Addiction Recovery as a Planetary Health Challenge: Historical Perspectives on Social Equity, Community Resilience, and Recovery-Oriented Care

Recovery-oriented addiction treatment has developed from mutual-aid movements and therapeutic communities into increasingly professionalised, data-informed, and socially integrated systems of care. Yet its relationship to planetary health has received limited attention. This article examines the historical foundations and current challenges of recovery-oriented addiction treatment and interprets recovery as a process shaped not only by individual change or clinical intervention, but also by the social, cultural, economic, institutional, relational, and ecological conditions in which people and communities live and flourish. Using a historiographic and historical-analytical qualitative approach, the article traces the transition from peer-led recovery models to professional therapeutic communities and contemporary outcome-oriented frameworks. The analysis shows that recovery capital, social participation, housing, employment, community relationships, equity, service integration, and intersectoral collaboration are central links between recovery-oriented care and planetary health. At the same time, the field remains limited by conceptual ambiguity, heterogeneous interventions, unequal access to recovery resources, fragmented services, and methodological difficulties in evaluating dynamic and context-dependent trajectories. The article argues that a Science of Recovery should be understood as an emerging, transdisciplinary, and systems-oriented field. Its consolidation requires stronger methodological standards and a planetary health perspective capable of connecting individual recovery with healthier, more inclusive, equitable, resilient, and ecologically sustainable communities.