Looking back: IPB at the Planetary Health Annual Meeting 2025

Under the motto "Urgency and Agency for Systems Change" around 500 participants from science, education, healthcare and politics gathered in Rotterdam from 6 to 10 October. The IPB is a member of the global Planetary Health Alliance, which is primarily responsible for organising the conference.

As experts in behavioural sciences Kira Maur and Lena LehrerPhD students & research assistants at the PACE project at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine, not only brought new impressions and contacts from the Netherlands back to Thuringia, but also shared findings from their research at the Erfurt Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour with the international community. In a 90-minute workshop, together with Sarah Pelull inspired around 100 participants for the topic of behavioural change and behavioural science in climate protection ("Workshop on Behavioural change in Planetary Health").

Overall, a major thematic focus of the conference was on national and international health systems as well as on the topics of equality and justice. The latter was also reflected in the great diversity of attendees and speakers - indigenous voices in particular were given space and existing knowledge systems were critically scrutinised. Sensitive topics such as migration and security were also on the agenda. Much of this was characterised by the idea of global connectedness.

Lena Lehrer summarises as follows:

Even though a lot of the content was already familiar to us - which reinforced our own perspective - we were able to make the topic of planetary health from an international and much broader perspective than at a traditional, purely scientific conference. The consistently positive feedback from the community about our own workshop also reinforced the importance and relevance of our work.