The Vienna declaration on public health

In 1986 participants at the First International Conference on Health Promotion agreed the landmark Ottawa Charter. The Charter was a powerful response to calls for a new public health movement, setting out a vision and framework for actions to achieve the World Health Organization’s ‘Health for All’ targets by the year 2000 and beyond. It provided the foundation for many subsequent developments, including health in all policies, action on the built environment, community action and empowerment, an emphasis on prevention, and a focus on health equity. Today the principles of the Ottawa Charter remain as important as ever. Yet the world in 2016 is very different from that in 1986, and so too have the risks and opportunities for public health. In recognition of these changes, and taking account of other developments such as the 2016 World Federation of Public Health Association’s Global Charter on the Public’s Health,1 the European Public Health Association and its partners have examined how the principles set out in the Ottawa Charter apply to these new circumstances. The resulting Vienna Declaration (online supplement) has been adopted at the 2016 European Public Conference in Vienna, Austria. The changing context that the Vienna Declaration responds to is due, in large part, to what is termed ‘globalisation’, involving the movement of people, goods, money, and ideas over ever greater distances on a dramatic scale. This has brought many opportunities. Economic development, technological progress, especially in relation to health care, and the widespread adoption of healthy, evidence-based public policies have together contributed to large reductions in the global burden of disease, itself vastly better understood than in 1986 as a result of global collaboration, with concomitant increases in life expectancy