Waiora: the importance of Indigenous worldviews and spirituality to inspire and inform Planetary Health Promotion in the Anthropocene.

We now live in a new geological age, the Anthropocene - the age of humans - the start of which coincides with the founding of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) 70 years ago. In this article, we address the fundamental challenge facing health promotion in its next 70 years, which takes us almost to 2100: how do we achieve planetary health? We begin with a brief overview of the massive and rapid global ecological changes we face, the social, economic and technological driving forces behind those changes, and their health implications. At the heart of these driving forces lie a set of core values that are incompatible with planetary health. Central to our argument is the need for a new set of values, which heed and privilege the wisdom of Indigenous worldviews, as well as a renewed sense of spirituality that can re-establish a reverence for nature. We propose an Indigenous-informed framing to inspire and inform what we call planetary health promotion so that, as the United Nations Secretary General wrote recently, we can make peace with nature.

Timely and significant call for planetary health promotion.

The 2019 IUHPE Global Health Promotion Conference held in Rotorua New Zealand, provided an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate the contribution of health promotion to the achievement of planetary health and sustainable development. This brief conference report outlines the intent of the two conference statements and calls for action by health promoters at all levels to integrate these principles into their everyday work.