Attention for the climate-health nexus is steadily increasing. Recent global initiatives, including the WHO Global Action Plan on Climate Change and Health, emphasize that climate action must become integral to health strategies. On 20 May, the UN General Assembly turned the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion into tangible political, legal and practical momentum for stronger global action and accountability, and at the 79th World Health Assembly (#WHA79) the work continued.Yet, planetary health is still largely approached through technological interventions and policy reforms aimed at protecting vulnerable populations and integrating health into climate action.
We suggest a new framework to understand and respond to the climate-health nexus. We argue that beyond the conceptual, knowledge, and governance challenges identified in 2015 by Horton & Lo, planetary health also faces a more fundamental challenge: a deeper crisis of disconnection and alienation arising from disrupted relationships with self and others, rooted in contemporary patterns of self-optimization, social acceleration, and weakening capacities for resonance with the world. This reverberates into social fragmentation and the ecological degradation that planetary health seeks to address.
People in modern societies are increasingly shaped by nervous systems that are overwhelmed, dysregulated, and disembodied. Internal instability can manifest outwardly in defensive behaviour, polarized thinking, and extractive patterns toward resources, attention, and life itself. ‘Planetary health’ is thus inseparable from the emotional and embodied capacities of human beings. How we inhabit our bodies shapes how we relate to others and to the world.
When emotions are suppressed, perception narrows, empathy diminishes, and our sense of belonging to a living world weakens. Conversely, the capacity to experience and integrate emotions expands our ability for connection, complexity, and care. These processes are not only personal; they influence how communities respond to social and ecological challenges.
A framework linking a person’s inner world to planetary health
We propose a framework linking a person’s inner world – emotions, regulation, embodiment, trauma patterns, attention, meaning‑making – to planetary health.
We use Hartmut Rosa’s concept of ‘resonance’ because it offers a powerful lens for understanding why modern life so often feels alienating, accelerated, and “out of tune,” and how more responsive world‑relations might ground a viable vision of the good life in late-capitalist modernity. Rosa describes resonance as a mutually responsive, affective, and transformative way of relating to the world – an encounter in which we are touched, we answer back, and neither side remains unchanged, without slipping into control or domination.
Further drawing on phenomenology, and critiques of disenchantment and separation, our framework understands human beings as embodied and relational participants in the world rather than detached observers. This view is strongly supported by contemporary neuroscience and affective neurobiology, which have made significant advances in explaining how emotion, cognition, and behaviour arise from embodied processes. Research by Antonio Damasio on the somatic basis of consciousness, Lisa Feldman Barrett on the construction of emotion, Stephen Porges on autonomic regulation demonstrate that human experience begins in the body. And Craig explained how interoceptive awareness is the brain’s moment‑to‑moment mapping of internal bodily signals – mediated primarily by the insular cortex – which gives rise to subjective feeling and the embodied sense of self.This evidence ends whatever was left of the old split between mind and body and makes one thing clear: our ability to perceive, make meaning, and act is rooted in neurophysiology and always shaped by the context we are in.
Or in plain language, we don’t just have bodies – we are bodies. Our thoughts, emotions, decisions, and relationships all arise from how our nervous system, senses, and movements interact with the world around us. Embodiment is the skill of knowing from your body (sensing, regulating, and choosing your next action based on present-moment physical cues) rather than only thinking about your body. If you wondered “what does embodiment really mean?”, it’s this day-to-day ability to feel what’s happening inside, shift your state, and act on purpose.
Four interdependent dimensions
Within this perspective, the four interdependent dimensions of embodiment – affective, relational, ecological, and transpersonal – are not speculative or metaphysical categories but empirically supported features of how human beings participate in and co‑create their worlds. Although deeply intertwined, distinguishing between them helps clarify how embodied capacities shape collective outcomes.
Affective embodiment refers to the capacity to experience and integrate emotions within the body. When difficult emotions are suppressed, the nervous system organizes itself around contraction. Experience is contained in specific parts of the body. The head for example becomes the part where emotions are experienced and felt, and tensions or discomfort in other parts of the body may be cut off from awareness. These internal divisions create psychological boundaries: between affect and meaning. While such boundaries may once have served a protective function, they also restrict perception and empathy towards the self, and others. When emotional experience becomes poorly integrated or chronically dysregulated, individuals may become more reactive and prone to defensive simplification. At the collective level, such dynamics can contribute to polarization, denial, and tendencies to project anxiety onto external others through processes resembling scapegoating.
Relational embodiment is the ability to remain connected with others while recognizing boundaries, their differences with others. When individuals expand their emotional capacity (as just discussed) they gain the ability to stay present with discomfort in a relationship, rather than reacting defensively. This embodied presence makes it possible to speak from inner sensation rather than from a defensive narrative. Difference may become informative rather than threatening and empathy deepens as a direct somatic experience of resonance. It supports authentic communication, reduces domination-based dynamics, and allows conflict to be processed rather than projected. It forms the basis of social cohesion and justice.
Ecological embodiment involves recognizing the continuity between the body and the living world. In states of disconnection, nature becomes an object to exploit; through embodiment, a sense of belonging within the biosphere can be restored, reshaping relationships to consumption, responsibility, and care.
Transpersonal embodiment refers to a shift in awareness in which the sense of self becomes less individually centered and more attuned to a wider field of interconnectedness. Where relational embodiment focuses on the quality of between‑us contact, transpersonal embodiment reflects an experiential opening beyond the individual self. Together they describe two complementary dimensions of embodied connection: one grounded in interpersonal presence, the other in a broader sense of unity.
These interdependent dimensions suggest that the path to planetary health, while certainly requiring interventions at various levels and in many areas, begins with internal capacities. Put differently, the transformation that humanity requires in our times of polycrisis, is not merely technological but also relational and embodied. The ability to remain present with discomfort, perceive complexity without reducing it to simplicity, and sense connection rather than threat are not simply therapeutic goals; they are planetary necessities. Planetary health ultimately depends not only on changing systems, but also on transforming how humans inhabit their own bodies – and therefore the world.