With clarity and direction, Marta Pahissa leaves marks that change things for good. Her ideas become pioneering achievements, and her knowledge and courage make her a true agent of change for Planetary Health. Part of the first official cohort of Environmental Sciences graduates in Spain and a leading expert in solution-oriented Environmental Transformation, she is Director of the Planetary Health Development Centre developed with prestigious ISGlobal and Fundació Sanitària Mollet.
She is driven by the surprise that some people or sectors seem to forget that we are “part of” nature, a trigger that led her to major milestones across large companies and third-sector organizations. Marta turns sharp insight into a driver of real change. Meet the speaker of one of the most anticipated Global Summit Talks: “Wisdom for a Living Planet: Leadership and Planetary Health” on the opening day of the IV Global Summit Science, Nature and Health, April 15–17.
How We Forget
“Nature has always been very, very present in my life. I can’t imagine my life disconnected from nature, and probably this sense of incomprehension is what led me to study Environmental Sciences. My whole career has been devoted to this connection between human health, the environment, and people.
“What surprises me is that this connection with nature is not more deeply embedded in us. What surprises me is that we forget it. There can be a ‘click’ moment often in professional conversations. The click happens when I realize that the person on the other side has a completely different mental framework. When you speak with others about this connection -which for me feels natural, deeply integrated, part of being one more animal or one more element within ecosystems- what surprises me is seeing the other perspective, the idea that we are something separate.
“I wanted to understand why we had become so separated, why we looked at ourselves as something different from nature. We perceived ourselves as observers of nature, not as ‘part of’ it.”
“I started my professional career in consulting. After a couple of years, I made what felt like a very unusual move into the NGO world. I worked in the environmental third sector for several years at Fundación Tierra, where I eventually directed the environmental foundation at the national level. I also spent significant time in international cooperation, working in India and Tanzania on the transfer of solar technology applied to water and food processing for communities.”
“We also created Spain’s first environmental information portal, terra.org, the first online store for ecological products, international conferences, and the first citizen-participated photovoltaic plants in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona. We also developed what we called ‘Solar Guerrilla,’ a photovoltaic panel you could plug directly into a socket in your home so your electricity meter would run more slowly, you would first consume the energy generated by your own solar panel.”
“In my final years at Fundación Terra, I was invited to join DKV, a German health insurance company, not a typical or obvious step. We proposed evolving their portfolio of insurance solutions beyond what they traditionally offered: placing environmental thinking at the core of the business. In reality, this approach can be applied to any company.”
“DKV was brave enough to accept the proposal. We started working with funeral insurance to create a product called Ecofuneral, transforming the last footprint of your life. The idea was to leave a responsible legacy with regenerative environmental impact. We conducted a full diagnosis of the environmental impact of funerals. I spent a year visiting cemeteries and crematoriums across Spain and around the world to understand what could be done, what legislation allowed or didn’t allow, and how the sector could evolve.”
“And we developed a solution so that the environmental impact of your final footprint would not become a contaminating legacy for the generations that follow.”
“In my final period there, my responsibility was within the Transformation and Innovation department, also focused on evolving health insurance. This is where we worked specifically on exposure to nature: how to prescribe nature, and how to incorporate services and solutions for nature exposure within health insurance.”
“That’s where I met Alex (Gesse, trainer at FTHub), so we developed many services aimed at stimulating a new healthy habit. The narrative was simple: just as we are advised to eat well and exercise, there could also be a new healthy recommendation: spending time in nature. We created an app to track your time in green spaces and produced several publications with ISGlobal to identify and communicate the benefits of nature for human health.”
“We worked with several scientists to compile all this scientific evidence so that nature prescription could also gain credibility within the healthcare profession.”
From Research to Implementation
“A year ago, I was invited to lead a new centre called the Planetary Health Development Centre, a joint initiative between ISGlobal (Barcelona Institute for Global Health) and Fundació Sanitària Mollet (FSM), a healthcare ecosystem located 20 kilometres from Barcelona that includes one of the world’s leading hospitals in environmental safety management.”
“It is internationally recognized as a Net Zero hospital in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, which is significant considering the environmental impact of the health sector, and it has a long trajectory of excellence in environmental management.”
“The aim of this centre is to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and the healthcare system. In other words, to apply the research generated by ISGlobal and create a living lab, a territorial model where this knowledge can be implemented not only inside the hospital but also across the wider area it serves: 11 municipalities and 165,000 people.”
“The goal is not to conduct research itself, but to apply that research and develop a territorial model where the reference hospital helps transform health — not only by treating people when they arrive at the hospital, but by improving the health of the communities living in that territory.”
Decarbonizing the Health Sector
“With this perspective, we aim to develop a territorial model of Planetary Health that includes exposure to green spaces, diet, and physical activity. At the same time, we are working to scale the experience of decarbonizing healthcare systems to other hospitals and health systems in Catalonia, Spain, and especially across Europe.”
“No sector should generate environmental impact, or at least every sector should strive to reduce it. But the health sector has a double face: it generates impact, yet it is also the sector that heals you. There is a deeper contradiction when a sector that affects health through pollution is also responsible for caring for that health.”
“What drives me is systemic adoption: refining solutions emerging from research so that they become very easy for healthcare systems to adopt.”
“Implementation is too often left to the goodwill, motivation, or enthusiasm of individual professionals. That doesn’t work, and it isn’t fair. It shouldn’t depend on that. We need structure, professionalization, and proper adoption. What’s missing is the arm that carries it forward.”
“If we seek systemic adoption, for example, it would mean that nature prescription becomes systematically integrated across hospitals — in Spain, in Europe, wherever possible. We need to be pragmatic and professional. We have to go into the real context of consultations: define which patients it makes sense for, where it should happen, with which professionals, at what time, and for what purpose.”
“We have to move into real prescription practices, not rely on goodwill, enthusiasm, or individual knowledge among healthcare professionals. For me, it’s about structuring when and how nature is prescribed from each consultation.”
Ph: Courtesy Marta Pahissa
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