2021 / Health and well-being, Planetary Health

The Planetary Wellbeing Initiative: Pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals in Higher Education

Citation

Antó, J. M., Martí, J. L., Casals, J., Bou-Habib, P., Casal, P., Fleurbaey, M., … Frumkin, H., … & Williams, A. (2021). The planetary wellbeing initiative: pursuing the sustainable development goals in higher education. Sustainability, 13(6), 3372. doi.org/10.3390/su13063372

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The planet is facing serious challenges, many of which could bring catastrophic changes to the natural environment. Tackling them will require massive, coordinated efforts from science and society on a scale never seen before.

Universities and other academic institutions have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take a leading role in this moment. After all, the fate of the planet is now in human hands.

Inspired by the Planetary Health project from the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet, Pompeu Fabra University launched the Planetary Wellbeing Initiative in 2018. It’s a long-term institutional strategy, also guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

So what is planetary well-being? It can be understood as the highest possible standard of well-being for all beings — human and non-human — for the social and natural systems they depend on.

Developing these ideas fully will require serious theoretical and practical work across many different fields. All of them are connected by the same crosscutting challenges: global complexity, the need for interdisciplinary thinking, and a sense of urgency.

Science, the humanities, and culture need to work together more closely than ever before. The stakes have never been higher.

Abstract

We live in a time of pressing planetary challenges, many of which threaten catastrophic change to the natural environment and require massive and novel coordinated scientific and societal efforts on an unprecedented scale. Universities and other academic institutions have the opportunity and responsibility to assume a leading role in an era when the destiny of the planet is precisely in the hands of human beings. Drawing on the Planetary Health project promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet, Pompeu Fabra University launched in 2018 the Planetary Wellbeing Initiative, a long-term institutional strategy also animated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Planetary Wellbeing might be defined as the highest attainable standard of wellbeing for human and non-human beings and their social and natural systems. Developing the potential of these new concepts involves a substantial theoretical and empirical effort in many different fields, all of them interrelated by the crosscutting challenges of global complexity, interdisciplinarity, and urgency. Close collaboration of science, humanities, and culture is more desperately needed now than ever before in the history of humankind.