Call for papers: Planetary Health and Transnational Families: Bridging Divides for a Sustainable Society

The intersection of planetary health and transnational families represents a crucial yet underexplored area of scholarly inquiry in the field of planetary health. Planetary health underscores the interconnectedness of human health, environmental sustainability, and planetary systems. It has gained urgency amid intensifying global challenges of the triple planetary crisis, which includes climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and environmental degradation. These crises threaten ecological balance and profoundly exacerbate existing health inequities, with marginalized populations, such as transnational families, bearing the brunt of these impacts.

Transnational families—defined as families whose members are spread across multiple nations—navigate unique vulnerabilities and opportunities in this context. Transnational families play a crucial role in shaping global perspectives on sustainability, resilience, and ecological responsibility. These families often contend with vastly different environmental and health conditions depending on their geographic locations, which can strain family cohesion, limit equitable healthcare access, and exacerbate economic instability. Often, transnational families are formed as an effect of climate challenges, with some family members forced to migrate due to climate change. For instance, family members in climate-vulnerable regions may face heightened exposure to natural disasters or resource scarcity, while those in wealthier countries may grapple with systemic challenges like restrictive immigration policies or cultural assimilation pressures. Therefore, understanding the intersection of planetary health with transnational families is essential because such families operate at the nexus of global and local dynamics. Spread across multiple nations, their members face diverse environmental and health conditions, which can complicate family cohesion, exacerbate healthcare disparities, and impose economic instability. At the same time, transnational families play a critical role in global processes through resource-sharing, cultural adaptation, and advocacy for sustainability. Despite these challenges, transnational families are pivotal contributors to global processes. They facilitate resource-sharing through remittances, adapt cultural practices to sustain family ties and advocate for sustainability within their communities and beyond.

To know more and submit your paper, see this link.