The Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health (JHIPH) was founded in 2024 to harness powerful cross-disciplinary expertise to confront pressing global challenges.
The mission of JHIPH is to catalyze scholarship and practice of Planetary Health across the University, bring together a cohesive community of practice, and establish Johns Hopkins University (JHU) as a global leader in addressing the global health and humanitarian dimensions of the Earth crisis. Sign up for email updates here
Governance and Organizational Structure
JHIPH is lead by a core team with input from a faculty steering committee (to be assembled), and an advisory council including deans and the provost’s office. View the current Team.
All JHU faculty and program staff are encouraged to become affiliated with the Institute contacting the Institute.
See the chart below for more detail.
Introduction to Planetary Health
The Earth crisis is an urgent threat to humanity as well as the rest of life on Earth. We now understand that problems that have been framed for decades as “environmental” problems—climate change; biodiversity loss; pollution of air, water, and soil; terrestrial and marine system degradation—are, in fact, driving global health and humanitarian crises.
Human activities surpass our planet’s capacity to absorb our waste or provide enough resources for current demand. The way people live is driving changes to earth systems and the living world at rates that are much steeper than have existed in the history of our species. And these changes are now threatening every dimension of human health and wellbeing as illustrated in the figure below.
The harms associated with global environmental change do not fall upon all people equally. Activities that degrade Earth’s natural systems tend to benefit the privileged, while the world’s poorest people, Indigenous Peoples, people of color, and future generations disproportionately bear the associated health burdens. As such, equity and justice concerns form a cornerstone for the exploration of global environmental changes and health at every scale from local to global.
Safeguarding a livable future for humanity and the rest of life on Earth will require rapid structural shifts in how humanity lives—a Great Transition across energy systems, food systems, manufacturing, and the built environment, requiring technological innovation and engagement of the private sector. It will require new forms of governance and policymaking from local to planetary scale and effective communication to build an activated global constituency. It will also require insights from the arts and humanities to help heal fractured relationships between people and Nature, between the wealthy and poor, and between present and future generations. Everyone from every sector has something to contribute to this effort.
The Institute and the Planetary Health Alliance
Since 2015, the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) has established itself as the backbone organization at the heart of the rapidly growing, global, transdisciplinary field of Planetary Health. With more than +472 member organizations in over 79 countries committed to understanding and addressing the impacts of global environmental change on human health and wellbeing. PHA also supports a network of regional hubs to galvanize local action throughout the globe and a cohort of Planetary Health Campus Ambassadors to lift the voices of youth leaders.
Its activities fall into six areas under two broad categories:
- building the field (community building; research and knowledge curation; education)
- mainstreaming Planetary Health (communications; policy; movement building).
PHA is shifting global consciousness about the moment we face. It is building powerful new constituencies across medicine, global health, the private sector, and civil society to demand rapid structural shifts in how we live so we may protect and regenerate our natural life-support systems and secure a livable future for humanity and the web of life on Earth.
By spanning the enormous strength of Johns Hopkins University’s divisions, departments, centers, and institutes and tapping into the PHA’s programs, partners, and engagements, JHIPH generates a vibrant, global, transdisciplinary community of scholarship and practice while quickly positioning Johns Hopkins University as a leader addressing our greatest societal challenges. Both are critical to advancing the field and social movement of Planetary Health. PHA’s Secretariat is based at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington DC.
Open Positions
The Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health launched in April of 2024 and our team is rapidly growing. Please check out JHIPH’s open positions and share them with your networks.
Learn more about Planetary Health through this popular video: