Reduction in key environmental health risks such as proportion of households using clean and safe cooking fuels and technologies or the proportion of urban populations that live in areas that meet WHO's ambient air quality guidelines;Reductions in diseases that can be directly attributed to environmental risks such as occupational cancers or respiratory and cardiovascular diseases attributable to indoor or outdoor air pollution. Global policies sustainable development can also be improved by enhancing awareness of, and accountability for, the health impacts of policy decisions. This can be promoted by the wider use of health impact assessment, which supports the inclusion of health into decision-making processes.Long term studies of urban cycle commuters in Shanghai and Copenhagen have indicated that such commuters experienced a 20-30 per cent lower annual mortality risks, on average, in comparison to other commuters. Measuring active travel to work, particularly when safe travel networks are available, could be a health-relevant measure of healthy physical activity. Better home insulation, heating/cooking systems and indoor ventilation, can have a significant impact on the reduction of respiratory diseases, including asthmas, pneumonia and tuberculosis, as well as reducing people's vulnerability to extremes of heat and cold. In some countries, such as New Zealand, estimates of the short-term health benefit of such housing investments has helped drive "climate smart" investments in housing energy efficiencies and retrofits. Economic evaluation can also demonstrate how greener investments can yield measurable cost savings for health. For instance, the benefit-cost ratio of replacing polluting, leaky biomass stoves with liquid petroleum gas can be 4:1, including savings in lives and health care costs as well as fuel expense. Measurement of the combined health and energy savings of other new stove technologies (advanced biomass, biogas, etc). In many off-grid health facilities, renewable energy sources may be a cheaper and more reliable source of basic electricity, once the initial capital investment has been made. Higher up the energy ladder, it has been estimated that energy efficiencies in health facilities, including development of more clean, onsite energy generation, could yield immediate, annual facility savings on the order of 10-30 per cent in a sector estimated to account for 5-7 per cent of national greenhouse gas emissions in some developed countries. These statistics illustrate how health improvements and economic development need not be tradeoffs, but are deeply complementary to one another - and indeed to sustainable development in the green economy context. nhealth 095

It is Time to Act - Now!Peter Löscher, President of the Managing Board and CEO, Siemens AG The streets of ancient Athens were the stage on which the Greek philosophers developed and presented their ideas. It was in the busy marketplace of his native town that Socrates chose to disseminate his teachings. Cherishing the close contact with people and the opportunity to exchange ideas with his pupils face to face, Socrates already recognised the creative potential of the urban environment some 2,500 years ago. And cities are still the breeding ground for the innovative forces driving progress in our society today. As recent statistics attest, urban areas are the growth engines of the world economy, generating some 80 per cent of global GDP. They also offer extraordinary opportunities for personal development, employment and increased prosperity. What makes cities is not just their houses, streets, railways, water lines and parks. As Edward Glaeser, US economist and author of Triumph of the City, rightly notes: "the real city is made of flesh, not concrete."We have an obligation to pass on to the city dwellers of tomorrow an urban environment worth living in. To people like little Danica, who was born in Manila in the fall of 2011 and honoured by the United Nations as the world's seven billionth inhabitant, we have an ethical duty to provide a secure future. Danica will be 39 years old in 2050. According to the experts, world population will have increased to more than nine billion by that date - in 1992, when the first Earth Summit took place in Rio de Janeiro, only 5.5 billion people lived on our planet. What is even more, today, more than 50 per cent live in cities. By 2050, this figure will have risen to about 70 per cent. This means that 096 smart cities