On a hillside in Nepal’s Lupra Valley, Suman Gyawali and Ruikang Wang came across a group of children as they walked uphill.
The children were happy to see them. They loved soccer, and before long the conversation turned to a familiar question: Messi or Ronaldo?
The children also talked about life at school. They lived in a hostel away from their families and returned home during the two months of winter when extreme cold forced the school to close.
What stayed with Gyawali was how hopeful they were. Many shared their dreams for the future.
“We human beings, we do not need much to have peace of mind, self-satisfaction and joy,” he said.
The encounter reflects the kind of unexpected learning at the heart of the Himalayan Planetary Health Transect, or HPHT, an immersive field-learning program that brings together students and faculty from Duke University, Duke Kunshan University and Nepal.
Rather than study environmental, social and health issues separately, participants travel through Nepal’s Kali Gandaki River Basin to explore how these systems connect.
Over more than two weeks, students moved from the tropical lowlands of the Terai through the Middle Hills and alpine Himalaya toward the Tibetan Plateau. Along the way, they spoke with farmers, health workers, government officials, conservationists and local residents, examining questions involving water, agriculture, migration, biodiversity, landslides and livelihoods.
A classroom without walls
“Planetary health is simply the idea that the health of humanity is linked to the health of the Earth systems that support life on the planet,” said Brian McAdoo, professor of Earth and Climate Sciences at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
HPHT grew out of years of research, teaching and collaboration in Nepal around disaster risk, health, environmental change and experiential learning.
McAdoo’s own work in Nepal expanded after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, which produced nearly 20,000 landslides, many associated with roads built to support development in rural communities.
The work also speaks to a question at the heart of McAdoo’s teaching and research: How can societies pursue sustainable development without damaging the Earth systems that support human health and well-being?
Nepal is a particularly revealing place to explore that question. Traveling through the Kali Gandaki River Basin, students experience major changes in climate, landscape, culture and livelihoods over a relatively short geographic distance, from the tropical Terai to the Tibetan Plateau.
For Binbin Li, associate professor of environmental science at DKU and one of the program’s faculty leaders, that compressed ecological diversity makes Nepal an especially powerful place to study planetary health.
Students can see how environmental systems, cultural practices and human well-being are intertwined across elevations and communities.
But HPHT does not give students a fixed research question and ask them to find the answer.
“The biggest feature is that students actively acquire what they learn themselves,” Li said. “We only provide a broad framework.”
Students are given enough background to ask informed questions, but not so much structure that every question has already been answered for them.
Sometimes, curiosity leads students in unexpected directions.
Before the trip, Wang brought a small water-quality testing device because he was curious about water. It was not required equipment. When the team later planned a visit to a village water source, he joined the group and tested the water.
His curiosity had effectively created its own assignment.
What happens when disciplines meet
DKU undergraduates joined HPHT for the first time in 2026, adding another layer of academic and cultural diversity to the program.
The cohort brought together students from Duke, DKU and Nepal with backgrounds including environmental science, geology, agriculture, sociology, data science, media arts and public policy.
That diversity was intentional. The program sought students from different academic backgrounds so they could share what they know while remaining willing to explore what they do not.
One group studying the effects of climate change on apple cultivation offered a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.
An agriculture student could consider how changing conditions affect crops. A geology student could examine soil, rock and landslide risks. A sociology student could ask who performs agricultural labor and who may be most affected by environmental change.
The same orchard raised different questions depending on who was looking at it.
“We’re not just learning the environment from one lens,” said Yesuidari Amarbayasgalan, a DKU undergraduate from Mongolia. “The field trip showed me the criticality of interdisciplinarity.”
The learning also crossed national and cultural boundaries.
Many community conversations depended on Nepali students, who helped bridge language and cultural differences. During interviews, students worked together to translate, clarify and verify information.
“The project would not work at all were it not for the Nepali students,” McAdoo said.
Li saw something equally important happening among the students themselves.
“The most interesting part was the interaction between Duke students, DKU students and Nepali students,” she said. “A lot of the learning was not between teachers and students, but among the students themselves.”
For Honglin Yan, a DKU undergraduate, that was one of the biggest differences from learning on campus.
“Although DKU also have conversation or discussion-based classes, they couldn’t compare with the variety of people we can talk to in the field,” he said.
Yan had visited Nepal before, but as a tourist. This time, he wanted to see the country through a researcher’s eyes.
In Upper Mustang, Yan saw how changes in rainfall and grasslands were affecting not only agriculture and herding, but also wildlife and people’s livelihoods.
When the solution creates another question
One example came in a watershed above Pokhara.
Nearly two decades ago, a road was cut into a hillside to connect a rural community with Pokhara. Increasingly intense monsoon rainfall has compounded the problem. The road triggered a large landslide that continues to send sediment downstream toward Phewa Lake.
The sediment threatens the health of the lake and could eventually contribute to filling it.
A siltation dam was built to trap the sediment before it reached the lake. But the sediment did not simply become waste.
A local business turned it into aggregate for the construction industry, creating an economic use for the material while helping keep the reservoir from filling.
Then a student asked: What happens if the environmental restoration succeeds?
If less sediment accumulates, what happens to the business that depends on removing it?
For Li, the question showed that students were beginning to think about how the system might change over time.
“These kinds of questions helped us understand how students think about these systems and their future implications,” she said.
Before proposing an intervention, students need to understand the history of a problem, the people affected by it, the economic realities surrounding it and the unintended consequences that a seemingly sensible solution might create.
HPHT is deliberately designed to give students that space.
“It isn’t a class, nor is it a research project,” McAdoo said. “It is a curiosity-driven exploration.”
When environmental change becomes personal
For Duke student Elly Ronald, that complexity became tangible in Upper Mustang when she met Dolma, a 21-year-old who had left Old Samdzong.
Dolma told Ronald that her community could no longer live there because of the water situation. They packed their belongings into baskets and walked over the mountain to a new settlement.
Dolma showed Ronald her abandoned home, her former school and the water source her community had once relied on.
For Ronald, the experience changed the scale of the problem.
“That was the moment I really understood that environmental crisis is not just an abstract idea,” she said. “It can force people to leave their homes and completely change the course of a person’s life, a family’s future, and even an entire village.”
McAdoo, however, cautions against reducing the story of Samdzong to a simple case of climate migration.
The reasons residents relocated, he said, are more complicated, involving environmental factors alongside other social and economic forces.
That complexity, he believes, is precisely where planetary health becomes useful.
It creates a way to think about how human health, environmental change and human activity interact, without forcing a complicated reality into a single explanation.
For Gyawali, the journey similarly transformed an abstract concept into something concrete.
“My understanding of planetary health is that human health and the health of our planet are deeply connected,” he said. “We cannot have healthy people on a sick planet.”
“Books, podcasts and reports are very good sources of information,” Gyawali said, “but they are not a substitute for talking directly with people.”
Learning to tell the story
Students also learn how to communicate what they have seen.
Documentary photographer and visual storytelling educator Tom White guides students in photography, field documentation and storytelling.
“The stories that participants hear and document on this transect are a way of articulating this complexity and communicating it effectively,” White said.
HPHT is now in its second year, and the program itself is evolving through the students who have experienced it.
Four Nepali students from the inaugural 2025 cohort returned in 2026 as teaching assistants. They helped develop the curriculum for a new starting location, created short fact sheets to prepare students for different biogeographic regions, advocated for smaller working groups and suggested end-of-region presentations so students could begin piecing together the complexities they were encountering.
Some of those ideas initially went against the faculty lead’s advice. The students successfully argued their case.
For McAdoo, that is part of the point. The program is designed to create an environment in which students can share what they know without feeling that they are being tested, while also giving them room to explore what they do not know.
For Amarbayasgalan, the impact has continued after the trip.
“What I saw and got to know in that two weeks of transect would later emerge long after the transect ended,” she said. “So in a way, the transect is still continuing for me.”
