Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, in honor of Earth Day, our topic is Planetary Health.

Dr. Sam Myers is the founding director of the Planetary Health Alliance and the director of the new Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health.

He joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk about this new field and why it's important not just to the earth but to all of us who live here.

Let's listen.

Dr. Sam Myers, thank you so much for joining me today on Public Health on Call.

You are the new director of the new Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health.

And I want to start by asking you, what is planetary health?

So nice to see you, Josh. So planetary health is a very young, cross-disciplinary field that's

emerged in the last eight or nine years that focuses on how our transformation of nature, our degradation and alteration of all of our

planet's natural systems is coming back to affect our own health.

And so climate change, biodiversity loss, global scale pollution of air, water water and soil, changes in land use and land cover.

All of these ways that our activities collectively are changing our planet's natural systems are driving increasing burdens of disease.

And we're trying to understand what those dynamics are and how we address them.

Sounds like you are looking across a lot of different problems. understand what those dynamics are and how we address them.

Sounds like you are looking across a lot of different problems at the same time.

No doubt.

Could you maybe take us through one of those problems? How do you think about planetary health and say oceans, for example?

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