Global Health's Grand Challenge: A Healthy Planet and Healthy People.

We are living in a golden era of improvements to human health. Our average life expectancy globally has increased from 47 years in the 1950s to 69 years in 2010; maternal death rates, under-5 mortality, and poverty rates have plummeted. However, this has come at a great cost, one we are only beginning to appreciate. The price for these improvements has been the destruction of Earth’s life-support systems. We have mortgaged the health of our planet to pay for our needs and wants. Improving the health of people and our planet is the grand global health challenge of our time. In response to this, the Lancet created 2 commissions. The first, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, was on Planetary Health. It released its findings in July 2015 and laid down, in unsparing words, how human activity is causing climate change, ocean acidification, land degradation, freshwater scarcity, the destruction of fisheries, and an era of mass extinctions that profoundly affects our security. The other Lancet commission, on Pollution, Health, and the Environment, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, and the nongovernmental organization Pure Earth, will release its report in at the beginning of 2017. Tackling the “king of all risk factors,” it will address pollution’s impact on health, economics, poverty, social justice, and the sustainable development goals and will conclude with solutions to prevent and control this massive, neglected global threat. These reports are clarion calls for action. The big question is: What will we do with this information? Perhaps our greatest opportunity will be to overcome our collective failure to implement what we already know will address these challenges.