WEBINAR
Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves
Presented in Collaboration with OMEGA Resilience Funders Network, Forsight Analyis Nexus Initiative (FAN), Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere (MAHB), and New School at Commonweal.
One of the most powerful frames for resilience work is the role of human health in the global polycrisis. While this link is core to the work of the Health and Environmental Funders Network and its global NGO community, it is often not sufficiently appreciated in the emerging field of polycrisis research and advocacy.
In this webinar Michael Lerner discusses planetary health with two of the leaders of the field, Sam Myers and Howard Frumkin, and their new book Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves.
They write:
Human health depends on the health of the planet.
Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.
Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts.
The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world… Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.
Samuel Myers, MD, MPH studies the human health impacts of accelerating disruptions to Earth’s natural systems, a field recently dubbed Planetary Health.
He is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is the founding Director of the Planetary Health Alliance. Sam received his BA from Harvard College, MD from Yale University School of Medicine, and MPH from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Myers serves as a Commissioner on the Lancet-Rockefeller Foundation Commission on Planetary Health and a member of the Lead Expert Group of the Global Panel on Agriculture, Food Systems, and Nutrition. He was the inaugural recipient of the Arrell Global Food Innovation Award in 2018. He has also been awarded the Prince Albert II of Monaco—Institut Pasteur Award for research at the interface of global environmental change and human health.
Howard Frumkin is Senior Vice President with the Trust for Public Land and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where he served as Dean from 2010-2016.
After serving as Dean, he led the “Our Planet, Our Health” initiative at the Wellcome Trust in London from 2018-2019. Previously, he directed the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR), and served as
Special Assistant to the CDC Director for Climate Change and Health, from 2005-2010. Dr. Frumkin was Professor and Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Emory Medical School from 1990-2005.
