Planetary health

The concept of ‘planetary health’ asks how human health and disease relate to the environment and to other species on a planetary scale. Cutting across scales, it allows us to think of human health and healthcare beyond the individual and beyond specific populations, asking how they relate to more-than-human others and to the planet at large. This broad approach to health responds to multiple crises of the Anthropocene, including climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and rising inequalities. At the same time, planetary health is not just an analytic tool but also an applied concept, one that connects health and environmental justice. As such, it provides a new ethical terrain that informs political agendas and social movements rooted in ecology, human rights, and feminism, and oriented towards justice and sustainable futures.

This entry describes how the concept of planetary health has been taken up in anthropology. Anthropologists have engaged critically with planetary health, exploring its heterogeneous origins and uses, foregrounding the work of Indigenous scholars and postcolonial theorists. First, the entry outlines two important conceptual lineages of planetary health: One that extends the framework of ‘global health’ to account for ‘planetary’ systems, and another grounded in postcolonial theory, which frames ‘the planetary’ as a horizon of shared responsibility and transformative inhabitation across difference. Then, the entry considers critiques of planetary health, including concerns about technocratic and universalist framings of health. The entry further explores three modes of anthropological engagement with planetary health, namely a focus on (a) wellbeing and chronic disease, (b) new risks to humanity, such as pandemics, and (c) anxieties about a planet on the edge. It ends by reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of planetary healthcare as an evolving set of practices and relations aimed at fostering sustainable and just futures for both human and non-human life.