PUBLIC LECTURE: Professor Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood The Operating System of Life Why Planetary Health is the Story of this Century

Abstract: We have built modern medicine on top of a planet we are quietly dismantling. Drawing on three decades in disaster zones, clinical practice, international organisations and government, what does it mean to take the health of the whole Earth as seriously as the health of a single patient. This keynote explains, in plain terms, what planetary health is and how we make a planetary diagnosis legible — translating how a warming, fraying Earth inpacts human lives. It asks what universities are for in such an age, why the communities healing people and those defending the planet still work apart, and how our growing cities could become the place where they finally act as one for inter-generational justice.

Dr Mahmood is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Clean Air and co-chair of the Climate and Heath steering group. She was Special Advisor on Public Health to the Prime Minister of Malaysia during the COVID pandemic, former Chief of the World Humanitarian Summit at the United Nations and Under Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. She is an ASEAN Prize-winner and founder of MERCY Malaysia, a leading humanitarian organisation from the Global South.