Planetary health is an international goal proposed in 2015 in the most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, and in the same year at the World Health Summit, an international health summit.
If we are to achieve human health and well-being, we need to reintegrate our fragmented world and take a global macroscopic view of the entire global system, including our interconnected systems: communities, societies, economies and ecosystems.
This is “planetary health”.
Proposed as an international goal, it requires research promotion and societal implementation through interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration, taking into account the SDGs and the transition to a nature-positive economy.
Planetary health cannot be realised with a superficial approach based on a traditional, elemental and partial understanding.
We are now called to make a Great Transition that fundamentally changes the way we are, our relationship with the world, and the plates of society.
international definitions of planetary health
Planetary Health is “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”
-The Lancet Commission on Planetary Health
(Planetary health: a new science for exceptional action The Lancet, Vol. 386, No. 10007)
Put simply, planetary health is the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”.
Relevance to the SDGs
While it has been pointed out that each of the SDGs may contradict each other when attempting to realise them individually, Planetary Health takes a holistic view of their interconnections and implications.
This will lead to a balanced realisation of these goals even beyond 2030, when the SDGs reach their time limit.
Relevance to Nature Positive
International biodiversity targets have been set and the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have proposed the Nature Positive Economy Transition Strategy. Planetary health is an important goal to be achieved, taking into account the relationship between people, the economy they create, social systems and ecosystems, and the transition to a Nature Positive Economy.
From Destruction to Regeneration
In the past, all of human economic activities have put a strain on the environment, and the resulting environmental changes have been detrimental to people’s physical and mental health. It can be said that human life has made both people and the planet as a whole sick, and although the SDGs have been raised and the importance of sustainability has been advocated, the emphasis now goes even further and focuses on the regeneration of the environment through more active human involvement. Every economic activity of humanity regenerates the environment and regenerates people. We envision a future in which the whole planet, including people, is healthier as a result of human life.
