Global health. The current scenario and future perspectives

71 global spread of consumer-based lifestyles through advertising and entertainment media, has successfully encouraged consumerism and fueled aspirations to attain consumer status in a world where there is no limited “right to consume”. In an increasingly unequal world, per capita consumption data hides considerable variations in people’s ways of life. For example, per capita rates of energy, water, food and material consumption are relatively stable in the developed world, but are very high compared to developing countries. In rapidly industrializing countries like China and India, per capita consumption is comparatively modest but grows rapidly as poverty decreases. In less developed countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa as well as Afghanistan, Yemen and other Asian countries, per capita consumption levels and trends are more varied but generally low and increase slowly. Therefore, it can be assumed that there are hardly any significant trends towards declining per capita consumption in any country in the world. From another perspective, it has been reported that higher incomes in the population create conditions for increasing pressure to improve environmental quality, which has been described by Grossman and Krueger (1991) through the environmental Kuznets curve. This curve expresses the relationship between pollution levels and per capita income. With an inverted U-shape, the curve indicates that economic growth can cause environmental problems in poorer countries, but these problems tend to plateau at a certain stage and gradually decrease because the “demand” for environmental quality tends to increase with higher incomes. The validity of this curve has been questioned by many researchers as they argue that it is not generalizable to all pollutants, like CO 2 , whose emissions do not decline at any known income level. Therefore, it is important to reflect on whether it is a good idea to sacrifice the environment to the point where people or nations begin to “demand” better environmental quality, without considering that the current environmental deterioration and damage may be irreparable. The Kuznets curve loses validity again when considering that a nation’s population can be responsible for environmental pollution far beyond its borders as a when it manufactures the products it consumes through production in other countries. In this way, consumption by high-income countries can directly contribute to the pollution problems of low-income countries, like when polluting industrial facilities are located in low-income countries and waste ends up in landfills in developing countries. In summary, the increase in economic activities due to globalization puts pressure on the environment through the overexploitation of natural resources, the emissions of dangerous pollutants and greenhouse gases