The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of planetary health – a framework that recognizes the interdependence of human, animal and environmental health – in a world marred by the climate change and biodiversity crises, as well as growing inequalities between and within countries. With the WHO’s calls for vaccine equity ignored, vaccine nationalisms have threatened progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda’s mandate of ‘leaving no one behind’. This event debates how we should go about governing planetary health when inequalities in human health are yet to be addressed. What value might environmental justice efforts add? What role is there for food systems? How might women help push planetary health to the forefront? And how can researchers help shape planetary health policy? These are some of the questions that will be addressed by Prof. Anna-Katharina Hornidge, Director of the German Development Institute in Bonn and member of the German Government of Global Change (WBGU), and Dr. Nicole de Paula, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam and Founder of Women Leaders for Planetary Health.
About the speakers
Professor Dr Anna-Katharina Hornidge
Prof Dr Anna-Katharina Hornidge is Director of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and Professor for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Bonn. Before joining DIE in March 2020, she was Professor of Social Sciences in the Marine Tropics at the University of Bremen and Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the research group ‘Development and Knowledge Sociology’ at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen. From 2006 to 2015 she worked as Senior Researcher for the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, where she held the position as Professor and Director in the Department of Social and Cultural Change from 2014 to 2015.
In her research, Prof Hornidge focuses on (a) the role of different types of knowledge in and for processes of change, as well as (b) questions of natural resources governance in agricultural and marine contexts. Her regional focus lies on Southeast and Central Asia, West and East Africa. Further, Ms. Hornidge serves as expert advisor in several advisory boards at national, EU and UN level: as Member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change of the German Government (WBGU), Co-Chair (with Gesine Schwan) of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Germany (SDSN Germany), and as Chair of the Section ‘Research’ in the German UNESCO-Commission. Ms. Hornidge holds a PhD in Sociology from the Technical University of Berlin and the National University of Singapore. She is from Germany.
Dr Nicole de Paula
Dr Nicole de Paula holds a PhD in International Relations from Sciences-Po Paris. She is the founder of the social enterprise Women Leaders for Planetary Health. In 2019, she became the first recipient of the prestigious Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. She currently works at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN at the recently established Office of the Sustainable Development Goals. Since 2005, she has been globally connecting policymakers, researchers and civil society to understand issues related to sustainability, the environment, public health and equity. She is the author of the book “Breaking the Silos for Planetary Health – a Roadmap for a Resilient Post-pandemic World”. Dr. de Paula is from Brazil.
Convenor
Alexia Faus Onbargi is a Researcher at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in Bonn and PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Working in the Environmental Governance and Transformation to Sustainability programme at the DIE, her research lies in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), climate change governance and inequality. She is particularly focused on the conditions for policy (in)coherence in energy transitions in Europe, Africa and Asia. She also has a keen interest in planetary health, this having been the topic of her MPhil in Development Studies thesis at the University of Oxford. She attended the latter from 2019-2021 with a full scholarship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation. Alexia is from Spain.
