As an Environmental Health Officer (EHO) with experience working in government, from the field to healthy built environments more recently climate change and health, my practice has been shaped by an intrinsic connection to the living world of which we are inseparable. Alongside the inspections, site visits, risk assessments, and healthy public policy work, I found myself drawn to a question: how can EHOs protect both human health and the ecological systems that sustain us, especially when our life support systems, including climate, watersheds and biodiversity, are themselves unravelling? How can we recentre our practice in allyship?

This reflection shares learnings from participating in an international research collaboration that set out to illuminate and respond to these questions, co-led by Alex Macmillan, Fran Kewene, Margot Parkes, Nina Veenstra and myself. Together, we brought environmental health leaders, professionals, policy makers, and academics across Aotearoa(New Zealand), Australia, the Pacific, and British Columbia to explore what are oriented, planetary health-informed EHO practice might look like.

The work began with a narrative literature review and environmental scan, followed by three online wānanga, deliberative workshops grounded in Māori ways of knowing and being. Emphasising relationship-building with Indigenous and non-Indigenous EHOs across these regions, we explored regulation, curriculum, and the workplace conditions that enable or constrain practice change.

A number of themes emerged, but what moved me most was this: practitioners are already doing the work (Macmillan et al, unpublished). Quietly, and often despite regulatory constraints, EHOs are finding openings for Indigenousknowledge-centred practice, particularly around traditional food systems and emergency management. These are the glimmers. Sustaining them requires something more structural:

·       Participatory reform of legislation and competency frameworks that genuinely centres Indigenous knowledges;

·       Training that balances technical and relational skills alongside land-based learning; and

·       Long-term investment in dedicated Indigenous EHO roles with the institutional backing to challenge policies that no longer serve people or planet.

Recentring environmental health practice is not about abandoning what we know. It is about expanding our scope, what we allow ourselves to see and do, and who we invite into that seeing. For me, one of the deepest learnings came from the land, and from the work of embedding its wisdom in our practice.

This work also informed a piece with Dr. Trevor Hancock, in which we argue that planetary health is not an addition to environmental public health but a fuller expression of it, moving from the local to the global and back again (Hancock and Yehia, 2026). The collaboration is also progressing further outputs and publications, so stay tuned (Macmillan et al).

References:

Hancock, T. and Yehia, J. (2026). Planetary health IS environmental public health: from the local to the global—and back. Environmental Health Review. 69(2): 46-51. https://doi.org/10.5864/d2026-008 

Macmillan, A., Kewene, F., Parkes, M., Yehia, J., & Veenstra, N. (2024). Pathways towards a planetary health workforce (Unpublished manuscript). Department of Public Health, University of Otago.