Short abstract

We examine climate-health risks from the 2025 California and 2024 Bolivian wildfires through a Real-World Knowledge (RWK) approach. Integrating experiential, practitioner, and scientific knowledge, we show how Planetary Health is both socially embedded and politically constituted.

Long abstract

In 2023, the World Health Organization declared the climate crisis and associated extreme weather events a public health emergency. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires increasingly compromise health, wellbeing, and livelihoods, triggering cascading climate-health risks ranging from increased mortality to the emergence of infectious and non-communicable diseases and disrupted living conditions. Yet, despite growing recognition of their urgency, progress towards climate and health goals remains insufficient. The strikingly limited implementation of these goals points to a gap that extends beyond biomedical or environmental explanations. Drawing on two recent catastrophic wildfire events – the 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in California and the 2024 Bolivian wildfires – we propose a Real-World Knowledge (RWK) approach that connects to STS debates on epistemic pluralism and the co-production of knowledge. By integrating experiential, practitioner, and scientific knowledge, we examine how wildfire risks are produced, interpreted, and governed across unequal socio-political contexts. This allows us to show how Planetary Health risks are not merely governed politically but are politically constituted. Structural, infrastructural, policy-related, and practice-related factors actively shape climate-health risks and outcomes. Failure to address climate change, land-use regimes, infrastructural vulnerability, policy regimes, and community needs reproduces preventable health harms during extreme weather events. Against this backdrop, we argue that Planetary Health must become a more socially anchored and publicly engaged field – one that confronts its political determinants to unlock its potential in theory and in practice.