The Lancet, 26 July 2025

Samuel S Myers: planetary health champion

Samuel S Myers, Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health (JHIPH) in Baltimore, MD, USA, has a stark message for health professionals: “As clinicians or as health practitioners, we can no longer do our jobs. We can no longer safeguard human health into the future while the natural life support systems that we all depend on are crumbling under the weight of our own ecological footprint.” When asked about solutions, he says: “To ensure a liveable future, we will need rapid transformational change in how we’re living across all of our systems: food, energy, manufacturing, green chemistry, and the built environment.”

Myers coauthored the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission’s landmark report in 2015 and soon after launched the Planetary Health Alliance, of which he is Director, with a “mission to catalyse the growth of the global field”. A consortium of academic, research, and government bodies and non-governmental organisations, the Alliance now consists of more than 500 organisations in 80 countries. Myer’s collaborator and friend, Howard Frumkin, Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health, USA, comments: “Sam has a clear and inclusive vision for building the planetary health field, and he has been tireless both in advancing the science and in convening a global network of collaborators.” At the Alliance, the initial focus was on curating research and building both an education platform and a global community of practice. Then, around 5 years ago, “we started to recognise that the global field had really taken off”, Myers says. For him, the next challenge is mainstreaming planetary health. “So how do you take the new knowledge and the framework of planetary health and try to introduce it into policy and the private sector and out to the general public?”