Provisional Program

This session will discuss current global initiatives that look beyond GDP growth to alleviate poverty and advance equality and thriving, including the UN’s High Level Expert Group’s report on Counting What Counts & the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’ Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. It will explore how a Planetary Health framing can be infused in those efforts and how such work can be contextualized for people, businesses, and nations throughout the globe.

All economies depend on natural and secondary resources, driving energy and material use, greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions, waste, and biodiversity loss. Understanding these interconnected flows is therefore critical to achieving planetary health. This session will examine the system changes and pace of transformation needed to shift production and consumption toward planetary health, with a focus on the rapidly growing environmental footprint of AI, including energy and material demands, data-center expansion, key uncertainties, and opportunities for intervention.

This session explores how Asia's diverse cultural traditions of living in harmony with nature, including traditional ecological knowledge and cultural wisdom, can inform contemporary approaches to planetary health in rapidly urbanising societies. Through case studies from across the region, we will discuss how local knowledge and practices can help build sustainable and resilient futures.

This session will explore how Indigenous, traditional, and spiritual knowledge systems offer practical solutions to today’s interconnected environmental and health challenges. Drawing on diverse global perspectives, participants will learn from successful examples of cultural preservation and knowledge stewardship, identify best practices for strengthening community leadership and ethical partnerships, and explore how multiple ways of knowing can be meaningfully integrated into policy, education, governance, and Planetary Health practice.

This interactive session will explore the gap between what we know about planetary health and how we communicate it. Rather than presenting a communications strategy or toolkit, participants will experience practical approaches for translating knowledge into clear, compelling messages. Through hands-on exercises, the session will demonstrate how communication tools can help bridge the gap between evidence and action, leaving participants with practical insights they can apply in their own work.

Planetary Health education has largely focused on integrating the field into health professions, but addressing the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution requires knowledge and collaboration across disciplines. This session will explore the next phase of Planetary Health education, drawing on lessons from a decade of curriculum development and innovation. Together, we will consider how Planetary Health can become foundational knowledge across higher education and lifelong learning, equipping learners across disciplines to address the complex challenges of the 21st century.

This interactive session will explore the benefits and challenges of Planetary Health financing from the perspectives of both those seeking investment and those who finance such projects. Participants will engage in small-group discussions about how to overcome barriers and promote investment in Planetary Health solutions, emphasizing the return on value of such financing.

Food systems are central to Planetary Health, driving greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, water use, and soil degradation while failing to provide healthy diets for billions. This interactive session will explore how diverse knowledge systems and innovations can help transform food systems to be more sustainable, resilient, and equitable. Drawing on approaches ranging from agroecology and Indigenous and traditional food systems to policy, technology, and dietary change, speakers will examine how blending scientific innovation with cultural wisdom can accelerate solutions to today’s food system challenges.

This panel session introduces state-of-art geosciences that serve as the foundation of Planetary Health to enhance communication between Geohealth and Planetary Health. The topics span from long-term history of interactions between nature and humans to current issues, including climate change and/or hazards in relation to human, ecosystem, and environmental health and diseases.

Health systems are on the frontlines of Planetary Health impacts while also contributing to environmental degradation. This session will explore how health systems, from primary and preventive care to hospitals and long-term care, can drive both adaptation and mitigation while advancing health equity. Speakers will highlight practical solutions, including decarbonizing healthcare, sustainable supply chains, prevention-focused care, sustainability metrics, and policy reform, with examples from around the world. The session will showcase pathways toward health systems that are equitable, resilient, and aligned with planetary boundaries.

This discussion-based session will explore how Planetary Health measurement can better meet the needs of policymakers at global, city, and community levels. Participants will share experiences, identify key data gaps and priorities, and consider how existing data can be brought together to inform decision-making. The session will focus on where Planetary Health measurement should go next and how to develop more policy-relevant evidence.

This panel will explore microorganisms as a lens for rethinking the human–nature relationship and advancing Planetary Health. Bringing together perspectives from agriculture, public health, medicine, and industry, speakers will examine how microbial relationships shape human health, food systems, biodiversity, ecosystems, and climate. The session will invite a shift from viewing microbes primarily as threats toward understanding their roles in balance, resilience, and the conditions that allow life to thrive.

This multidisciplinary session will explore how the exposome—the totality of environmental exposures experienced throughout life—can advance Planetary Health. Speakers will examine how emerging methods and data can capture the cumulative effects of climate change, pollution, chemicals, microplastics, and other exposures, identify vulnerable populations, and better understand exposure–health relationships. The session will consider how exposome research can inform prevention, policy, and solutions that protect both human and planetary health.

This session will explore how Nature-Based Solutions can address interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and health inequities. Through diverse examples from forests, wetlands, mangroves, and urban green spaces, speakers will examine how investing in healthy ecosystems can deliver co-benefits for human and planetary health, from climate resilience and cleaner air and water to mental health and food security. The session will also consider how to design, finance, and implement NbS as essential public health infrastructure.

This session aims to explore the existing evidence about the intersections between peace and Planetary Health, exploring how environmental disruption leads to conflict and how conflict further exacerbates environmental harm, with a focus on the disproportionate impacts on women, youth, and future generations. This session will feature examples from different regions exploring pathways to peace and conflict avoidance that incorporate a Planetary Health perspective (e.g., addressing causes of conflict such as water shortages and migration, reducing weapons of mass destruction).

This session highlights examples of how Planetary Health in All Policies (PHiAP) is being put into practice at national, subnational and sectoral levels, and how global frameworks are interpreted, adapted, and operationalized in different contexts. Through a moderated discussion, speakers will share case examples and discuss how to address structural barriers like fragmentation and exclusion.

This workshop will explore how city and local policies can act as frontline levers for planetary health, using concrete examples from Japanese municipalities and communities as a primary lens. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how local policies can operationalize planetary health principles, examples of tools and governance approaches, and a mini‑action plan and set of ideas they can adapt to their own contexts.

This session will explore how global demographic shifts, including aging, population growth and decline, urbanization, migration, and climate-driven displacement, are reshaping planetary health. Drawing on comparative country examples, speakers from across disciplines will examine how demographic trends create both risks and opportunities for human and environmental health, and how the Earth crisis is in turn influencing population trends. Participants will consider potential interventions to navigate these changes toward healthier and more sustainable futures.

This session will feature a discussion about the two faces of generative AI—the possibility (accelerated discovery, democratised knowledge, tools that extend human capacity across every domain including in advancing Planetary Health) & the risk (algorithmic dispossession, eroded agency, and an expanding environmental footprint).

This session will bring together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders to explore the interconnected impacts of rising seas, extreme heat, and climate-related emergencies on planetary health in islands. Through regional case studies and dialogue, participants will examine solutions that integrate health, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and loss and damage to build more resilient communities and ecosystems. The session aims to provide clear actionable outcomes that connect to both the Lancet Commission on Sea Level Rise and the Sendai Framework. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary schemes in the island nations will be discussed.

This session will explore how to build and sustain the political will, social demand, and democratic norms needed to implement evidence-based solutions and drive a just transition at scale. Drawing on bottom-up and top-down case studies, speakers will examine movement building, navigating challenging political environments, strengthening democratic resilience, and the role of Planetary Health narratives in mobilizing action. Participants will identify opportunities for collaboration, aligned messaging, and collective movement building.