

Different pollutants are linked in children to noncommunicable diseases (such as asthma), cognitive disorders and perinatal defects, and among adults to heart disease, stroke and cancer. “WHO estimated that exposures to polluted soil, water, and air contributed in 2012 to an estimated 8.9 million deaths worldwide-8.4 million (94%) in low-and-middle-income countries. It aims not only to investigate the effects of environmental change on human health, but also to study the political, economic, and social systems that govern those effects.”īosurgi describes air pollution as a concrete example in the realm of planetary health. Planetary health offers an exciting opportunity to find alternative solutions for a better and more resilient future.
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The Lancet Planetary Health’s editor-in-chief Raffaella Bosurgi, PhD, MSc, breaks down the difference between public health, global health and planetary health this way: “While public health is about health protection and health promotion within the health systems and global health looks at how to improve the health of populations worldwide, planetary health broadens this discussion by looking at the societies, civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.

Put simply, planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.”

The original planetary health manifesto and the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health defined planetary health as “ … the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide through judicious attention to the human systems-political, economic, and social-that shape the future of humanity and the Earth’s natural systems that define the safe environmental limits within which humanity can flourish. In addition to public health and environmental health considerations, it examines upstream political, economic, and social systems and calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Sweeping in scope, planetary health focuses on the sustainability of our civilization and the toll of inequitable, inefficient, and unsustainable resource consumption on the planet and human health. In spring 2017, The Lancet debuted an open-access, online-only journal, The Lancet Planetary Health, based on the concept. The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health officially launched the planetary health concept in 2015, and by the end of the year, a consortium of over 70 universities, NGOs, government entities, research institutes and other partners founded the Planetary Health Alliance at Harvard. Planetary health-the youngest concept presented in this series-has gathered significant momentum since it first appeared in a 2014 commentary in The Lancet. We hope this will both clarify things as well as spur discussion on social media (see our Facebook page and Twitter feed) and in the comments section below. In this “ What’s the Difference?” series, Marija Cemma, PhD, explains the disciplines based on research and interviews with global experts. No worries! Global Health NOW is here to help. If you’re just testing your interest in population-level health or you’re a veteran public health-er, you may be a bit bewildered by the proliferation of the various “healths”: public health, global health, planetary health, one health… The differences can be squishy, the distinctions cloudy or monumental.
