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Environment, Sanitation and Water

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core SPG2PH408 4

Semester and Year Offered: 2nd Semester, 1st Year

Course Coordinator and Team: N. Nakkeeran and Samik Chowdhury

Email of course coordinator: nakkeeran@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: None

Aim:  The course emphasises the critical importance of environment, with a focus on water, sanitation, waste management and climate change and associated impact on biodiversity, and their associations with public health. Direct and indirect public health concerns stemming from challenges to sustainable environment, pollution and toxicity will also be engaged with. The course will introduce these diverse perspectives on environment and public health with the concept of environmental justice as one of the frameworks to understand health inequity.

Course Outcomes:

  • To be able to appreciate the critical link between water supply, sanitation, waste management, pollution, toxicity and public health and how these links directly and indirectly shapes health outcome and wellbeing differentially across population groups
  • To be familiar with contemporary debates around the nexus between climate change, sustainable environment and public health.
  • To be sensitive to disproportionately high effect of environment on the health and wellbeing of groups in the margins.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Module 1: Relevance of Environment in Public health

This module will introduce students to the relevance of environment and ecology to health and more specifically to public health; both at individual and population levels with environmental justice as the overarching framework. The module will also introduce ‘one-health’ as a concept and a framework to link environment, ecology including agro-farming practices with public health.

Module 2: Water supply, sanitation and public health

Water and sanitation are important drivers of public health. They are also intimately associated with hygiene, one of the more individual level determinants of public health outcome. Apart from the obvious correspondence with communicable diseases, access to safe water and sanitation has tremendous positive implications for women’s role in the household and society. This module will also introduce the debates around the interrelationships between climate change, sanitation technologies, and water requirements keeping climate resilient sanitation systems, equity in availability of sanitation services and the concerns of sanitation workers in the foreground.

Module 3: Pollution, waste, toxicity and public health

Pollutants are undesirable elements produced in higher than acceptable levels of concentrations that reduce the quality of our environment. Pollutants are often the by-product of human activities, industrial activity or climate change. They have an adverse effect on the environment by polluting the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the soil in which plants grow. This module looks at the approaches and debates around air and water pollution, pesticide use and industrial pollution. The module will also uncover the links, processes, regulations, and institutional arrangements for waste management and their public health implications.

Module 4: Climate change, biodiversity and public health

Climate change poses a variety of threats to public health in several interconnected ways. There are direct threats in the form of extreme weather events and their consequences and indirect threats through the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems (e.g., atmosphere, food systems, vector distribution) economies and societies (e.g., migration, conflict), often mediated by human interventions. This module introduces students to some of the key aspects of the relationship between climate change, the environment and public health. It also engages with the health benefits of mitigation and adaptation policies and measures in public health and related sectors.

Assessment Details with weights:

  • An assignment that is based on field observation, review of literature or secondary data (30%)
  • A term paper / written assignment (40%)
  • End semester exam / Presentation (30%)

Reading List:

  • Mackenbach J. P. (2007). Global environmental change and human health: a public health research agenda. Journal of epidemiology and community health, 61(2), 92–94. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2005.045211
  • Northridge, ME., Environmental Equity and Health: Understanding Complexity and Moving Forward, American Journal of Public Health, February 2003, Vol 93, No. 2, 209-14
  • Ranganathan, Malini (2021): Caste, racialization, and the making of environmental unfreedoms in urban India, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1933121
  • Schlosberg, D., (2013) Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse, Environmental Politics, 22:1, 37-55, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2013.755387
  • Asaaga, F.A., Young, J.C., Oommen, M.A. et al. Operationalising the “One Health” approach in India: facilitators of and barriers to effective cross-sector convergence for zoonoses prevention and control. BMC Public Health 21, 1517 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11545-7
  • Amebelu, A., Ban, R., Bhagwan, J., Chilengi, R., Chandler, C., Colford, J. M., ... & Wolf, J. (2021). The Lancet Commission on water, sanitation and hygiene, and health. The Lancet, 398(10310), 1469-1470.
  • Bartram J, Cairncross S (2010) Hygiene, Sanitation, and Water: Forgotten Foundations of Health. PLoS Med 7(11): e1000367. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000367
  • Pattanayak, S. K., Poulos, C., Yang, J. C., & Patil, S. (2010). How valuable are environmental health interventions? Evaluation of water and sanitation programmes in India. Bulletin of the World Health organization, 88, 535-542.
  • Radu Ban, Monica Das Gupta & Vijayendra Rao (2010) The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?, The Journal of Development Studies, 46:4, 685-700, DOI: 10.1080/00220380903002962
  • Arnold, D. (2013). Pollution, toxicity and public health in metropolitan India, 1850–1939. Journal of Historical Geography, 42, 124-133.
  • Gutberlet, J., & Uddin, S. M. N. (2017). Household waste and health risks affecting waste pickers and the environment in low-and middle-income countries. International journal of occupational and environmental health, 23(4), 299-310.
  • Dhara, V. R., Schramm, P. J., & Luber, G. (2013). Climate change & infectious diseases in India: implications for health care providers. The Indian journal of medical research, 138(6), 847–852.
  • Haines, A., Kovats, R. S., Campbell-Lendrum, D., & Corvalan, C. (2006). Climate change and human health: impacts, vulnerability and public health. Public health, 120(7), 585–596. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2006.01.002
  • McMichael A. J. (2015). Extreme weather events and infectious disease outbreaks. Virulence, 6(6), 543–547. https://doi.org/10.4161/21505594.2014.975022
  • Buse, C. G., & Patrick, R. (2020). Climate change glossary for public health practice: from vulnerability to climate justice. Journal of epidemiology and community health, 74(10), 867–871. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2020-213889
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