Policies & FAQs

Welcome to the Planetary Health Alliance! We are delighted to have you join us. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our guidelines to ensure a positive and inclusive experience for all members:

Respect and Focus: Our community is exclusively focused on advancing Planetary Health. Please share your ideas, projects, resources, events, announcements, articles, and any other content relevant to this theme. We value diverse perspectives and encourage respectful dialogue.

Creating a Safe Environment: We are committed to providing a harassment-free experience for all members. This includes:

• Refraining from making threats, personal attacks, defamation, inflammatory language, derogatory comments, disruptive behavior, physical or emotional abuse, bullying, or profanity.
• Respecting boundaries and refraining from spamming or posting irrelevant content.
• Refraining from posting content containing viruses, malware, or spyware.
• Respecting privacy by refraining from sharing private communications or visuals without consent.
• Refraining from harassing photography or recording, including online activity logging for harassment.
• Refraining from making comments related to others’ personal attributes, including gender, race, nationality, religion, and lifestyle.
• Ensuring that discussions remain inclusive and free from discrimination based on age, race, ethnicity, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, veteran status, or any other characteristic or identity factor.
• Refraining from indecent or sexually explicit material, sexual harassment, or unwelcome sexual attention.
• Reporting any instances of harassment or inappropriate behavior promptly to ph_alliance@jhu.edu.

Personal Opinions Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that the viewpoints and policies of member organizations and individuals may not represent the official position of the Planetary Health Alliance.  

Privacy, Confidentiality, and Consent: Protect the privacy of yourself and others by not sharing confidential or private information in public posts. Please obtain explicit consent before sharing photographs or videos featuring individuals. 

Continuous Improvement: We value feedback and suggestions for improving our community. Please feel free to reach out to us at ph_alliance@jhu.edu with any ideas or concerns you may have.

Let’s work together to foster a welcoming and supportive environment where all members can thrive and contribute to the advancement of Planetary Health. Thank you for being a part of our community!

*For our Hylo community standards, please see the Group Agreements in the Hylo Group.

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.