Maike Voss | CPHP | Centre for Planetary Health Policy (2024)

FAQs

What are the principles of planetary health? ›

Planetary health is concerned with ensuring that civilization is sustained while ensuring that inequitable, inefficient, and unsustainable resource consumption is mitigated to prevent further destruction to the planet and human health.

Planetary health and wellbeing recognises that healthy ecosystems underlie all wellbeing. There is an inevitable interdependency between the health and wellbeing of people and the rest of nature. Climate change, biodiversity loss and overconsumption of nature's resources affect people's health and wellbeing everywhere.

Disability-Adjusted Life Years and Quality-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs/QALYs) are commonly used metrics in measuring global health. Planetary health describes the health of humanity globally and the health of the natural planetary systems on which it depends.

Animal health, specifically zoonoses (eg antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases), remains the most prominent One Health research field, whereas planetary health research does not address animal health.

Air pollution, whether from industrial emissions or smoke from fires clearing forests for agricultural use, can lead to cardiorespiratory illnesses and other diseases. Hurricanes and other major storms put people's lives at risk.

Planetary health is a cross-disciplinary field that has emerged in the last eight or nine years. It focuses on how our transformation of nature—our degradation and alteration of all of our planet's natural systems—is coming back to affect our health.

Overview. Climate change presents a fundamental threat to human health. It affects the physical environment as well as all aspects of both natural and human systems – including social and economic conditions and the functioning of health systems.

Planetary health is a concept that encourages evidence-based policies to promote human health and prosperity while preserving the environment that allows us to thrive.

The Planetary Health Alliance defines planetary health as “…a solutions-oriented, transdisciplinary field and social movement focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to Earth's natural systems on human health and all life on Earth”.

What is the great transition of planetary health? ›

The Planetary Health roadmap proposes a transformational shift in how we live on Earth, what many are calling the Great Transition: rapid and deep structural changes across most dimensions of human activity and a rethinking of our values and relationship with and within nature and to each other.

The concept of planetary health is based on the understanding that human health closely depends on the healthy functioning of natural systems and that preserving the quality of these systems is crucial to safeguard human health.

The term planetary health – denoting the interconnections between the health of person and place at all scales – emerged from the environmental and holistic health movements of the 1970–80s; in 1980, Friends of the Earth expanded the World Health Organization definition of health, stating: “health is a state of ...

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, declared planetary health as a new discipline in global health.

Planetary Health is where people and planet collide

These include infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics, rising food and water insecurity, rapid biodiversity loss and climate change.

The principles are: respect and care for the community of life, improve the quality of human life, conserve the Earth's vitality and diversity, minimize the depletion of non-renewable resources, keep within the Earth's carrying capacity, change personal attitudes and practices, enable communities to care for their own ...

Ethical principles of sustainability, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, community, and precautionary substitution provide a framework that can be used to evaluate environmental chemicals.