Home
This site is intended for healthcare professionals
Advertisement

Dr Carlos A. Faerron Guzman, Associate Professor Global Health, University of Maryland, Baltimore - Director, Centro Interamericano para la Salud Global (Costa Rica) - Senior Advisor to the Planetary Health Alliance at Johns Hopkins University: Keynote talk SHARE 2025

Share
Advertisement
Advertisement

Similar communities

View all

Similar events and on demand videos

Advertisement

Computer generated transcript

Warning!
The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

Thanks Jasmine for, for the invitation. Thanks for hosting this great event. A pleasure to be here. I'm calling in from uh Pennsylvania today. Um Not my home. My home is in Costa Rica. Eager to get there later today. I've been working here uh with a set of faculty members from all around the globe, advancing a global health education and trying to uh uh workshop with them ways that they can incorporate planetary health education. So, pleas pleasure again to be here. Thanks again. Uh um Unfortunately, I haven't been able because I've been in this other space facilitating. I haven't been able to uh hear the wonderful conversations that you've had so far. Uh I did see that in the agenda. There was someone uh talking about the Costa Rican healthcare system. So I hope that talk went well and hopefully our health system is up up to the challenge on some of these things. I know we have a bunch of challenges. Um I usually describe the Costa Rican healthcare uh uh system as e efficacious, not efficient. Uh which is I think uh some of the same things that the NHS might be suffering at the moment or has been suffering for the last couple of years. I did live in Scotland for my uh a graduate study. So um NHS is kind of close in that sense. Um And uh II think at that time, uh dearly, I will be in England uh in upcoming months. So um uh I'm happy as well to reconnect with the British community anyway, so I'll get started because I know we only have 20 minutes. And II don't, I don't think more than a keynote uh which uh I don't think this will be more uh uh this will be less of a keynote and more of me sharing a perspective and uh some resources. And I just heard, I think Heather was talking about sharing some resources in this education for Planetary Health Space, which is where my main area of scholarly interest and where I spend most of my scholarly time is in this area of education for planetary Health and Planetary health education broadly. So I'm gonna start sharing my screen, although you'll probably see kind of a uh uh uh scrambled screen for a second, just the way this, this app works. So just bear with me as I navigate from this endless mirror of screens to the actual thing I wanna show you, which is the presentation. Uh And again, thanks for the invitation. So I'm gonna get right right away. Uh I started just by saying that that we are on our uh the Planetary Health Alliance, which is one of the organizations that I represent, if you don't know the alliance. Our, our website is Planetary Health alliance.org. Uh And we just uh uh we're celebrating our 10th anniversary. It's also the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Rockfeller and L at a, a report on Planetary Health, which was kind of the, you know, seminal kind of kick off to the movement, I should say, although planetary health is a field and a movement, a lot of the science and knowledge that informs planetary health is uh it has been carried on for many, many years by many ways of knowing. And uh we, it's a term that we're using strategically to advance the agenda and just the importance of uh of the urgency. I should say how, how uh our environment is changing and how it's impacting our health now into the future. So Planetary Health is a framework and I'd like to introduce that framework perhaps briefly just to make sure that everyone is on the same page and I'm just gonna take a couple of minutes of doing that. I usually obviously this this terminology and and this framework, it takes much more time to introduce. But again, with, with a little amount of time, I want to spend some time showing some research to you and some of the advances that we've made in plant health education. So I'm, I'm, I'm gonna start with some graphs here. So you can see this as, as I understand it. And if you just look at the top graphs, the top three graphs, you, you'll see uh that we've actually made some important progress on, on indicators. And I II always say this cause let, let us not forget that humanity Society as a whole has me program, whether you're measuring life expectancy or death by preventable diseases like malnutrition or people living in extreme poverty, you can see there's progress throughout time. Uh And if we were to look, uh if we were to pull these back even more, you know, extreme poverty over the last 200 years, it's definitely I increased uh or or decreased and, and we've made progress, but that progress has also come in different names. And depending on who you ask progress, that word progress means different things for different people. So let us as well doubt a little bit of this progress narrative. And I want to kind of write progress with a a quote quotation mark, right? Because it's it's important to, to write that progress with quotation marks because not bare, the economic growth means progress, right? When we just measure growth for, for the for the sake of it doesn't necessarily mean that that's translated into the wellbeing of people. So of course, there's a lot of literature in this, you can read things like Kate raw and secular economies or you know, the growth uh uh uh way of thinking, Jason Hick's work and many other people that are working in this trying to reframe what we consider quote unquote progress. And as well, you might see this other graph of meat consumption in ac units that relate to yes, advancements in nutrition, advancements and access to resources, advancements in quote unquote, more comfortable lives. However, these have consequences as well, right? Uh Both meat consumption and ac units represent uh the usage of resources, energy, land, water, et cetera, right? Uh uh In order to produce quote unquote, more comfortable life for us. Uh So, so these are again, questions that we should be debating as well when we talk about well being is well being at what cost, right? And pa part of that is, is recognizing that part of our wellbeing right now really is relying on a uh a deep consumption patterns and extraction patterns that can be more or less, you know, summarized in some of these graphs that most of you have seen if you read the Lancet Planetary Health Report card, uh our Planet Health Report. And I'm glad that you're talking about the Planet Health Report card just now cause I will mention it very briefly in my presentation. So, whatever resource we're talking about, and this is just a sample of resources where it's energy. And right now, it's to be clear, most of the energy we use today still comes from fossil fuels, whether it's water, which we need for everything, for our common consumption to, you know, producing the cotton that's in on my shirt to producing the, you know, uh or cooling down the servers that keep this internet uh uh uh ro rolling or producing, you know, uh the tomato that I had for breakfast water is absolutely uh uh a research that we've used very, very uh excessively in many cases or whether that research is land or timber coming from tropical forests or biodiversity in the form of food like fish or whether we're using resources like uh fossil fuels to produce fertilizers. There is a sharp increase on that use of resources. And again, let me just highlight how important that resource use has been to keep our wellbeing in growth, that extreme poverty decline that, you know, uh uh uh that's by malnutrition. It's all because we've been actually very good at extracting these resources. But of course, this does not come without any consequences. And when we see the complex uh impact that these are having over our earth natural systems, whether it's shorter with water or changing our oceans becoming more acidic, more warm, more full of pollution, or how we change our atmosphere with more co2 or methane emissions or how we change our biosphere, killing off biodiversity, not just kind of the iconic species like the rhinos and the gorillas and the orangutans, but also invisible species to most of us like fungi, bacteria uh uh uh uh mosquitoes and bunch of insects that we're losing in a rate that is quite alarming and whether we're changing, you know, our, our uh our honestly at large through a symptom that we call climate change, all these things are happening simultaneously, right? So obviously you put these together and yes, there is wellbeing increase. Yes, there is extraction of resources that is coming next to that wellbeing increase. And that is changing our our natural environment to a point that's actually risking and threatening our wellbeing. So that's kind of the core component of the diagnosis component of planetary health is understanding how these interconnected crisis, whether it's pollution, biodiversity loss, resource, scarcity, nutrient overloading land use change, climate change, how these interconnected crises are impacting health. That's the diagnostic part, right of planetary health. I would say that kind of the solutions oriented part, taking these understandings, trying to understand and make these connections in order to that create solutions that are comprehensive and that can be sustained in time. Now, it's important to know that of course, when we're looking for solutions, we need to also be very, look very closely at, you know, what is it that we're dealing with? Whether it's, you know, we're trying to uh talk about consumption patterns or we're talking around how do we build our cities or how do we prioritize how our food systems are built or how do we organize ourselves society to make the decisions that we need in order to fix these issues or whether we're looking at, you know, demographic trends around the world. It's very important to talk about these multiple underlying drivers. But I would say that these interconnected crises with these underlying drivers also have a common cause on like underlying this. So if we were to ask why, why, why, why you know the five, why exercises that we do a lot of times in education, right? We would find that this crisis is also these interconnective crises have root causes and it's an interconnect. I mean, I would say it's a crisis of values, societal values and the people in power, the people making the decisions have a crisis of values. And just to name some of these values that are, you know, overly dominant in our world. Everything from short termism to materialism, to techno optimism, to wastefulness, to extract consumerism, all these things although might not represent the majority of people that are here do represent the people that are making the decision. So talking about these things, reading are become very important if we are going to talk about solutions. So I'll just stop there to say that a lot of this is framed uh or this this graph here.