St. Gallen Symposium’s Post

New Perspective from Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra! Human health and the health of Planet Earth go together. "Embracing the planetary health paradigm within the field of health sciences can catalyze transformative changes essential for cultivating a sustainable and equitable future." #planetaryhealth #environmentalhealth #humanhealth

Please help, by reposting this across your networks! The sustainability and long-term profit of businesses depend on the well-being of Society and Nature. Without more businesses taking climate change and human well-being to heart (and demanding more support from their countries), we will continue to miss targets and slide inexorably towards a much less habitable and frankly quite dangerous planet. No corners will remain untouched; no islands, compounds, gated communities, or politics will protect us. Earth does not exist for the purpose of perpetuating the human race - in fact, we just got here - and the planet can survive and thrive just fine without us - just as it did when other species came and went. Last week at the Planetary Health Annual Meeting 2024, we launched the world’s first Roadmap and Action Plan for Planetary Health. I’m proud to be one of the co-authors of this work, specifically Chapter 4.3 Change Area 3 on how businesses can “be” the change that is needed: to survive and thrive in this changed world, by bringing consideration of human well-being and planetary health to the centre of planning and operations across the organization, rather than being limited to token gestures, enthusiastic press releases or minimum compliance. This change in priorities and approach is crucial if we all want our businesses, families, communities and countries to survive and thrive in this changing world. The Roadmap and Action Plan can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gb-RVsBi #planetaryhealth #PHroadmap #KLC2APH It was a great honour late last year to be invited by Dr Jemilah Mahmood, Professor of Planetary Health at Sunway University, to become a member of the Planetary Health Alliance. The Alliance is a diverse community of 1700+ individuals and 300+ organizations from 60+ countries. Planetary Health encompasses the well-being of our planet’s ecosystems, the health of its inhabitants, and the delicate balance that sustains life. It is a global movement, analytical framework, and field of work focused on understanding, quantifying, and addressing the growing human health impacts of anthropogenic global environmental change. My role as Business co-lead, representing the business community, together with Danial Rahman (CEO of the Asia Strategy and Leadership Institute), representing Academia, is to help lead better engagement with and between academia and businesses across all industries. This is just the first deliverable in a major initiative to engage and inspire businesses to rethink their purpose, planning and operations while demonstrating empathy for their challenges. Please help, by reposting this across your networks!

"Planetary health" acknowledges that the degradation of Earth’s natural systems due to human activity poses severe risks not only to public health but to all life on Earth. The Planetary Health Alliance proposes a roadmap that advocates for transformation of governance structures, an approach to education and business practices, aligning them with the principles of sustainability, regeneration, and health. Interestingly, the roadmap doesn't start with human health - very refreshingly Read the summary and join the movement if it resonates. Cheers https://lnkd.in/ddDBaCPy

The 2024 Planetary Health Check makes for a sobering read. Humanity is living beyond the Earth's capacity to sustain us. But we already know this in our hearts if we are honest. To help bring us back to a safe operating space, we need a high level of collaboration between businesses, policy makers, government, the media, and civil society organisations. "We know that solving the planet crisis is not utopia. It's not fantasy. We have the solutions for a secure, stable future for humanity. What are those transformations? Well, we know them. It's a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. It is a transition towards circular business models. It is transitioning towards healthy diets from sustainable food systems. And it's not only halting loss of nature, it's also scaling the regeneration and restoration of marine systems, soils, forests and wetlands. We have solutions for all of these." Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research https://lnkd.in/enxWw5U9

A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations From the conclusions: "A just, healthy, and safe planet is essential. Good health, including physical and mental wellbeing, is a basic human right,601 and is at the core of the SDGs. Promoting a healthy planet for all requires an Earth-system justice approach to ensure that the critical functions of the Earth system are protected, human health and wellbeing are improved, and the minimum needs of all humans are fulfilled to enable them to prosper." " We present our results for public debate to ensure their legitimacy. What is now required is both scientific scrutiny and public debate about our numbers and framework to ensure that they are the best possible estimates. Actors worldwide need to mobilise and act on engaging with the broader systemic translations and transformations that we propose. This mobilisation is essential to protect the health and wellbeing of humans and other species, to ensure that everyone can live within the safe and just corridor, and to ensure that the responsibility for enabling this falls most heavily on those most responsible for current environmental degradation. Ultimately, the safe and just corridor provides a roadmap for a resilient and sustainable future." Link to the research paper in The Lancet: https://lnkd.in/ej_iCYpa #planetaryboundaries #health #sustainability #environment #ecosystems #systemtransformation #sdg #wellbeing #sciencebased #just #safety #transformation #consumption

The Health Check We All Need How well do you really know your health? Without a thorough examination, it's all speculation. As we age, changes occur quickly and often unnoticed. We assess Earth's overall health only every six or seven years - a stark inadequacy given the rapid and critical shifts in our planet's systems. Launched during Climate Week NYC in September 2024, the Planetary Health Check is a pivotal scientific effort by the PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and partners like Planetary Guardians. It has been created to provide a far more regular, comprehensive, scientific assessment of the state of Earth's systems based on the Planetary Boundaries Science. This will start off as an annual check but imagine where it could lead - a live dashboard - vibrant and interconnected with colour-coded indicators of health status. What if this wasn't confined to a website or limited to existing enthusiasts but was displayed worldwide, on the most high profile and high footfall digital ad spaces? Imagine it featured weekly on global news channels and woven into social media feeds. Visibility like that could profoundly elevate our collective understanding of Earth's health, ignite discussions, change attitudes and compel our leaders to act with urgency. And as well as highlighting dangers, it can also show progress and offer hope. This is the health we urgently need. I love the idea of it. What do you think? #PlanetaryHealthCheck #ClimateChange #Media #Visibility

Human health and the health of our natural environments are inextricably linked, so how do we create a better future for people and the planet? Experts from across UTS will tackle this question and more, 12.30pm today. Register now: https://lnkd.in/gXvf6gGH The planet is facing multiple crises. Recently, we’ve seen the hottest years in history, wildfires sweeping across continents, record levels of food insecurity, escalating biodiversity loss, and a widening gap between the rich and poor. How can we reverse these alarming trends? Professor Jason Prior leads INSIGHT's Climate Change and Health Research Collaborative, driving an ambitious research agenda uncovering a future of planetary health, flourishing natural systems, and the wise stewardship of natural resources. He will sit alongside other experts on today's panel to explore the interconnection between global systems and the public’s health. Can you make it?

Planetary health emphasises that our well-being is closely connected to the health of the environment around us, while highlighting how the condition of ecosystems directly impacts human health. Our HDR student Eleanor Robson has been working with Blue Mountains City Council, the first local government globally to adopt a planetary health approach to its strategic framing of sustainability. Eleanor's groundbreaking paper, "Planetary Health Values and Their Implications for Sustainability Governance: Case Study in the City of Blue Mountains, Australia", is the first to investigate the practicality of using planetary health as a framework for local sustainability governance.   https://bit.ly/3Tk5Myt 

🌏 Our planet will only remain able to provide even the most basic standard of living for everyone in the future, if economic systems and technologies are dramatically transformed and critical resources are more fairly used, managed and shared, a new report shows. 📖 The report is co-authored by over 60 leading natural and social scientists from the Earth Commission, led by the AISSR professor Joyeeta Gupta, as well as Prof. Xuemei Bai and Prof. Diana Liverman. And was published today in The Lancet Planetary Health. https://lnkd.in/eE4SAVXh

HI, my latest editorial in Planetary Health Weekly August 15, 2024 https://lnkd.in/gcX2tvfj Just as some Canadian fires get under control and the devastation in Jasper becomes clear, huge fires still rage across our Arctic areas and heat extremes continue worldwide (as you'll read following this). Is all this because some take 'freedoms' at the expense of others? And how free are we? Are we free at all? If so what are we free from? Are we free to do things that harm others or ourselves, to do whatever we like, whether it hurts, perhaps even kills, others, including other forms of life on Earth? What exactly are we allowed to do by society? Really, that is what it comes down to, unless we each individually get to set our own moral, ethical codes. But our system doesn't work like that, rather it allows various freedoms even at the expense of others, a continual balancing act. The freedoms we enjoy are influenced by many factors. Think of personal things: like family, name, age, immediate home and outside environments, workplace, exposure to pollution, income level, education, teachers and other motivating and forming experiences, including travel. And then what about the surrounding business environment and economic system we live in? Ours, in a macro sense being neoliberal in character, ultimately causes great inequality that certainly influences how we live, think and our privileges.  On top of all there’s the legal and regulatory environment, the imposed code of action including many practical impositions, all ultimately to protect the individual, the commons, the majority. It's there to protect our liberal democracy, personal security, health and other freedoms, all to enable us to become the best we can. Finally, there's a judiciary to enforce. All this in theory though we act it out every day. How can we continue to blatantly pollute the atmosphere with huge excesses of greenhouse gases that are now causing a tremendous climate crisis? It’s happening more and more, GHG concentrations increase weekly. To me it’s truly inconceivable that the system is now allowing some to have the freedom to make it all play out in real time, in plain view, but certainly not on a level playing field. Ecojustice be damned, those making such decisions are only doing so from a protected position of power and wealth to accrue more power and wealth.  How do the harmers keep winning and inflicting? Why is it that their freedoms are protected by our neoliberal economic and judicial systems, all of which have treated for decades, and continue to treat, the environment and human life as commodities to be exploited, sold, destroyed as collateral damage in the quest for profit and great privilege? Just the climate crisis alone should be sufficient to jumpstart huge action to change course, to turn from polluting to non-polluting ways, to healing Earth which we depend on second by second for...(Read the rest: https://lnkd.in/gcX2tvfj)