Education for Planetary Health: a call for papers
Authors: Alastair Brown
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2021)

In 2022, The Lancet Planetary Health will dedicate an issue to Planetary Health education. Fuelled by the intersecting challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and profound social, economic, and environmental injustices, calls for new ways to work together for a healthy, just, and sustainable future are burgeoning. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and further accentuated these issues. Meaningfully addressing these deep and interconnected issues is fundamentally a learning process. Society at large must move beyond existing patterns and constraints toward ways of thinking, being and acting (eg, imagination, knowledge, and governance challenges) that restore, protect and safeguard our shared planetary home and the living systems we depend on. Consequently, there is a growing imperative and mandate across the education space (eg, learners, educators, education institutions, decision makers) for transformative, inclusive, integrative—and sometimes disruptive—approaches to learning that strengthen our capacity to work toward the goal and imperatives of planetary health. This requires attention to pathways of societal, policy, and educational system change, prioritising different voices and perspectives across jurisdictions, cultures, and learning contexts. With this call for papers, The Lancet Planetary Health is signalling a long-term interest and commitment to publishing research, learning, and practice that broadly addresses education for planetary health, and the societal transformations this requires. We acknowledge the range of existing work drawing, for example, on the strengths of Indigenous knowledges, ongoing efforts to (re)connect health with equity, sustainability and resilience; and an array of related integrative approaches to health, spanning planetary health, one health, ecohealth, geohealth, eco-social approaches to public health, and beyond. We welcome a broad spectrum of contributions, but have a particular interest in operational examples that address the why, what, and how of planetary health education and related practice. This collection seeks to profile case examples, specific research on transformational educational initiatives, reviews and viewpoints that contribute to understanding of the design, conduct, evaluation, and success of education, training, and professional development that contribute toward the goal of planetary health. We strongly encourage integrative approaches that respect, include, and prioritise different ways of knowing (eg, Indigenous ways of knowing, diverse perspectives across cultures and contexts), and how this is applied in education and learning processes. The issue will aim to explore a range of examples of 'what success looks like' in planetary health education, including different approaches to evaluation and assessment of learning and change, and engagements with a range of learners and life stages (eg, youth, tertiary education, professional development). Please submit your paper through The Lancet Planetary Health's online manuscript system before the end of February, 2022, and mention in your cover letter that your submission is in response to this call for papers. I declare no competing interests.