Planetary Health Equity Hothouse - lecture and launch

The new Planetary Health Equity Hothouse (the Hothouse) is an interdisciplinary initiative focused on three major and interconnected challenges - a rising public health burden, inequality and climate change. Much is known about what is needed to address these issues but little effective action is being taken.

The Hothouse aims to understand how action can be enabled, providing a roadmap towards planetary health equity: the environmentally sustainable and equitable opportunity for good health. We will do this through a governance-focused study of the consumptogenic system, revealing how powerful interests, ideas and institutions support or hinder the development of intersectoral public policy and commercial activities that advance planetary health equity goals. Our priority areas of interest are energy, food, housing and employment. The Hothouse is an initiative of Sharon Friel's ARC Laureate Fellowship based at the Australian National University School of Regulation and Global Governance.

In the first Annual Lecture of the Hothouse, Sharon will discuss the global consumptogenic system of institutions, policies, commercial activities, norms and behaviours that encourage and reward excessive production and consumption of fossil fuel-reliant goods and services that are unhealthy and inequitably valued and distributed.

Following immediately after the Lecture, the launch of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse offers hope for the future. Through national and international collaboration with academics, policymakers and industry actors, the Hothouse aims to generate new knowledge about ways to improve the common drivers of climate change and global health inequities and identify how the consumptogenic system can be transformed towards planetary health equity goals.

At this event, you will have the opportunity to learn more about the Hothouse, including our research plans, the team, PhD and EMCR programs, and how your research, policy or advocacy needs can engage with the Hothouse.

About the Speaker

Sharon Friel is Professor of Health Equity and Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Governance at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). She was Director of RegNet from 2014-2019. Sharon is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

She is considered one of the foremost researchers internationally in the social determinants of health, and was nominated in 2014 by her international peers as one of the world's most influential female leaders in global health. Sharon's interests are in the governance and regulatory processes related to the structural factors affecting health inequities, including trade and investment; urbanisation; food systems and climate change.

This event will be delivered online via Zoom only.