We find ourselves in a revolutionary age, the Anthropocene. It is characterized by humanity's dramatic impact on Earth's biophysical conditions and the risk of permanent collapse of civilization or even extinction. We urgently need to adapt our collective behavior, our cognitive habits, and our social structures to manage the existential risks we have created ourselves. Universities have a special responsibility regarding this challenge: not only to study these changes and share the outcomes, but to act on them accordingly and participate in the adaptive transition. The institutional Planetary Health scorecard introduced in this course, offers a structured way for students to hold their own university accountable and to drive exemplary changes from within.
From the paper 'Propelling planetary health beyond the walls of academia' (Kort, Ossebaard, Martens & Gupta, submitted for publication, 2026) we summarize:
- Academic institutions must move from knowledge production to knowledge co-creation and implementation.
- Five action pathways translate planetary health into concrete institutional commitments: Education Reform, Research Design, Policy Engagement, Private Sector Partnerships, and Public Engagement & Citizen Science.
- Without measurable, comparable benchmarks, institutional commitments to planetary health remain rhetorical. A scorecard turns ambition into quality improvement and accountability.
Our stage, our lab, is the university itself. Students will explore their responsibility for the Planetary Health performance of VU Amsterdam, examine global citizenship, learn to think in terms of systemic institutional change, and contribute to a new instrument for sister-universities to adopt.
The five pathways and their associated metrics:
- Pathway 1 - Education Reform (M1 - M4): training science activists and change-makers across all faculties.
- Pathway 2 - Research Design (M5 - M8): participatory and situated research methodologies, co-design, equitable authorship, minimal research waste.
- Pathway 3 - Policy Engagement (M9 - M12): from data to directives, advisory roles, counter-disinformation.
- Pathway 4 - Private Sector (M13 - M16): ethics-guided collaboration, exclusion criteria, living labs, SDG alignment.
- Pathway 5 - Public Engagement & Citizen Science (M17 - M21): co-creation with the public, science-arts collaborations, develop global citizenship and long-term community engagement.
This course addresses institutional challenges as set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, and the recent call for universities to move beyond the walls of academia.