The Geisel School of Medicine chapter of Physicians for Human Rights and the Nathan Smith Society present “Planetary Health: Life in Our Changing World”. Our aim is to generate a fruitful and in-depth discussion on the multi-disciplinary and reciprocal effects of humans and our environment with a focus on health and human rights on the local and global level.

The world has allowed countless generations of humans to evolve and progress. We have an amazing world that provides us with everything we need to sustain ourselves. Since we are highly interconnected to our environment, the changes we bring about in our environment affect our health and life as well. This realization of interdependence has spurned a new field: Planetary Health. Defined in The Lancet in 2015, Planetary Health is “the achievement of the highest attainable standard of health, wellbeing, and equity worldwide through judicious attention to the human systems… that shape the future of humanity and the Earth’s natural systems.” By trying to shape planetary health, we have to recognize that the effects of environmental change are unequal; poorer communities tend to be more affected by and are less able to tackle this change.

It is our hope that the conference will inspire appreciation of how the changing environment affects us, especially the poorest parts of the world, and what we can do to in response. More so, we hope for participation in the program to empower everyone to contribute to planetary health. We welcome Dartmouth undergraduates, graduate students, and the wider Upper Valley community to join this necessary discussion.