Although South Africa has achieved near-universal grid electrification, many connected households experience inadequate, unreliable, and unaffordable energy. This review asks why energy poverty persists despite improved access, a question at the intersection of social inequality, human health, and environmental sustainability, the core concerns of planetary health. Drawing on 143 sources (peer-reviewed studies, reports, and theses) from a structured search of Scopus and Google Scholar (1994–2026) and citation tracking, the review examines conceptual foundations, drivers, and disparities of household energy poverty by income, gender, location, and province; its associations with welfare, health, education, livelihoods, and the environment; and South Africa’s policy responses. Building on South African reviews that addressed measurement within the Just Energy Transition or focused on rural households, it makes three contributions: it covers urban, peri-urban, informal, and rural settings; it proposes a conceptual framework linking structural drivers, household energy conditions, well-being and environmental outcomes, and policy responses through multidimensional energy poverty, energy justice, and planetary health; and it appraises where the evidence is consistent, mixed, or limited. Evidence of the persistence and unequal distribution of energy poverty after connection is consistent, whereas evidence of its consequences is weaker. Energy transitions are not driven by electrification or decarbonization alone but by household energy well-being: whether households can obtain adequate, affordable, reliable, and safe energy that supports health and livelihoods while reducing environmental harm. Limitations include purposive source selection and mostly cross-sectional evidence; most reported relationships should therefore be read as associations rather than demonstrated causal effects.
Malnutrition in Nepal’s Eastern Terai is shaped by food access, caregiving, water and sanitation, agricultural livelihoods, and local institutions. This mixed-methods evaluation describes the implementation patterns and endline nutrition, WASH, and food-system practices of an integrated Nutrition Education and Rehabilitation Program (NERP) and Linking Agriculture and Natural Resource Management towards Nutrition (LANN+) programme implemented in Karjanha, Kalyanpur, and Siraha municipalities from 2021 to 2024. The final evaluation included a household survey of 365 participating households, six focus group discussions with 69 participants, 19 key informant interviews, document review, and a partner reflection workshop. Because endline households were selected sequentially from accessible participating households until municipality/community quotas were met, municipality comparisons are presented descriptively rather than as population-level statistical inference. Project-supported community screening conducted by health-facility staff used MUAC and weight-for-height criteria for children aged 6–59 months. The Phase II evaluation source records reported a GAM prevalence of 20.0% at the initial project screening and 8.38% (1038/12,392 screening records) at the final screening; because the initial numerator/denominator, individual anthropometric records, exact screening coverage, and seasonal comparability were not available for secondary verification, these values are not interpreted as a verified longitudinal reduction. At endline, MDD-W was 79.3% (242/305), and the project-defined SIFS criterion was met by 92.7% (294/317) and the project-defined hygiene criterion by 95.6% (349/365). After correcting age-inconsistent breastfeeding records, a breastfeeding-related project criterion was met by 84.5% (125/148) of households with children aged 0–59 months; a corrected complementary-feeding criterion was met by 73.8% (104/141) of households with children aged 6–59 months. The qualitative findings indicated that nutrition gardens, diversified production, nutrition learning, women’s economic participation, and municipal planning were perceived as mutually reinforcing, while COVID-19 disruptions, procurement delays, seasonal water constraints, and weak routine water treatment constrained implementation. This study provides descriptive implementation evidence; climate resilience and planetary-health benefits remain plausible pathways rather than directly measured outcomes.
Peer-to-peer finance is usually dated to the platform lending experiments of the mid-2000s, a dating that inverts the actual chronology. Rotating savings associations, burial societies, tontines and village pools have carried the risk of illness, death and income loss for centuries without disintermediating, and many households that lack formal insurance rely on them. The paper treats such arrangements as an unrecognised tier of climate adaptation finance whose binding constraint is the correlation of member losses rather than trust, transaction cost or informality. In the symmetric equicorrelated pooling model the gain from membership is bounded above by 1 − √ρ, a ceiling of 29% at an illustrative correlation of 0.5, whatever the pool size. The paper also argues that repeated correlated shocks deplete the pool’s capital, a proposition labelled the correlation ratchet. The demand shortfall in index insurance is attributed, as an untested hypothesis, to placement rather than product design, as contracts were sold to households at the tier where pooling works instead of to aggregators at the tier where it fails. The paper proposes a tiered architecture, in which parametric cover is written to the aggregator under governance safeguards and digital transfer rails extend reciprocity beyond the hazard footprint.
Planetary health has emerged as a critical framework for understanding the interdependence of human, social and ecological systems in the face of escalating global challenges. While discussions of planetary health have largely focused on policy and systems-level interventions, comparatively little attention has been given to the developmental foundations that shape how future generations will respond to these challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss and widening social inequities. This viewpoint highlights that early childhood flourishing represents a critical foundation for planetary health. Drawing on perspectives from early childhood development, relational health and planetary health, we examine how children’s flourishing is shaped by their relationships, environments and opportunities for growth. Recognising flourishing in early childhood as a planetary health concern broadens current understandings of prevention, early intervention and systems change. Supporting flourishing in early life is not only an investment in children’s present wellbeing, but also in the capacities future generations will need to contribute to sustainable futures and respond to planetary challenges.
Sustainable food system transformation is inseparable from planetary health, the interdependent wellbeing of human populations and the ecological systems that sustain them. Agroecology and regenerative agriculture are frequently portrayed as competing paradigms for sustainable food system transformation. This commentary challenges this framing as both analytically unwarranted and practically counterproductive. Grounded in Ethiopia’s smallholder agricultural context and informed by recent empirical evidence, we argue that these two approaches are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Agroecology emerged from an equity-centered, participatory, and politically engaged framework for transforming food systems, while regenerative agriculture contributes farm-level ecological restoration tools and measurable biophysical outcomes related to planetary health. Neither is sufficient alone: regenerative practices without agroecology’s social architecture risk reinforcing existing inequities; agroecology without a systematic effort to ensure a widespread increase in production for food security and a net positive regeneration of environmental health cannot fully deliver its transformative potential, particularly in contexts where productivity, livelihoods, and ecosystem restoration must be achieved Ethiopia’s concurrent validation of a National Agroecology Strategy (2026–2040) and advancement of a National Regenerative Agriculture Strategy (2026–2036) reflects a growing national recognition that these paradigms are essential partners, not rivals. An integrated framework embedding regenerative practices within agroecological principles offers the most scientifically grounded and contextually appropriate pathway for Ethiopia’s resilient, equitable, and productive agricultural transformation. Reframed in these terms, agroecology–regenerative integration is not simply a technical or sectoral fix but a direct contribution to planetary health, safeguarding the ecological systems, food security, and social equity on which human wellbeing ultimately depends.
