Planetary health

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Transforming Tomorrow Tipping Points from the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, in association with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health.

We're at the Global Tipping Points 2026 conference at Sunway University in Malaysia.

I'm Paul Turner.

[laughs]

... about AI.

Uh, actually, that's not true, and that will be evidenced by our guest today, because we're going to be joined by Professor Cornelia Walther, who is a senior fellow at the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health and the Institute of Global Strategy and Competitiveness here at Sunway University.

So it's gonna be a good conversation, and we'll take you to it right now.

Cornelia, thank you very much for joining us.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Transforming Tomorrow Tipping Points, from the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, in association with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health.

We're here at the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, here at Sunway University in Malaysia.

I'm Paul Turner.

If you're, uh, everyone has the equal opportunity.

If you don't make use of the opportunity, it's a different thing, but, but I think equal opportunity is, is critical.

So we're really delighted to be here as hosted by the Sunway Center for Planetary Health.

What does planetary health mean to you?

Well, planetary health is, is a way to think about the connection between climate, nature, and human health.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Transforming Tomorrow: Tipping Points, from the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, in association with the Centre for Planetary Health here at Sunway University in Malaysia.

We're back in Malaysia for the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, and we're recording this special miniseries before we launch season four of Transforming Tomorrow itself.

I'm Paul Turner.

So, as we'll come onto, Paul, it's really important that it's here in Asia.

There's some special characteristics as to why it's here.

And of course, it's here in partnership with the Centre for Planetary Health.

And we know about the Centre for Planetary Health.

Mm-hmm.

Together, celebrity chef Ned Bell, dieticians, doctors, and food service staff created, taste-tested, and added 18 new recipes to the hospital menu.

Their new Planetary Health menu contained less animal protein and more plants, including coconut chickpea curry with cauliflower and cashews, a Korean gochujang bowl, turkey Bolognese pasta, and steelhead trout with tomato miso dressing.

Yum.

The payoff? Food-related emissions fell by 39%, and patients liked it.

He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the 20th century.

Jules completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, History and Philosophy Science in 2020, and he is currently a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Liverpool, and a PI of the Wellcome Trust funded research project, Conserving Global Health, Biodiversity Protection, and the Prehistory of Planetary Health.

That project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations, and frictions between conservation theories and practices of international, global, and planetary health.

We don't speak a lot about health in this episode, but certainly, uh, health is one of the key instruments that's often used to kind of separate humans and animals from one another, and that's why I speak about pigs in the animal highlight at the end of this interview.

So stay tuned for that animal highlight at the end where I talk about some of the history of pigs in Kingston, Ontario, the city where I did my PhD.

And we have these open access courses to really begin to understand this food quality, foodomics data.

We just launched in the past few weeks, a new course on food quality and planetary health.

It's open access.

It has marvelous case studies.

And it really begins to build capacity on understanding this complex data in a really digestible way.

So I recommend everybody to check out FoodEDU's Food Quality and Planetary Health course.

And so I think that capacity strengthening is really important.

ultimately critical in helping inform decision-making and creating the types of policies that we want to see.