As we break for the holidays and begin to look forward to 2025, we're also taking a beat to look back on what most drew our readers' attention in 2024. 

The link between environmental sustainability and health outcomes — now a hallmark of planetary health — builds on a foundation of public health, which brings a systems-level approach to health issues.

Rechargeable batteries are ubiquitous and power our lives in myriad ways, but to “electrify everything” we will need dramatically more of them, and that in turn means we will need cheaper and more environmentally friendly ways of manufacturing them.

Motors drive a lot more than cars. They are a ubiquitous and established technology that currently consume roughly ¼ of all energy produced on Earth. So you might think the motors surrounding us would be maximally efficient, right? Not so fast.

Whether you enjoy air travel or not, it’s increasingly common and persistently bad for the environment. Almost three million passengers fly in and out of US airports each day and global demand for air travel is expected to double by 2050. In addition to emitting pollutants that lower air quality, aviation is recognized as a hard-to-decarbonize sector and accounts for ~3% of global CO2 emissions. Airlines have recently announced commitments to switch to "green" fuels, but as of today 95% of jet fuel is produced from fossil fuels. Why is that? 

Let’s dig into some of the most recycled materials in the world – metals – and how we might make metals recycling even better. We are obsessed with metals because they are critical materials to human civilization and well-being, which is why improved scrap metal recovery is good for the economy, good for the environment, and good for people – exactly the kind of win-win-wins we live for at Planetary Health.

Let’s talk about something everyone produces but nobody really likes – trash. People produce billions of tons of waste annually. While there are many ways to reduce the amount of waste we produce, it is not possible to stop it entirely. Waste is, quite literally, inevitable. The disorder (entropy) in the universe increases with time, which just means that things will always break and there will always be some amount of waste. Once our things become our trash, we have two options: we can dispose of them or we can try to reclaim them as a resource. From a planetary health perspective, there are a lot of reasons to want to reclaim wastes as resources. Unfortunately, it is not easy to do so economically.

Our mission at RA Capital Management (RACM) is simple: to improve the health of each and every person in the world. Staying true to RACM’s mission, the Planetary Health team invests in profit-seeking companies that benefit people by improving the health of the planet.

The federal government must address the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) with speed and clarity before it metastasizes into a national crisis, so the ecosystem of institutions in which SVB has operated, including other banks and investors, can help bridge companies so that they can continue to operate while they wait for their deposits.

The run-on-the-bank panic around SVB would have been quelled if everyone was dissuaded from succumbing to mass hysteria. Understanding what happened can help prevent further bank runs.