Planetary Health
Human activity is causing an Earth crisis which is threatening the survival of humanity and the rest of life on our planet. “Environmental” problems—climate change; biodiversity loss; pollution of air, water, and soil; terrestrial and marine system degradation—are expanding at a pace and scale that have become dominant threats to human health and well-being. Planetary Health has emerged as a transdisciplinary field to understand and address these threats. The impacts of anthropogenic environmental change are not distributed evenly or fairly, and Indigenous peoples, low-income communities, people of color, and future generations bear disproportionate burdens. Addressing the Planetary Health emergency demands urgent action and transformative innovation across nearly every dimension of human activity, from food and energy systems to manufacturing and the built environment.
In April 2024, Johns Hopkins University launched the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health (JHIPH). The mission of JHIPH is to catalyze scholarship and practice of Planetary Health across the University, to bring together a cohesive community of practice, and to establish Johns Hopkins University (JHU) as a global leader in addressing the health and humanitarian dimensions of the Earth crisis. JHIPH is convening a Planetary Health community at JHU with a focus on five programmatic areas: education, research, policy, innovation and implementation, and a clinical program. In addition, it includes the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) (based at the Hopkins-Bloomberg Center in Washington DC) which serves as the backbone organization for the global field of Planetary Health and helps curate knowledge and educational approaches while showcasing policy solutions at different scales and building a global community of practice including 8 regional hubs. By spanning the enormous strengths of Johns Hopkins University’s divisions, departments, centers, and institutes and tapping into the Planetary Health Alliance’s programs, partners, and engagements, JHIPH seeks to accelerate solutions to protect the planet, people, and all life on Earth.
The BDP cluster in Planetary Health will be closely associated with JHIPH and is expected to strengthen and complement the scholarship community that is being assembled and supported through JHIPHs programs and activities.
Our investment
This cluster’s investment in research includes: 4 Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships and 4 junior faculty positions. These faculty, along with the cluster leads, will collaborate together along with existing Johns Hopkins faculty on this important area of research.
This cluster aims to build a program at JHU that addresses the challenge of the 21st Century that impacts every other challenge we face. Cluster scholars will synergistically address major gaps in the research agenda and also provide policy solutions that consider local context and methods to effectively implement viable methods of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Interested in this cluster? Contact us to learn more.
The Planetary Health cluster will build a community of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration to:
- Understand the health implications of changes in complex, interacting environmental systems, including the influences of unintentional and intentional modification of these systems
- Design and implement effective, robust solutions for the health impacts of the Earth crisis
- Monitor, evaluate, and communicate the effects of such strategies
This cluster is seeking innovative systems thinkers with records of connecting the areas of strength across institutional boundaries. They will have worked across fields and impacted multiple disciplines (i.e., hydrology and politics, engineering and economics, climatology and communication). They will be scholars and leaders who “speak the language” of the diverse intellectual communities within Johns Hopkins, but also have a vision of how to mobilize the expertise within those communities towards broader societal goals.
Johns Hopkins is positioning itself as a global leader on Planetary Health. In 2023, Hopkins became the home of the PHA and formed the JHIPH, a cross-university institute with support from both the President and Provost and advised by a council of divisional leaders. JHU is also expanding the number of faculty working across disciplines that are core to Planetary Health.
This commitment to global leadership in Planetary Health builds upon Johns Hopkins’s deep disciplinary excellence in the individual systems that comprise the field. Many departments across the institution work on problems ranging from natural systems knowledge to infectious diseases to disaster preparedness to food systems to health communications. These units have years of experience focusing on global communities most vulnerable to climate change, understanding the challenges in delivering health care to such communities, and developing health monitoring systems.
New initiatives such as the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute will work on developing more environmentally-friendly technologies, while the SNF Agora Institute seeks to strengthen the democratic systems and processes necessary for developing and implementing robust approaches to mitigation and adaptation.