Course Correction: Prioritizing Planetary Health

I think you know better than anybody that environmental threats disproportionately affect people with the fewest resources. How can we ensure that those most at risk are our greatest priority in the years to come? 

I don't have the absolute answer, but the way I look at it is, if we are serious about protecting the vulnerable people and communities, we've got to find a way of making them less vulnerable. So we've got to start from that point.  

My humble opinion is that we academics need to get a lot more strategic and less competitive. There's so much collaboration that needs to happen now, and we need to really accelerate the work on planetary health. We need to be ambitious and speak uncomfortable truth to intransigent power. It's quite straightforward. We need to just keep going at it, and we need to coordinate, cooperate, advocate, and help shift the dial. 

Getting governments and the private sector on board is so critical. How do we do that?  

I always talk about the three P’s. The first is political will. The second is solid policies, and the third is pressure. And pressure comes from people—consumers, or young people standing up to say, “We demand this from you.” Because ultimately, this is what moves the political will, and this will is what might shift the policies. Don't underestimate the power of people. 

What’s your message to national governments who are facing so many pressing needs—why should they prioritize planetary health?  

I always talk about family. I talk about my two sons, and my new grandson, and my vision for them. And I talk about my parents—one was a civil servant and the other was a housewife who later on became an entrepreneur—and how they worked so hard to give me a bright future. And yet I cannot leave the same hope for my children because my generation is also guilty of what's happened in the Anthropocene era that we live in now.  

The second thing I say is, it's possible for us to succeed because planetary health brings together all the major challenges that we face. John Muir, a real early advocate of wilderness preservation in the U.S., said something like, when one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world. The only way we have to find some way of balance and solution is to come back to where we came from, and that is nature. 

We cannot just stand on the sidelines anymore.

What do most people not understand about planetary health? 

Perhaps the right question is more likely to be, what is it that planetary health practitioners and advocates do not understand about the way humans think and act that currently prevents us from changing the course? What are we doing wrong because we're not getting the traction that we so desperately need today? 

I think we need to deliver key planetary health messages in ways that people understand.  

The Global Planetary Health Roadmap and Action Plan were launched last April. They were really meant to help answer the question—and I love this question—how do we do planetary health? Well, how do you do planetary health?  

Firstly, we need to be able to get our facts and figures right. How do we measure and prove that we are in trouble? Secondly, the global agreements and frameworks are fragmented as well. So we need to be looking at global governance. Thirdly, we need to revolutionize education to include in most national curricula proper respect and care for the environment. Fourthly, CEOs are only being encouraged—rather than pressured—to think about how the way in which they operate affects our health and the health of everyone on the planet, and the planet itself. We need to engage with these CEOs. Fifthly, all of us need to bring together the best minds in communications and coordinate our messages to politicians.  

We've got to get out there and court controversy, argue, debate, and confront. We cannot just stand on the sidelines anymore.  

You've done a great job at Sunway lifting up planetary health as a major initiative. What advice would you have for our effort here at Johns Hopkins to develop the Planetary Health Institute?  

I think all of us need to have humility. We need to learn from each other and to be able to invest in coordination and connection. The world today, compared to the world in which I started as a medical practitioner, is so different. Everything is available at our fingertips, and I think there's no excuse for us not to connect and coordinate. It's not going to be easy. What I did was I doggedly showed people that it's a win-win situation if we collaborate.  

My advice to Johns Hopkins, as a very renowned institution, is to use your evidence now to drive policy change.