Sustainable Development Goals and Health: Insights from the Ecosystem Services Approach

The present context of environmental degradation poses huge urgency to confronting the multiple challenges that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) offer. Health is a key issue as it acts as the Agenda’s cornerstone and interlinks every SDG and on the other hand, health achievement is not to be accomplished without the multiplicity of contributions of all the SGD. Global sustainability requires coordinated efforts which also emphasize the dependence of human well-being on nature and the statement that planet’s health and people’s heath are indivisible. The Ecosystem Services Approach brings the opportunity to address and highlight the nature’s contributions to people and to societal prosperity, strongly affected by natural environments. In this paper we reflect on the most relevant connections among SDG, nature’s contributions to people, health and opportunities for worthy livelihoods. This approach may help understanding and enhancing nature’s values as the basis for human well-being and it also may facilitate an analytical and communicative framework to enhance the Agenda 2030 achievement and to the transition into more fair and resilient societies.