Policies & FAQs

The Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) is committed to making its content accessible to a global audience. While we cannot independently verify the accuracy of translations, we welcome collaboration with external translation partners to make our materials available in various languages. We strive to ensure that all translations faithfully capture the full intent of the original work and maintain the highest quality standards before dissemination. 

If you are interested in translating any PHA documents, please contact us first to discuss permissions and ensure compliance with copyright and other legal requirements. All translated materials must include the following disclaimer, written in both the original and translated languages: “The Planetary Health Alliance has not verified the accuracy of this translation. The document in its original language is available [insert link]. The Planetary Health Alliance and the authors of this document are not responsible for any discrepancies in meaning. To inquire about this translation, please contact the translator at [email contact].” 

Note: Translations for documents not published by PHA (such as research papers, which may appear on the PHA website) must be coordinated with the original or rightful publishers or copyright holders. 

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.