A collaboration space for the missing conversations in Lifestyle Medicine

The Environmental & Planetary Health Hub was created to bring the less discussed, but highly relevant, aspects of Planetary Health into Lifestyle Medicine and everyday healthcare.

Planetary Health is often discussed through climate change, food systems, and sustainability. These are essential topics. But many environmental risks and their social determinants that directly affect human health, well-being, and sustainability remain underrepresented in healthcare education and clinical conversations.

This Hub focuses especially on highlighting those missing links. We aim to create a space where health professionals, environmental scientists, educators, economists, and science communicators can work together to make Environmental and Planetary Health more practical, more visible, and more useful for healthcare.

Why Environmental and Planetary Health?

We use both terms intentionally.

Planetary Health helps us see the bigger picture: human health depends on stable ecosystems, climate systems, biodiversity, healthy food systems, and social justice.

Environmental Health brings Planetary Health closer to everyday healthcare and Lifestyle Medicine practice. Air pollution, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, plastics, heavy metals, and unsafe consumer products are not distant planetary issues. They are direct health determinants, connected to fertility, pregnancy, child development, respiratory health, metabolic health, cancer risk, and health inequalities. This is why environmental health awareness is essential for prevention, counselling, and patient education in a changing and polluted world.

Our mission

The mission of the EPH Hub is to help redefine prevention for a changing world. We want to bring the environmental conditions that shape health closer to the heart of Lifestyle Medicine, healthcare education, and professional practice.

The Hub exists to make Environmental and Planetary Health more actionable for health professionals: not only as knowledge to understand, but as a lens for prevention, counselling, research, communication, economic analysis, and public health action.

An interdisciplinary core team

The core team brings together expertise across environmental science, healthcare, education, economics, and communication, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of Environmental and Planetary Health.

Publications & outputs

The EPH Hub aims to support collaborative academic and professional outputs. These may include peer-reviewed publications, perspective papers, educational papers, white papers, position statements, reports, and practical resources for health professionals.

This section will highlight work produced through Hub collaborations, including publications by members of the core team and future outputs developed within the Hub.

Peer-reviewed publications

• Prifti E., Andreou V., Katsanidou A. Environmental and planetary health education for healthcare professionals: A social imperative. Future Healthcare Journal, 2026.
• Prifti E., El-Osta A. Gender, self-care and toxic exposures: a narrative review of personal care product use and health equity implications. BMJ Public Health, 2025.
• Pseiridis A. The Role of Medicine for the Alleviation of Resource Scarcity: Towards a ‘Consumption and Production Medicine’ Framework. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 2025.

Conference presentations

• Prifti E. Small Changes, Big Impact: Practical Tools to Reduce Toxic Exposures. Presented at The Practice of Lifestyle Medicine, Brussels, Belgium, 12–14 December 2024.
• Prifti E. The importance of water cycles in designing a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. Presented at the 5th European Lifestyle Medicine Congress, “Life is about Water and Medicine”, Budapest, Hungary, 10–12 November 2023.

Reports, white papers, and professional resources

• Coming soon.

Past events & activities

The EPH Hub meets every last Thursday of the month, from 7:00 to 8:00 pm CET. These monthly meetings create a regular space for EPH Hub members to exchange ideas, discuss Environmental and Planetary Health within Lifestyle Medicine, and develop future collaborations.

The Hub is also outward-facing and actively builds bridges with other institutions, professional organisations, universities, and scientific communities. In addition to the monthly meetings, the Hub hosts invited speakers, webinars, guest lectures, and professional discussions on selected topics.

Selected webinars and invited talks

• Marini M.G., President of the European Narrative Medicine Society. Narrative Medicine and Planetary Health. Invited webinar hosted by the ELMO Environmental & Planetary Health Hub, 28 May 2026.
• Prifti E. Toxic Exposures and Personal Care Products. Invited presentation hosted by the Irish College of General Practitioners, 6 March 2026.
• Prifti E. Toxic Exposures and Women’s Health. Webinar hosted by the ELMO Women’s Health Initiative, 30 October 2025.

All past recordings of the webinars are available to ELMO members. Become a member

Who is the EPH Hub for?

The Hub is open to health professionals and professionals from related fields who want to understand how environmental and planetary conditions affect human health and society.

This includes medical doctors, nurses, dietitians, psychologists, midwives, health coaches, public health professionals, researchers, environmental scientists, economists, science communicators, and more.

Join the Hub

The EPH Hub welcomes professionals who want to help bring Environmental and Planetary Health closer to Lifestyle Medicine and healthcare practice. If you believe prevention today must include the environments in which people live, eat, work, dream for the future, and raise their children, this Hub is for you.

And if you believe that health education must also address gender inequality, environmental injustice, and the unequal burden of pollution and climate change, this is a space where that conversation can grow.

Join us in building a more practical, interdisciplinary, and justice-informed approach to Environmental and Planetary Health.

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