that the world is facing severe environmental challenges. Ongoing air and water pollution, increasing energy consumption, and the depletion of natural resources have all placed considerable stress on the capacity of our environment to support the present quality of human life in a sustainable manner. Ensuring a Sustainable Future does what few previous works have: it examines these trends' disproportionate impact on the poor and the economically viable solutions that can serve to remedy them -- solutions that simultaneously address environmental and economic problems. This gap in previous research, evidence, and writing has left low-income countries often unwilling to take on major environmental problems and many poor communities believing they faced impossible choices between improving the environment in which they live and increasing the jobs and income available. Bringing together evidence-based recommendations and in-depth case studies of successful policies and programs around the world, Ensuring a Sustainable Future examines innovative solutions to this crucial challenge. In doing so, it addresses a comprehensive range of environmental sustainability challenges affecting low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

About the Author

Jody Heymann is Dean and Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Heymann was the Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University and the Project on Global Working Families at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and held a Canada Research Chair in Global Health and Social Policy. Heymann established and leads the WORLD Policy Analysis Centre, the first global initiative to examine social policy in all 193 UN nations. This initiative provides an in-depth look at how social and environmental policies affect the ability of individuals, families and communities to meet their health and welfare needs across the political, economic and social spectrum worldwide. Magda Barrera works at McGill University's Institute for Health and Social Policy conducting comparative research on how to effectively improve social conditions in an economically sustainable manner. She has co-led a fellowship program designed to examine policies and programs around the world on topics such as urban sustainability and environmental equity.