Written by Erin Broas, MSPH, Communications Specialist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health<\/p>\n
Over the past century, humanity has achieved extraordinary gains in human health. Advances in water and sanitation, maternal and child care, infectious disease control, vaccinations, and other public health achievements have vastly improved human longevity and quality of life, reducing global child mortality significantly and increasing life expectancy to about 71 years as of 2021 (WHO, 2024<\/a>). However, while human health and well-being have improved by traditional measures, the ecological systems supporting this well-being are deteriorating.<\/p>\n Rapid population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and technological advances in transportation, communication, agriculture, and manufacturing are transforming patterns of human consumption on an unprecedented scale (Globaia, 2024<\/a>). Since the 1950s, people have acquired vast new capacities to travel, manufacture, extract, and consume. Cars and airplanes are reshaping how we move, plastics and paper production have expanded into the hundreds of millions of metric tons annually, and freshwater use is surging to meet the increased demands of agriculture, industry, and our growing cities.<\/p>\n The consequences of increased consumption are now visible across every major Earth system. It is not only the climate that is changing\u2014everything is changing. Alongside record-high temperatures, the planet has lost roughly one-third of its forests, approximately one million species face extinction, and global fish populations are collapsing (Myers, 2017<\/a>).<\/p>\n Evidence is building on the ways these changes come back to affect every dimension of human health: for example, rising CO\u2082 levels are reducing the nutritional content of staple crops, disrupted water systems are accelerating the spread of infectious diseases like malaria, and pollution is contributing significantly to deaths from cardiac disease, stroke, and lung cancer. What once seemed like distant, unrelated environmental problems are increasingly understood as urgent threats to human health and well-being (Myers, 2017<\/a>).<\/p>\n Planetary Health<\/p>\n The field of planetary health<\/a> emerged from the recognition that the health of people and the health of the planet are inseparable. As both a scientific discipline and a growing social movement, planetary health provides a framework for illuminating and understanding the human health impacts of environmental change and activating solutions to create a liveable future. It unites diverse scientific disciplines and knowledge forms, emphasizing the interdependence of human health with the health of other species, ecosystems, and Earth\u2019s natural life support systems. It also calls for just systemic solutions that recognize a crucial reality: the communities least responsible for ecological degradation are often those most harmed by it (Faerron Guzman et al., 2025<\/a>).<\/p>\n Safeguarding human health will require a major upheaval in the way we live\u2014in how we produce and consume food, design our cities, manage natural landscapes, and tell stories about who we are and what we value. Scientific research and policy frameworks are essential to that transformation, but despite decades of scientific consensus on climate change<\/a> and biodiversity loss, the behavioral and cultural shifts needed to change the tide have lagged far behind the evidence. Science can identify the problem, but it cannot, on its own, compel the response. <\/p>\n Art has long been at the heart of social movements, preceding and accompanying nearly every significant cultural shift from abolition to civil rights, from women\u2019s suffrage to the environmental movement of the 1970s. Creative expression across visual art, music, theater, storytelling, and immersive installation has the capacity to make abstract, systemic crises feel immediate and personal, transforming data into emotional understanding and emotional understanding into action (Sonke et al., 2019<\/a>). For planetary health, art offers a way to reach more communities, reshape the values and behaviors that contribute to ecological crises, and spark the new thinking required to find solutions to these crises.<\/p>\n What Neuroarts Reveal<\/p>\n A growing body of science now helps explain why art provides fuel for social change. Neuroarts <\/a>is an emerging interdisciplinary field that draws on neuroaesthetics and diverse ways of knowing to explore how arts and aesthetic experiences shape the brain, body, and behavior, and how that knowledge can advance health and well-being across society. It is both a body of research on how the brain and body respond to art and a springboard for interventions and programs that translate that knowledge into practice in clinics, homes, workplaces, and communities.<\/p>\n For example, immersive storytelling and art experiences activate emotional and sensory pathways in the brain in ways that purely informational approaches cannot replicate (Vessel et al, 2012<\/a>). When abstract threats like climate change are rendered through art, through a powerful image, a piece of music, a walk through an eco-installation, they become personal and urgent. When applied to planetary health, that emotional engagement can help inspire not just sustainable but regenerative behaviors and actions oriented toward actively restoring, rather than merely preserving, the natural systems we depend on.<\/p>\n Environment Essential Reads<\/p>\n Neuroarts-based practices have also been shown to regulate the body\u2019s stress<\/a> systems and support mental resilience<\/a> (Fancourt & Finn, 2019<\/a>). This is particularly relevant to helping individuals navigate environment-related mental health challenges such as climate anxiety<\/a> and ecological grief<\/a>\u2014the intense emotional distress, sadness, and mourning that can result from loss of ecosystems, landscapes, species, or displacement<\/a> due to environmental change.<\/p>\n Particularly relevant to planetary health is also the role art can play in rebuilding human connection to the natural world. Studies suggest that art experiences rooted in nature, from outdoor creative practices to biophilic design, can deepen nature connectedness, laying the groundwork for both sustainable and regenerative relationships with the living world (Lumber et al., 2017<\/a>).<\/p>\n A More Complete Approach to Health<\/p>\n Together, the fields of neuroarts and planetary health illuminate a more holistic understanding of health, one that encompasses not just the body but the mind, community, and living systems we depend on. Addressing the Earth crisis will require science and policy, but also story, feeling, and connection, and the arts are an essential tool for inspiring the public will for implementing massive structural changes in how we live. <\/p>\n Planetary health calls on all of us. Every field, discipline, and form of knowledge has a role to play in shaping a healthier, more resilient future. By working across sectors and embracing both scientific and creative approaches, we can help safeguard a livable planet for generations to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Written by Erin Broas, MSPH, Communications Specialist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health Over the past…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":598890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-598889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/598890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}