Back Why Should We All Care About Planetary Wellbeing?

Why Should We All Care About Planetary Wellbeing?

Josep Lluís Martí, commissioner for the Planetary Wellbeing project and professor of the UPF Law Department
16.12.2021

 

Why should we all care about planetary wellbeing? What the ideal of planetary wellbeing is? Why should states, cities and citizens around the world know and care about it and take some action? And, more specifically, why should universities and alliances of universities feel concerned about this idea at all? Let me try to give you a few answers to these questions. 

1. I think, at this point of our history, it’s evident to everyone that we live exposed to gigantic and complex global challenges, even existential threats, the solution of which do and will require integrated, interdisciplinary, complex, and sophisticated responses from both science and from our political local, national, transnational and global institutions. Yes, I’m talking about this dreadful coronavirus pandemic and about global health in all its other dimensions. And yes, I’m also talking about the terrible and terrifying climate crisis, the effects of which we have just started to experience.

But, more generally, I’m also talking about the preservation of ecosystems, the protection of endangered species and the fight against the loss of biodiversity. I’m also talking about fighting against severe poverty and hunger, about securing access to clean water and sanitation, and about providing affordable and sustainable energy to all human beings. I’m talking about nuclear security, or about protection from global terrorism –and I’m saying this with special emphasis from a city that, as many others, has been hit by it-, and also about the preservation of peace and conflict prevention and resolution. I’m talking about the promotion of democracy as well as the protection of human rights and the enactment of new digital basic rights for everyone. I’m talking about having minimally ethical regulations for the global financial system, but also for scientific, technological and medical research, regulations that should not be easily circumvented by moving the regulated activities from one country to another. I’m talking about fighting against political corruption and against tax evasion, about promoting workers’ rights, gender equality, quality education, and many other aspects of human wellbeing.

2. As you may have noticed, many of the issues and challenges I’ve mentioned are directly related with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, with the so-called 2030 Agenda. And it should be clear by now (only 9 years before the global deadline for achieving –at least substantial parts of- such SDGs) that all political, economic, and social institutions, including of course universities, should be firmly and deeply committed to play their part to pursue such goals. And the ideal of planetary wellbeing is, of course, related to those SDGs and that agenda. It might be actually seen as a specific commitment, a personal bet, an ambitious effort to try to contribute to promote the SDGs, at least from now to 2030. But planetary wellbeing is an ideal that goes well beyond that.

But what “planetary wellbeing” exactly is? Let me share with you the definition that a group of 15 scholars from very different disciplines, such as medicine, epidemiology, economy, philosophy, law, politics, communication, engineering, or archaeology, gave in the article entitled “The Planetary Wellbeing Initiative: Pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals in Higher Education” that came out this year in the journal Sustainability (this article was led by Josep Maria Antó, by the former Rector of Pompeu Fabra University Jaume Casals, the two fathers of the idea, and by me –I wish I could say I’ve been the mother of the child, but that would be a too much more important role than the one I’ve played-, and let me mention the other 12 authors: Paul Bou-Habib, Paula Casal, Marc Fleurbaey, Howard Frumkin, Manel Jiménez Morales, Jacint Jordana, Carla Lancelotti, Humberto Llavador, Lela Mélon, Ricard Solé, Francesc Subirada and Andrew Williams), and now here is the definition: 

“Planetary wellbeing”, as we proposed, could be understood as the highest attainable standard of wellbeing for human and non-human beings and their social and natural systems. This definition assumes that we can hope to flourish in harmony with other human and non-human beings, only through judicious attention to the political, legal, economic, cultural, and social institutions that shape the Earth’s natural systems. Integral to the initiative is the idea that identifying strategies that promote planetary wellbeing requires a combination of impact-oriented research with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary activity.

The vision behind this ideal of planetary wellbeing was triggered or ignited by Jaume Casals and Josep Maria Antó, was then developed and refined by many different researchers at UPF through many discussions and meetings, and is now fully supported by the current Rector Oriol Amat. 

The idea of “planetary wellbeing”, if you allow me a brief reference to its genesis, was inspired by the, let’s call it ‘older sister idea’ of planetary health, which came out from a joint initiative of The Lancet, the Rockefeller Foundation and a worldwide network of universities and health research institutes. In a seminal paper published in The Lancet in 2015, the authors pointed out that the humankind has in this 21st century successfully achieved unprecedented levels of global health and wellbeing, but, paradoxically, we are at the same time compromising or even ruining the planet Earth in which we live. Then, it’s not surprising that we have these world rock stars from the business sector, such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, trying very hard to build rockets to allow us, or at least to allow them, to escape and fly from the Earth to another planet! As it should be obvious to everyone, if we ruin or crack our own planet, no matter how successful our medicine may be, the humankind will be lost.

Then, the vision behind the idea of planetary health is very simple: the health of human beings is not independent, but interdependent, it is interconnected, with the health of non human beings and the health of the planet as a whole. Planetary wellbeing is just an expansion of this approach to a more general and overarching array of concerns, one that certainly includes health, but goes beyond it to cover all aspects of value for human and non-human beings.      

3. But why do we need this concept of planetary wellbeing when we already have the Sustainable Development Goals, which count with the invaluable support of the United Nations and have been globally accepted? Well, first of all, they are not incompatible ideals. They should rather be seen as complementing and supporting each other. The SDGs constitute, in one sense, a more general or encompassing framework, since they integrate a shared and common language we may use all over the world, to speak with other academic, social and political institutions. When the city of Barcelona, the University of Ljubljana, the government of New Zealand, or a corporation in Ghana, when they reflect about the SDGs and take ambitious actions for giving their part in this collective play, they all more or less know what they are talking about. And they can actually talk to each other and share their respective experiences. In that sense, the SDGs provide a universal framework, and therefore a common language. Planetary wellbeing is, in relation to that common language, one way, our way, of approaching and contributing to the 17 SDGs. And it has the advantage, or so we think, of providing an integrated or holistic interdisciplinary approach, one that might potentially include even other goals.

On the other hand, the SDGs integrate, as you know, the 2030 Agenda. They replace the previous Millennium Development Goals that provided an Agenda for 2015. And, as we can expect, another, different framework will most likely take the post after 2030. In that other sense, the SDGs framework is more limited than that of planetary wellbeing, since the latter is an atemporal ideal, one that will need to be permanently updated and that, we must acknowledge, we will never fully achieve. And yet, it provides an invaluable horizon to understand where we want to go, as a humankind, in which direction. Because only when we know which direction is this, only then, we will really master the knowledge we need to evaluate which should be our next, immediate steps, which brings me to the next and final point.

4. Okay, I’m a very optimistic person –perhaps even pathologically optimistic, but let me be completely honest: we are –all of us, as a collective- doing very poorly, very badly. For generations, our stewardship over the Earth has failed to take into account the most important dimensions that, we now know, were crucial for the sustainability and the endurance of the planet. And now that we know much better about them, our political institutions are failing to provide the effective and urgent measures that are desperately needed. Take, again, the examples of the climate crisis and the pandemic. Just a few days after the COP26 in Glasgow, a new failure of the state governments of the world to coordinate ambitious and decisive action to stop CO2 emissions and other causes of global warming and to explore how to deal together and collaboratively with the consequences and effects of climate change, when we are still witnessing the patent and abhorrent disparities of the pandemic, for instance in terms of the number of ventilators, or ICUs, or medical resources and personnel, but also on how unfair and uncoordinated has been the distribution of vaccines, or when we have all checked that the WHO has been unable even to propose a single standard or metric to count Covid19 mortality in the same way in every country, we can only conclude that we are failing.

We are failing to pay respect to the heritage we have received –even if, admittedly, it came with its own deficits and shortcomings-, and, above all, we are failing to leave a better planet to our children and to our future generations, for them and for the non-human beings whose fate is unfortunately tied to ours, and for which we are also responsible. Science has reasonably delivered. We know very much now about what is producing, which are the causes of this climate crisis, and we know quite well what it takes to stop it. Also on the pandemic front, what we have seen in the last year with the design, global production and distribution of vaccines is almost a miracle. And yet, states are proving unable to lead a really ambitious transition to a net-zero emissions economy and vaccines have not been distributed worldwide on the exclusive basis of epidemiological and medical criteria, but mostly by political and economic reasons.  

Let me add this personal note. I mostly teach young people. Believe me, as you perfectly know, they are fully aware of the risks we face, the existential threats we must deal with, the gigantic challenges we have in front of us. And they are very, sincerely, deeply worried. In most of my courses I evaluate their performance on a bundle of items, the most important of which is a final essay, a policy paper, practically oriented where I ask them to pick one concrete problem or challenge that may have a global dimension and identify different alternative solutions that they must evaluate and compare against each other, before finally recommending one. They write not about how to handle the climate crisis or how to stop the pandemic or wars, but about more specific problems. They write, for instance, and these are all real examples, about a gender gap in the public education in one country of Latin America, or about what to do with the Syrian refugees trapped in Lebanon, a country that is actually suffering itself quite a lot in the last years, or about how to promote the building of sustainable housing in certain city, or about how to prevent ageism –you know, the aged-based discrimination- in certain economic and educative policies in a particular country.

I ask them to be creative, to think big, to have a bigger picture, to be ambitious in the solutions they propose, but I also ask them to identify actual obstacles and to be realistic. What I see, every year, in every course I teach, in almost paper I read, what is truly moving and heartbreaking, is to see how pessimistic and hopeless they end up being. Any interesting, innovative, disruptive solution they may come up with, is immediately disallowed by themselves saying: “well, we all know this is not going to happen, ever”. Can you imagine? (oh, I’m sure many of you have similar experiences, so of course you can imagine) You have all these fresh, young, brilliant minds in front of you, perfectly educated, very well informed, fully aware of the problems we face, and they are heartbreakingly pessimistic. And the worst part is that I can’t blame them. Are they perhaps wrong? Do you, by chance, believe that the next COP, the COP27 will be any different from this one or the previous 25? Do you perhaps think that next year, 2023, we will change upside down the way we distribute vaccines worldwide, that we will use COVAX as it was actually originally conceived, as a centralized purchasing and distributing of vaccines global service?

And with this I come to an end. We all have a special responsibility here. And now I talk about universities in particular. We need to change the way we do research. We need it to be genuinely interdisciplinary and integrated. To have this holistic approach that allows us to understand the complexity of the global existential threats we face and brings us to identify practical solutions. It needs to be impact oriented. But by impact I don’t mean now research that may have more academic citations, but science that may produce changes in the world. And for that to be possible we need to understand that world and the institutions that operate in it. Otherwise, no change will be possible and our students will remain hopeless. We need to change the way we teach and educate. We need to address wider and more global audiences. We need to raise awareness and increase the quality of information that inform public debates all around the world. We need to interact much more with governments and political organizations. And, above all, we need to disseminate and spread the results of our research and educative programs all over our societies.

In the end, and despite all the criticism his statements triggered, former President Barack Obama was right when, in the last COP26, he addressed the young audience and claimed that “Collectively and individually we are still falling short. We have not done nearly enough to address this crisis. We are going to have to do more. Whether that happens or not to a large degree is going to depend on you”. And he finished “To all the young people out there – I want you to stay angry. I want you to stay frustrated. But channel that anger. Harness that frustration. Keep pushing harder and harder for more and more. Because that’s what’s required to meet that challenge. Gird yourselves for a marathon, not a sprint.”

Okay. This is a marathon. And I think Obama is right in turning our hopes towards the young activists. But in order for that to be possible we must all play our part, and here universities and political institutions are two privileged actors with very special responsibilities. This is, in the end, why we should all care about planetary wellbeing.

And you know what they say. A pessimist is someone who finds a catastrophe in every opportunity, while an optimist is someone who finds an opportunity in every catastrophe. Let’s work together to make my students, our students, more optimistic again and give them some hope. Their amazing intelligence will do the rest.

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