ICS Estudos e Relatórios Nº1 / 2019

ICS E S T U D O S e R E L A T Ó R I O S 2019 General Framing Cities are the homes for a majority of people on earth and have a significant impact on the planet, which provides the resources and ecological functions for urban health and wellbeing. As complex living systems, cities are the nodal points for innovation and knowledge production, which are crucial for addressing the challenges of sustainable development, such as climate change, resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss. Urban policymakers overall have made progress in the health and wellbeing of people worldwide, although we have also increasingly recognized the costs of these improvements. The special report from the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health - Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch (Whitmee, Haines, and Beyrer et al., 2015) has made the point. Among those costs are environmental pollution and lifestyle diseases affecting mental, social, and physical human health. Broader drivers of change such climatic and demographic changes are catalysts and accelerators of emerging risks to health and wellbeing in rapidly changing environments. Besides, the institutional infrastructure and governance systems that have been built to support past developments need to be adjusted to respond to increasing risks and changing human values. The inherent inertia of the institutional infrastructure to adapt and react appropriately to changing ecological and social circumstances is a severe risk itself. These risks manifest themselves in the fundamental problem of acting on the knowledge we have to reach the goals we are aiming at in the future, among them, to reduce the risks to health and wellbeing in cities. To learn from the past and respond to increasingly interconnected urban health risks, the International Council for Science has suggested a systems approach to make cities healthier places to live in (International Council for Science, 2011). Such a systems approach aims at understanding the complexity of a system and acting on that knowledge we have for improving key performance indicators (KPI) of cities, such as health and wellbeing. Taking a