The Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health is poised to host the inaugural event of the 2025 Planetary Health Cities Symposium in Washington, D.C., on June 16. This event aims to address the urgent challenges posed by the degradation of Earth’s natural systems and the impact on human health and well-being. (Registration for the event is closed due to capacity, view the agenda.)
Seydina Fall, a senior lecturer in finance at the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business, focuses on the future of cities, particularly the delivery of public infrastructure projects in both developed and emerging markets. He serves as the faculty co-director of practice at the institute.
The research program accelerates cross-university collaboration to tackle these pressing environmental issues. This bold, interdisciplinary initiative recognizes the urgency of the moment and seeks to advance solutions that safeguard health on a rapidly changing planet. Following the symposium, the Planetary Health Annual Meeting will convene in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to bring together thought leaders, researchers, policymakers, and other experts who are dedicated to building a healthier, more regenerative future.
UL: What is the Institute of Planetary Health at Johns Hopkins and what is your role?
Seydina Fall: Planetary health is focused on the global health implications of the earth crisis, all the ways in which human activity is transforming our planet’s natural systems. A couple of researchers from Harvard started the global Planetary Health Alliance a year ago, and now it’s the Institute for Planetary Health at Johns Hopkins.
We have several programs at the institute—clinical, policy, education, and practice. My role is co-leading the practice program. Think of it as innovation and implementation.
Our vision is leveraging the diverse cross-university expertise to expand trans-disciplinary discovery. We want to find real solutions that address the health and humanitarian dimensions of the earth crisis.
UL: Can you talk a little bit more about trans-disciplinary discovery?
Fall: Trans-disciplinary is different from multi-disciplinary, because you are looking at different perspectives, and the goal is to come up with something new. Whereas multi-disciplinary, you’re looking at different perspectives, but you’re looking to solve a common problem that everyone knows about. Here the goal is really innovation.
UL: How do you envision integrating the various established frameworks, such as the UN sustainability goals and the planetary health framework, into the development of planetary health cities?
Fall: What’s different is the approach that we’re taking. In a nutshell, we plan to take a very pluralistic approach. We plan on interpreting this by developing new models that can evaluate alternative paths that can be taken to solve the global crisis.
What does that mean specifically? We want to put the assessment of how we can achieve economic development within the earth’s physical limitations regarding air, water, and land. That’s really at the core of what we’re looking to do. And we’re looking to take a very pluralistic approach, where different cities have different cultural contexts, different ways of thinking. We want to invest in developing new models, new tools that will help us integrate all these blockchain workstreams that have already been created into decision making that helps address specific needs of each city.
Economic development within the Earth’s natural boundaries is really at the core of what we’re looking to do. Our job is to work with scientists and different schools to come up with new models, new tools to integrate the workstreams that have already been evolved.
UL: What strategies do you plan to implement to foster effective collaboration among the diverse stakeholders from the various disciplines—scientists, planners, financiers—in the creation of planetary health cities?
Fall: We have a working group that’s been working for almost a year now that represents different perspectives. We’ve got policymakers, scientists, doctors, urban planners. That’s one of the strategies that we use to get different perspectives from the working group. We want to do what we call a kind of a “gap assessment” of the different cities that join this movement, see where we can help them fill those gaps.
Those gaps could be urban planning within their urban boundaries, for example. It could be in research that helps them come up with evidence-based decision making. Mutual learning, collaboration, developing case studies that can be disseminated across the various universities that we work with. And then we have a series of convenings that we’re organizing.
UL: What innovative financing mechanisms are being discussed or developed to support the establishment of planetary health cities, particularly in regions facing significant environmental challenges?
Fall: I’ve been doing a lot of traveling recently in Southeast Asia—listening, talking to folks—and we are thinking of integrating Islamic finance, for example. They have some ways of managing endowments and donations that we feel are worth implementing here. The endowments are rooted in perpetuity in their design. It makes things a lot more stable, a lot more protected against political upheaval and cyclical changes in the market.
One example is the Waqf endowment model, which we think may offer some solutions. Ultimately, we want to work with patient investors or charitable donations so that once the money is given, it allows researchers enough time to implement a trans-disciplinary approach for working in different countries, so on and so forth.
UL: Can you talk about the pilot projects you intend to showcase at the convenings? What are the criteria for these projects, and what are the outcomes you’re hoping to highlight?
Fall: Most of the work is going to be focused on urban planning within the Stockholm Resilency Centre’s nine Earth boundaries. That’s going to be an important piece of how to file profits. Then another important workflow for us, as I said, is evidence-based decision making. How can we come up with and account for natural capital: earthquake systems, biodiversity, clean water, and so forth? We need to find a way to not only preserve it but also account for it in the way we make decisions.
UL: How do you select pilot projects?
Fall: We choose pilot projects based on secular themes that we think are an important part of our cities. One of those is demographics, another is urbanization, and the other is industrialization. All countries around the world are interested in controlling their supply chains somewhat, and we want to contrast between cities. Who’s doing it best? How we can pop in, right then, to help achieve their goals, which is economic development?
One of the pilot projects we’ve been working on is in southeastern Louisiana in St. James Parish. There are nine river parishes, and it’s commonly known as “cancer alley.” This is an area where you’ve got some infrastructure, you’ve got some natural capital, which is the river, but you have a lot of tension on the ground, a lot of problems. And here’s an example of how we can think about economic development within the urban boundaries, like creating jobs, industrializing an area, all things that are wanted. We’re trying to show how we can do it in a way that is within the Earth’s limits, and how we can quantify that situation to show where it’s beyond the Earth’s natural boundaries.
Contrast what’s happening there with the Japanese city of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb in 1945, and how that city recreated itself around the health of the planet and its inhabitants.
UL: What do you identify as the main challenges currently facing urban development in the context of health and sustainability, and how does your initiative aim to address these challenges?
Fall: The number one challenge is that when I talk to folks who are in the business world, managing real estate companies, infrastructure and so forth, they think of this planetary health theme as somewhat of a nuisance, something that’s impractical. We have developed an analytical cost-benefit framework where an educated person who believes in science but is busy running a business can pause and look at the cost-benefits of what they’re doing.
How we plan on alleviating that is again having economic development at the center. How do we build cities that are prosperous, regenerative, but not anti-business? We need to be responsible and protect our natural capital. And we want to come up with ways of thinking about this where the CEO of a company can look at what they’re doing and see how it makes sense from a cost-benefit standpoint to align with planetary health.
UL: What should folks know about the June 16 symposium?
Fall: It’s a first step of developing this framework for the planetary health of cities. Ultimately, we want to be in the conversation when people think about secular trends, about the future of real estate, the built environment, and infrastructure. My job is to translate a lot of the scientific research into concepts that busy business people should be able to understand and act on. The spirit the convening is very global, because the problems we’re facing are extremely global.
