Pathways Reports

Explore recent symposia reports and event highlights, alongside cutting-edge publications from Pathways to Planetary Health Director Stephen Posner, advancing global understanding of biodiversity, climate resilience, and planetary health.

Pathways

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Reports

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Pathways to Planetary Health conducts research and convenes leaders. Our in-person roundtables, symposia, and retreats gather visionaries in key fields from around the world and all walks of life.

2025 Pathways Report: Developing the field: Earth Awareness

In 2025, Pathways to Planetary Health produced a report exploring trends in the development of an emergent social field of Earth awareness. By applying ancient wisdom to modern sustainability efforts, Earth awareness practices can help communities learn about the environment while developing deep, meaningful, ongoing relationships with Earth. A full report of findings and a brief overview describe obstacles and opportunities to developing the field, along with analysis of the relationships among traditions, intentions, sources of inspiration, and centers of practice.

 

2024 Pathways Retreat: Conscious Food Systems as a Pathway to Planetary Health

In 2024, Pathways to Planetary Health hosted a retreat on “Conscious Food Systems as a Pathway to Planetary Health” in partnership with the UNDP-convened Conscious Food Systems Alliance. Over 75 participants came together to deepen collective capacity to address the underlying worldviews at the heart of current social, environmental, and food-related predicaments. We gathered before Climate Week NYC ’24 and the UN Summit of the Future to transform how we mindfully step into these important occasions and to create a compassionate world. Click here to read the summary report with participant biographies.

 

Other 2024 Gatherings

  • A Hudson Valley Bioregional Health and Resilience Roundtable explored opportunities to align bioregional work.
  • A retreat on Becoming Earth: Honoring Nature as Source of Life brought together diverse, creative participants from 4 Tribal Nations to hold ceremony and exchange across peoples, places, cultures, and generations. Anishinaabe knowledge keeper and Elder Bert Landon described how the Garrison Institute “became a healing lodge and a teaching lodge.”

 

2023 Pathways Symposium: Commons and the Common Good

The 2023 Pathways Symposium focused on “The Commons and the Common Good.” This event gathered a diverse group of 80 thought leaders, including scientists, Indigenous teachers, public sector leaders, impact investors, researchers, and on-the-ground change makers. The Symposium sought to define the ways in which the concepts of the commons and the common good could provide coherent grounding and mutuality amidst disruptive times marked by climate change, biodiversity loss, injustice, and racism. Read the 2023 Symposium summary report here.

 

2020 Pathways Symposium: Ethics in the Age of the Anthropocene

A 2020 Pathways Symposium was held to focus on “Ethics in the Age of the Anthropocene.” It was conceived as a search for a contemporary ethics of the common good, shared well-being, and societal mutuality. It assembled more than 50 leading practitioners of applied ecology, conservation, impact investing, and sustainable business together with scientists, ethicists, journalists, meditation teachers, Indigenous Elders, philosophers, physicians, researchers, students, theologians, and writers.  Click hereto read the 2020 Symposium proceedings.

 

2018 Pathways Symposium

In 2018, we held the first Pathways Symposium on Ecological Civilization, exploring new ethical frameworks for planetary health and defining the four pathways that guide the initiative today.

 

Pathways to Planetary Health Director Stephen Posner regularly contributes to published academic papers and technical reports at the forefront of biodiversity, climate change, and planetary health:

    • Stephen is currently an author focused on Frameworks and Approaches for the first ever National Nature Assessment, and co-lead on a related paper that is defining nature for specific decision contexts
    • Stephen’s May 2025 article “Frogs, Coalitions, and Mining: Transformative insights for planetary health and Earth system law from Ecuador’s struggle to enforce Nature’s rights” in the Earth System Governance Journal.
    • Earth Awareness Report
    • Cvitanovic, C., Karcher, D. B., Breen, J., Badullovich, N., Cairney, P., Dalla Pozza, R., … & Posner, S. (2025). Knowledge brokers at the interface of environmental science and policy: A review of knowledge and research needs. Environmental Science & Policy, 163, 103973. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901124003071
    • Karcher, D. B., Cvitanovic, C., Colvin, R. M., van Putten, I., Pozza, R. D., & Posner, S. (2025). Key attributes for effective knowledge brokering at the interface of environmental science and management. Sustainability Science, 20(1), 117-133. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-024-01575-6
    • Ingram, Jane Carter, et al. “Leveraging natural capital accounting to support businesses with nature-related risk assessments and disclosures.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B1903 (2024): 20220328. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstb.2022.0328
    • Warnell, Katie, Sara Mason, Rachel Karasik, Lydia Olander, Stephen Posner, Aura Alonso-Rodríguez, Natalia Aristizábal, Laura Bloomfield, et al. (2023). Assessing the Effects of Management Activities on Biodiversity and Carbon Storage on Public and Private Lands and Waters in the United States. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/bitstreams/660d189e-46f3-48a8-8e57-f78a7b9e73e3/download