Liz Willetts

Liz Willetts is a science-policy expert on planetary health governance. She is a family medicine clinician with a 10-year background in community public health and medicine in marginalized and Indigenous populations and has 20 years’ experience tracking international diplomacy and environment and human rights law related to the nature and health nexus.

Since 2009, Liz has covered over a dozen multilateral environmental agreements and processes with the ENB. She is experienced in the global governance of climate change (UNFCCC, IPCC), biodiversity (CBD, IPBES, Convention on Wetlands, ITPGRFA), chemicals and waste pollution (BRS Conventions, SAICM, GFC, Plastics Treaty), land (UNCCD), food security (CFS), water (UN Water, Water Convention), disaster risk reduction (Sendai Framework), Indigenous Peoples issues (UNPFII, SB8j), and sustainable development (CSD, HLPF and the SDGs). She closely follows the evolving environmental agenda of the World Health Organization and the World Health Assembly.

She has advised and authored landmark planetary health works for the World Health Organization, World Bank, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the Planetary Health Alliance, the Indigenous Determinants of Health Alliance, International Alliance Against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade, and the Global Climate and Health Alliance, among others. She is a contributing author to IPCC AR7 and was a voluntary reviewer for several IPBES thematic assessments (Biodiversity-Water-Food-Health Nexus, Transformative Change, Monitoring).

For 2023-2024 Liz served as Planetary Health Policy Director at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She also advised and drafted the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health negotiated and adopted by 196 countries in 2024. In 2026, Liz served as Review Committee Member of the inaugural U.S. National Assessment by the Nature Record, hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (U.S.) and contributes freelance news writing for The Lancet and The Lancet Planetary Health.

Liz is a current member of the IUCN Medicinal Plant Specialist Group and a past lead on Nature and Mental Health for IUCN CEM Human Health Thematic Group. She is affiliated to the Masters in Planetary Health at University of Edinburgh, Scotland (instructor) and at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain (thesis advisor) and is an Associate Editor for Frontiers Conservation Social Sciences.

She has a B.A. in biology (University of Pennsylvania), M.E.M. in environmental economics and policy (Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment), and M.M.S.c. in medicine (Emory University School of Medicine).

As a clinician, Liz served long-term roles in resource poor primary care medical clinics, on a remote island in Micronesia, at a bilingual Spanish clinic in Harvard - Mass General-Brigham Hospital system, and in an Indigenous hospital in Central America. She currently practices in an underserved community clinic with a focus on women’s health.

Liz was lead author of five IISD publications:

• COVID-19 and Planetary Health (2020): a 50-year retrospective on the health-environment intersection since the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in the Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN Sustainable Development Policy.
• Health in the Global Environmental Agenda: a policy guide, an analyses of 9 multilateral environmental agreements plus the World Health Assembly (2021) that led to a Comment in The Lancet.
• Operationalizing the Environment-Health Nexus in Asia and the Pacific, a regional policy guide in collaboration with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2022).
• Integrating Policy: Water, Endocrine Disruptors, Pharmaceuticals in collaboration with UNEP and the SAICM Secretariat towards the UN Water Conference (2023).
• The SDGs and Global Health Governance: Impacts, Shifts, Gaps and Risks, in The Elgar Companion to Global Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals (2026): an analysis of the integration of health and environment narratives and the evolution of the WHO Global Programme of Work since adoption of the SDGs.