How are health-care and trees related?

By: Ritzuko Gutierrez 

Unfortunately, there are flaws in our system. One of these flaws is the lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care in rural areas. People who suffer from this issue, may be incentivized to rely on illegal activities. For example, illegal logging in order to get cash to pay health care needs. Tropical forests are mainly affected. The loss is greater than gain and it leads to a change in landscapes, livelihoods, biodiversity, and climate change. Providing high-quality health care to rural communities with limited resources and income options living nearly a tropical rainforest benefits both conservation and human health. Globally, 35% of protected areas are managed by local communities and when designing a conservation program, they are rarely considered in it. Although, this idea has benefits for humans and the environment, it also has its negative consequences. When applying, incentive-based conservation approaches, it can either go well or bad. Benefits are not always distributed equally, therefore these benefits would not reflect as good as one would like. It is important that when applying this idea, there should be a community leadership in the design. This means that the community should be part of the program and that it should focus on pressing  health and well-being needs. Then, we can obtain a good health-care program and an improvement on the number of tropical rainforests trees.

Cross-sector global health and forest conservation needs. (A) Maps of global aboveground forest carbon density and Universal Health Coverage (9): Tropical areas, particularly Africa and Asia, have high forest cover and low health care coverage. (B, Inset) Forest loss (resulting from deforestation and forest degradation) accelerates over time across all 32 terrestrial IUCN Category II National Parks (10) established before 2001 in Indonesia [boxplots; forest change data: Hansen et al. (1)]. (C) Study site and approach: locations of IUCN Category II National Parks (10) in Indonesia, with the intervention park highlighted, and an outline of the problems and hypotheses addressed in this analysis, along with hypothesized outcomes that were tested empirically through objective earth observation and health clinic records.

References 

Jones, I. J. 2020. Improving rural health care reduces illegal logging and conserves carbon in a tropical forest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 117: 28515 – 28524.