Children in Baltimore City are about twice as likely to have asthma as children nationwide. The country Tuvalu is disappearing because of sea-level rise, with more than one third of its citizens applying for climate visas in Australia. Extreme weather events, such as heat waves and floods, put thousands of people in the United States at risk of illness, injury or death. What I learned in medical school (in excruciating detail) is that we are biological organisms. What my classes haven't acknowledged is that we are subject to the same environmental forces as every other biological organism: the complex causality and interdependence that both enable life and take it away.
Planetary health is a way of making sense of this by connecting the health of individual humans to the state of the planet. Central to planetary health is the idea that we are not separate from our planet — we interact with it every day when we eat, breathe, drink, work and play —and these interactions inform every aspect of our health. In today’s anthropogenic conditions of climate change and biodiversity loss, planetary health is also a solution-oriented field to reorient human behavior towards sustaining earthly life.
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health (JHIPH), launched in April 2024, provides a hub for work on planetary health throughout the university. JHIPH leads programming to promote planetary health in education, policy, practice, clinical areas and research. Some exciting work that JHIPH is doing in clinical education includes the addition of planetary health competencies to the Master of Science in Nursing curriculum starting in 2026, creation of a Leadership in Planetary Health Fellowship in Emergency Medicine, and a specialization in planetary health for the Doctor of Nursing Practice program. Additionally, there are efforts to integrate planetary health into the school of medicine curriculum.
How do you understand the health of the planet? It requires an interdisciplinary approach, with everyone from biologists, economists, clinicians, artists, policymakers, activists and more. In short, everyone has something they can offer to planetary health, because we all live here in relationship to Earth, and observe how it is doing every day. JHIPH convenes faculty and students from every discipline you could imagine. I have had the opportunity to attend a few JHIPH events; at one JHIPH dinner, attendees included professors in fields such as neuroaesthetics, education and geriatrics.
Many people are drawn to clinical roles because they want to fix, heal and solve. Being effective problem-solvers throughout our careers on a changing planet requires that we understand the place we call home — how we interact with it, and how we can restore it. Bringing the framework of medicine to environmentalism can help with diagnosing what has gone wrong and what the next steps forward may be.
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