Achieving the SDGs, protecting planetary health
Today, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide the global community with a new impetus for cooperation and innovation to solve shared pressing challenges. With 13 years remaining for reaching the 17 goals and 169 targets, much more needs to be done, and existing action must be accelerated. Thanks to the UNLEASH Lab which I am privileged to be a part of this week in Denmark, 1,000 young people from around the world are charged to do just that.
To my fellow UNLEASH “talents” and other young and emerging SDG advocates, thinkers, innovators, and leaders around the world, let me share a framework that can be useful in, borrowing from our UNLEASH methodology, our “problem framing” and “solution ideation” — the concept of planetary health.
In 2015, while the world’s governments approved the SDGs in New York, the scientific community launched the new concept called “planetary health.” According to the Lancet-Rockefeller Foundation Commission that published the report on the topic, planetary health refers to “the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.”
In contrast to conventional fields such as medicine and even public health, planetary health highlights the undeniable interdependence between human and ecological systems — what we do for human progress affects the environment, and environmental change affects us in return.
In fact, one of the key premises of planetary health is that we now live in a unique geologic epoch called the “Anthropocene.” In contrast to other more familiar epochs such as the Pleistocene (when the first Homo sapiens evolved), the Anthropocene reflects the gross humanization of the planet — meaning our human activities have substantially altered the integrity of our natural systems. Perhaps climate change best demonstrates this concept — our addiction to burning fossil fuels has dramatically warmed the planet, therefore disturbing many of its life-nurturing functions.
As a result of our indiscriminate actions, we are endangering the “planetary boundaries,” the environmental limits for maintaining a “safe operating space for humanity.” The Stockholm Resilience Centre so far has identified nine planetary boundaries, and noted that we have already breached four of them — climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles. Violating these boundaries exacerbate chronic health problems such as malnutrition and malaria and introduce new ones like Ebola and Zika.
The range of planetary health challenges is wide and diverse — from climate change and ocean acidification, to land use change and biodiversity loss — which are driven by an equally-broad array of factors such as urbanization, migration, technology, and population growth. All of these are generated by human activity big and small, and in turn have grave implications on human health, wellbeing, and flourishing.
And so, when an UNLEASH team is tasked to address a specific issue in any of the themes — whether it is about health, energy, food, or urban sustainability — I encourage adopting the planetary health framework. It can aid not only in mapping the multiple and complex causal pathways that produce the problem, but also in expanding the range of solutions that go beyond conventional and siloed approaches.
For example, an SDG innovation that follows the planetary health framework will aim to address several issues that are overlapping and deeply intertwined. Since sectors affect each other, resources are limited, and time is quickly running out, this “nexus” approach will help us achieve more than one SDG at the same time at a faster rate and on a larger scale.
My work on building climate-smart healthcare systems is an example of this nexus approach. Making hospitals more sustainable and low-carbon through green procurement and renewable energy does not only ensure healthcare access, but also energy security in the community as well as greenhouse gas reduction for climate mitigation — meeting SDGs 3, 7, 11, 12, and 13 together. Building climate-resilient local health systems in cities by improving mosquito-borne disease surveillance and enhancing disaster response capacity will bring us closer to achieving SDGs 3, 11, and 13 as well.
Coming up with nexus approaches to reach the SDGs using a planetary health framework will therefore require collaboration that cuts across disciplines, sectors, geographies, and generations. Thankfully, UNLEASH provided a platform that has the huge potential to facilitate such collaborations. While across the past week, the different tracks worked separately in generating solutions, I hope that the broader UNLEASH community, guided by a planetary health paradigm, will allow more interaction across the tracks — water and food teams working together, health and urban sustainability teams exploring synergies. Only in this manner we will be able to find those nexus solutions that will help us achieve the SDGs and protect planetary health within our generation.
To learn more about planetary health, visit the Planetary Health Alliance website.
Renzo Guinto is a Filipino physician, a Doctor of Public Health student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an Aspen New Voices Fellow, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Lancet Planetary Health.
