Planetary Health as a Central Context to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The 2016 World Health Organization‟s Shanghai Declaration on Health Promotion - „Promoting Health in the SDGs (SustainableDevelopment Goals)‟ - established a primal place for health promotion on the SDGs agenda and contextualized health promotion as a centralframework of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2. However, there exist ongoing enquiries that identify gaps in this proposition and provide evidence to rather advance planetary health as a more appropriate central context to the SDGs.From systems-thinking and socio-ecological perspectives, the concept of health goes beyond human well-being to include well-being of natural ecosystems, healthy transactions and flow of resources between humans and nature, in a manner that precludes vulnerabilities and inequities for humans and other socio-ecological systems 3. Health promotion, however, acknowledges a socioecologicalanalysis to health of human populations by considering the impact of social factors, actors and institutions, as well as abiotic and bioticcomponents on human health 4. It leaves gaps, as it does not explicitly capture how humans interact within their surrounding ecosystems and the impact of human activities and human health interventions on biotic and abiotic components as well as on the integrity of planetary entities in socio-ecological systems. These gaps put holes in health promotion, which though embraces useful approaches and localizing ideas for human health, but lacks capacities to promote ecological health and human health as inseparable, co-evolving, co-dependent concepts in a coupled humanenvironment system. Such gaps also explain why advancement of human health and pursuits of environmental sustainability have long been treated as two separate domains of interventions 5. The current state of health research has reinforced that the health of living systems is intrinsically linked with the health of their surrounding natural and human-made ecosystems 6. Therefore, the attribution of health promotion, as an intrinsic core of the Sustainable Development Goals, should be progressed to embrace a more systems-thinking nuanced term, such as Planetary Health 7