Research

...Donna Green, Maddie Heenan, Ollie Jay, Harry Kennard, Arunima Malik, Celia McMichael, Mark Stevenson, Sotiris Vardoulakis, Aditya Vyas, Marina B Romanello, Maria Walawender, Ying Zhang

April 6, 2025

In this, the sixth report of the MJA–Lancet Countdown, we track progress on an extensive suite of indicators across these five domains, accessing and presenting the latest data and further refining and developing our analyses.

This Perspective is authored by participants from our first year of the Future Leaders program. The paper articulates proposed future research directions emerging from shared understandings of intersecting governance and policy challenges, including sections on transdisciplinary and co-productive knowledge paradigms; political economy and governance; policy integration; and opportunities to advance planetary health equity.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2025.100245

In this commentary, we give examples of some of the avenues by which this transformation could occur, including those that draw on financial and governance mechanisms.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00278-X

Our analysis indicates much greater attention to economic issues than to social determinants in countries’ NDCs, particularly in high-income, high-emitting and carbon intensive economies. It seems there is a clear need to reorient policymaking toward health equity and social determinants within these critical climate change policy documents.

https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad7edf

Transparent checks and balances must be built into these systems, with state actors using their regulatory power to guide financial practices in ways that are good for planetary health equity and hold financial actors accountable. Civil society groups can shine a light on these practices, articulate alternative visions and hold financial actors, and governments, to account. Ultimately, financial and commercial worlds must return to stakeholder primacy rather than that of the shareholder.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(24)00187-7

To achieve this potential, this working paper recommends: ending fossil fuel-related financing, reducing domestic content requirements for clean energy projects, expanding domestic lending and equity financing for renewable energy, and enhancing ECAs' roles through blended finance frameworks.

https://iit.adelaide.edu.au/news/list/2024/08/21/mapping-networks-of-export-credit-for-fossil-and-clean-energy-infrastructure

In discussing these preventive actions, this article emphasises the urgent need to transform the consumptogenic system, with a focus on economic models, policy coherence, advocacy, and health sector leadership. 

https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.52397

This exploratory analysis indicates that structural power within the supercluster complex for planetary health equity is not evenly distributed, is highly centralised and dominated by economic governance organisations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2024.100207

...Donna Green, Maddie Heenan, Ollie Jay, Harry Kennard, Arunima Malik, Celia McMichael, Mark Stevenson, Sotiris Vardoulakis, Tran N Dang, Gail Garvey, Raymond Lovett, Veronica Matthews, Dung Phung, Alistair J Woodward, Marina B Romanello, Ying Zhang

March 24, 2024

In this, the seventh report of the MJA–Lancet Countdown, we track progress on an extensive suite of indicators across these five domains, accessing, assessing and presenting the latest data and further refining and developing our analyses.

https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.52616

This commentary reflects on what should follow COP28's successes and failures. It highlights the need to focus on mitigation policies both at national and international levels to avoid the further exacerbation of the climate-health-equity crisis. It calls on governments, especially in high-income countries, to shift towards an economic system centre on wellbeing rather than GDP to create the environment for those mitigation policies to flourish and deliver positive outcomes for people and planet, as well as reshaping COP governance to rebalance power dynamics in the decision-making process.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00199-5

Taking the necessary bold mitigation action requires disrupting the consumptogenic system, and the entrenched power inequities that exist at the core of this system. Governments, especially in high-income countries, must use their regulatory power to curb excess commercial activities and stop further coal, oil, and gas projects.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)02512-6

We analysed the Australian growth model, the politics that sustain this model, and the impacts of the model on people and the planet. We show that the Australian growth model has become more reliant on domestic consumption fuelled by rising house prices and a permissive credit environment to drive economic growth. The key drivers of the Australian growth model have created conditions that undermine economic equality, drive health inequities, and create excessive greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2023.2242796

The Planetary Health Equity Hothouse is a transdisciplinary research program that aims to present new conceptual thinking and empirical evidence around the complexities, dynamics, and trajectories of the global 21st century consumptogenic system, with a novel focus on the intersections between climate change and social and health inequities. Critically, it aims to provide practical strategies for socially-oriented actors, including governments, civil society, and international organizations to change the consumptogenic system and advance action for planetary health equity.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2022.100195

...Mark Stevenson, Fay H Johnston, Celia McMichael, Fiona Charlson, Alistair J Woodward and Marina B Romanello

November 7, 2022 

The MJA–Lancet Countdown on health and climate change in Australia was established in 2017 and produced its first national assessment in 2018 and annual updates in 2019, 2020 and 2021. It examines five broad domains: climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerability; adaptation, planning and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; economics and finance; and public and political engagement. In this, the fifth year of the MJA–Lancet Countdown, we track progress on an extensive suite of indicators across these five domains, accessing and presenting the latest data and further refining and developing our analyses.

https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51742

This article lays out ways of advancing planetary health equity goals. To help achieve these, the health community must advocate for and engage in intersectoral policy discussions relating to the social determinants and the structural consumptogenic system. Acting immediately on these issues is critically important if we are to avert a planetary health inequity crisis.

https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51731

Recalibrating power inequities might be possible by compelling narration of ideas that advance equity and sustainability, strategic use of institutional processes, and social mobilisation among like-minded and unusual bedfellows."

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01544-6

On 9th and 10th December 2025, members of the Hothouse (and friends) attended the Monitoring Corporate Power workshop, organised by colleagues at Deakin University. The intent was to interactively discuss and demonstrate practical methods for monitoring corporate power, which meant dedicating quite a bit of time to each topic or session so we could do deep dives into the methods. This gave us the opportunity to see the applications and virtues of different methods, as well as, of course, the limitations and frustrations.

There are a couple of presentations I highlight in my comments here. I have been working on a project led by Ashley Schram, where we are drawing attention to how public policy does or undoes privilege, and what this means for health equity. Hearing Jason Ward say, “poverty is a symptom of greed”, resonated with me in relation to this body of work. It is similar to something Shamus Khan, who has done research on elites, says: “poor people are not why there is inequality; rich people are why there is inequality”. Instead of having public policy and research focused on the ‘disadvantaged’, questioning why systems continue to promoting advantages among those who already hold extreme advantage and privilege in our societies. Jason went on to deliver a session about analysing corporate tax. Taxation is a tool that societies have available right now to tackle economic inequality and thus the health inequities that ensue, but we are yet to see transformative tax reform because of issues such as those discussed in the workshop in relation to corporate political activity (which was the focus of the session facilitated by Jenn Lacy-Nichols and Katherine Cullerton).

John Mikler gave a great talk about different types of power – structural, instrumental, and discursive – and was encouraging us to pay particular attention to discursive power. He mentioned the term, ‘discourse coalitions’, which was a new term to me, where government and industry are speaking the same language. The media has a large role in perpetuating this language and particular narratives. In the privilege project, I analysed Australian agricultural policy, and you can ‘see’ discourse coalitions playing out there in the way industrial agriculture is depicted as essential for Australia’s economy through providing jobs and exports. You can see these sorts of narratives and discourse coalitions in gas and coal as well. These narratives inhibit people questioning who ultimately ends up benefiting from the profits of these industries.

Zooming out, a couple of cross-cutting points that I took away from the workshop are that sometimes data are available in existing databases or there are avenues to collect data primary data (business or philanthropic events/conferences), but they can be incredibly expensive to access, or data are in terrible formats or arrangements that require the researcher to spend a lot of time conducting data cleaning.

To finish on a note of hope, as we should aim to do: we – researchers in the collective sense – do have lots of tools and tricks up our sleeves to generate evidence that can arm other academics, NGOs, civil society to come together to push Governments to implement policies that would rein in corporate power to produce better outcomes for the public interest and not serving only private interests.