Humans have altered 77% of the land surface and 87% of the oceans, causing a massive extinction of species. We have triggered a progressive change in the global climate by burning fossil fuels and by our intensive cultivation of soils and forests. We are endangering biodiversity, ecosystems and their services, and thus also human health. More heat waves and flooding, land degradation and water shortages are making whole regions increasingly uninhabitable. This results in damage to both physical and mental health, for example through the loss of the familiar social environment, through flight and migration. A phase-out of fossil-fuel use and the creation of adequate refugia for self-sustaining biodiversity covering 30-50% of the Earth’s surface are urgently needed.


The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how vulnerable we are and how closely connected we are with Nature. Health cannot be taken for granted. Do we take the prerequisites for healthy living seriously enough? Or are we, as a civilization, systematically jeopardizing our health?

The WBGU is currently working on the interconnections between health and global environmental change and would like to put forward three assertions and ten sets of questions for discussion.

1. Our lifestyle is making us ill and is destroying the planet.

2. Healthy people can only exist on a healthy planet.

3. We must initiate a civilizational transformation for planetary health.
What it is about

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how vulnerable we are and how closely connected we are with Nature. Health cannot be taken for granted. Do we take the prerequisites for healthy living seriously enough? Or are we, as a civilization, systematically jeopardizing our health?
Healthy people as part of a healthy planet Earth

In recent decades, as prosperity has increased, human health has improved worldwide; yet not everyone has benefited. In poorer population groups, infectious diseases and maternal and child mortality still cause a great deal of avoidable suffering. Increasingly, however, the gains in prosperity are themselves having a negative impact on health: on the one hand as ‘too much of a good thing’ through the overconsumption of food and the displacement of physical activity from everyday life, on the other as harmful side effects in the form of air pollution and environmental toxins. As a result, lifestyle diseases such as overweight, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are on the rise worldwide.

Last but not least, our resource-intensive way of life, with its immense emissions of greenhouse gases, the destruction of natural habitats and increasing pollution of land and sea, has led to a planetary crisis. It threatens the natural life-support systems on Earth and thus the health of all people. Heat waves, disastrous floods and pandemics drastically demonstrate to us that our society is dependent on functioning ecosystems and a stable climate. The planetary crisis could furthermore threaten the cohesion of our societies and overburden healthcare systems. But the crisis also gives us an opportunity to rethink our idea of prosperity and progress, to break habits and make our societies fairer, more sustainable and healthier.

Because the increasing environmental and health problems often have common roots, synergies can be found in approaches to solving them. We are at a crossroads. Society, business and politics must assume responsibility and initiate a comprehensive transformation that leads to healthy human life on a healthy planet.

The way we produce food and feed ourselves destroys natural habitats and biodiversity, pollutes air, water and the soil, generates greenhouse gases, is cruel to animals and also directly harms our own health – e.g. by increasing resistance to antibiotics, via nitrates in groundwater and as a result of malnutrition. On the one hand, 800 million people are suffering hunger and 2 billion are lacking micronutrients; on the other hand, 2 billion people are overweight – causing a range of diseases. A more plant-based diet following the recommendations of the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, with lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts and legumes and little meat, brings numerous benefits: for human health, animal health, climate protection and biodiversity conservation. The potential of organic agriculture that values ecosystem services and produces varied and healthy foods is far from exhausted.