New Guide for Accessible Public Health Messaging

The new guide “Planetary Health is Public Health,” developed through a partnership between the Public Health Communications Collaborative and the Planetary Health Alliance, fills a need for health messaging guidance that is precise and purposeful.

This resource recognizes that environmental degradation is a present-day public health crisis manifesting in everything from heat-related illness to respiratory disease, from food insecurity to mental health challenges.

The guide:

• is a practical, evidence-based approach to translating complex concepts into accessible public health messaging,
• provides concrete strategies for explaining the community health impacts of current and possible changes to Earth systems without overwhelming scientific jargon,
• empowers public health professionals to address environmental injustice through their communications work,
• addresses real barriers—from political polarization to misinformation—and offers solutions that build trust and understanding, and
• offers a path of honest, accessible dialogue about the environmental foundations of human well-being.

Get the Guide

We welcome your feedback on the effectiveness of this resource and invite you to share what additional messaging support would serve your communities best. Since this guide centers primarily on U.S. contexts and frameworks, we’re particularly interested in hearing how these approaches might adapt to other regions, or what entirely different strategies might better serve communicators working across varied cultural, political, and environmental landscapes.

Your experiences using these tools—and the gaps you discover—help us understand how Planetary Health communication can serve communities worldwide. Your insights shape more effective approaches to this urgent work.

You can share other existing tools and resources with us directly through the resource submission form.