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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Public Health

Sec. Planetary Health

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1564555

What You Need to Know about the World. Toward a Taxonomy of Planetary Health Knowledge

Provisionally accepted
  • University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Knowledge about the world is deemed a core competence to engage in shifting the world to a better place to live. Although the importance of this knowledge is emphasized in several political and educational frameworks, there is still a lack of a definition of the scope of the required knowledge. Looking for a suitable taxonomy about world knowledge for sustainable development we analyzed different approaches in this area-Sustainable Development Goals, Global Citizenship, and Planetary Health-concluded that none of these approaches satisfied the requirements of a knowledge taxonomy identified a huge amount of overlapping content among these approaches. By merging these frameworks, we developed the Planetary Health Knowledge (PHK) taxonomy targeting knowledge about the health of the planet, human individuals, human systems, and their interaction. This hierarchical taxonomy exhaustively and disjunctively covers all relevant aspects of PHK in seven domains: Health, Nutrition, Environment, Safety, Education, Standard of Living, and Political & Economic Systems. We further discuss the existence of jingle-jangle fallacies in this field, quality criteria for evaluating taxonomies, and possibilities to use the PHK taxonomy.

    Keywords: Planetary Health Knowledge, Taxonomy, jingle-jangle fallacies, sustainability, Global citizenship, Planetary health, knowledge

    Received: 21 Jan 2025; Accepted: 31 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Rees and Wilhelm. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Franziska Rees, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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