Planetary Health: Urgency and Agency for Systems Change. Including Submissions Associated with the 2025 Planetary Health Annual Meeting (PHAM2025)

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite contributions for a Special Issue of Challenges featuring the proceedings of the Planetary Health Annual Meeting 2025, to be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 7 to 10 October 2025.

Planetary health is a solutions-focused, transdisciplinary field that addresses the impacts of human activities on Earth’s natural systems in order to foster a world where both people and the planet can thrive. It acknowledges the deep interdependence between human well-being and the health of ecological systems and calls for urgent, transformative action at all levels of society.

The 2025 Annual Meeting, themed “Planetary Health for All and In All: Boosting Urgency and Agency for Systems Change,” aims to accelerate collective momentum toward sustainability and resilience. It recognizes that transformational science must be designed for impact—driven by real-world challenges, accessible to the public, and actionable by communities, policymakers, and institutions.

This Special Issue will spotlight new knowledge and practice from across disciplines—including science, policy, the humanities, and the arts—that advance the planetary health agenda.

As we face escalating planetary challenges, this Special Issue invites bold ideas, practical solutions, and diverse voices working to chart a course toward a more just and thriving future for all life on Earth. It is our hope that this Special Issue will facilitate collaborative vision and shared agendas that drive activity to link virtually every endeavor aimed at solving the interconnected challenges of our time—large and small alike—for the flourishing of people, places, and planet.

We look forward to your contributions.

Articles in this Special Issue will be published without charge in this open access journal. For Malaysian researchers, please refer to funding guidelines by MOHE on publishing before submission to journals.

Dr. David Webb

Prof. Dr. Susan Prescott

Scope and Article Types:

We warmly welcome submissions on any topic relevant to planetary health, including full papers based on conference presentations, abstracts, discussions, workshops, satellite events and/or ideas arising from the event. We also invite other submissions from the wider community that focus on understanding and improving the complex relationships between human health and environmental change—from any researchers, clinicians, practitioners, educators, students, community groups, and artists, seeking to advance the planetary health agenda.

Submissions may include original research, perspectives, case studies, initiatives or projects (either complete or still in progress), protocols, new proposals or ideas, and more creative works. We encourage all authors to articulate the ways in which their submission is relevant to some (or preferably, many) of the grand challenges of our time, and/or ways in which the work could contribute to planetary health. Examples of topics may be found below in the “keywords” below.

Dr. David Webb
Prof. Dr. Susan Prescott
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information 

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Challenges is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• planetary health
• ecology, biodiversity, ecosystems, microbiomes, anthropogenic ecosystems
• value systems, indigenous knowledges, cultural shift, narrative medicine, storytelling, belief systems, traditional cultures, spirituality
• healthy finance, finance and wellbeing, doughnut economics
• education transformation, education revolution
• just transition, governance, transformational change
• science based communication, social media
• mental health, emotions and wellbeing, solastalgia, ecological grief
• noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and infectious diseases
• food systems, nutrition, food processing and nutritional ecology, planetary diets
• lifestyle and the exposome, systems biology, machine learning, preventive medicine, bio-psychosocial medicine, high-level wellness
• environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change
• urban landscapes, natural environments, nature-relatedness, green space, green prescriptions, biodiversity interdependence, cooperation, integration
• social and ecological justice, intergenerational justice, health disparities, socioeconomic inequalities, displacement and conflict, migration, economic, political and commercial determinants of health
• life-course (developmental origins), transgenerational perspectives, epigenetics