Frequently Asked Questions

The Planetary Health Alliance has adopted the following definition: 

“Planetary Health is 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.”

The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, which framed the field in 2015, 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. Put simply, Planetary Health is the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.”

Planetary Health is focused on the health of humanity as it is affected by planetary-scale environmental change, which is known as the Earth Crisis.  We now understand that problems which have been framed for decades as “environmental”—air pollution; biodiversity loss; chemical pollution; climate change; resource scarcity; land use change; nutrient overloading; and marine degradation—are, in fact, creating a global health and humanitarian crisis. Environmental change has reached a scale in that it is driving a significant fraction of the global burden of disease across the world. The transdisciplinary field of Planetary Health has emerged to address these health dimensions of human-caused environmental change on a planetary scale.  

Introductory resources are available to view and share.