Reimagining Urban Health through the Lens of Planetary Health
At the Planetary Health Cities Symposium, global leaders reimagined urban life to better protect and restore the life-support systems essential to human survival.
Planetary Health Alliance and Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health
The 2025 Planetary Health Cities Symposium, co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health and the Carey Business School, brought together global leaders across science, business, policy, and urban planning to reimagine urban life through a Planetary Health lens. With urban populations projected to grow by 1.1 billion in the next decade, sessions explored how cities can safeguard both human health and the planet’s life-support systems. Speakers stressed the need to move beyond a narrow focus on decarbonization to also address toxic building materials, biodiversity loss, and social inequities, while highlighting solutions such as green building standards, community health data tools, and integrated resilience. From addressing “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana to embedding heat resilience in Miami-Dade and strengthening elder care in East Asia, the symposium emphasized the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration and systemic change to foster healthier, more regenerative cities. Looking ahead, the initiative aims to co-develop shared design principles and support the growth of Planetary Health Cities worldwide for the health of both people and planet.
Read a detailed report on these developments and their implications for our global movement.
Together, we plan to reshape how the industry thinks about sustainability and the built environment. We want to expand the current narrow focus on just decarbonization to encompass broader environmental and human health concerns.
Seydina Fall
Faculty Co-director of the John Hopkins Institute of Planetary Health's Practice Program and Senior Lecturer in Finance at Carey Business School
From left to right: Saori Kashima (The IDEC Institute; Hiroshima University), Galen Treuer (Risk + Resilience Tech Hub), and MinGu Jun (World Health City Forum) participate in a panel discussion on "Converging Paths to Planetary Health Cities: Infrastructure, Community, and Connected Intelligence."
Mary Conway Vaughan (Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence) demonstrates how to navigate the City Data Explorer website.
From left to right: Rick Fedrizzi (International WELL Building Institute), Chrissa Pagitsas (Pagitsas Advisors), and Jin Won Noh (Yonsei University) discuss advancing market transformation, illustrated by an adoption curve displayed on the slide behind them.
