Kinari Webb

Kinari Webb, MD founded Health In Harmony as a response to the devastation she saw in the rainforests of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. With a mission to recognize the inextricable link between human and environmental health and a focus on providing healthcare as an incentive to protect natural resources, Health In Harmony is working toward a healthy planet for all. The seeds of a future in Indonesia were first sown for Kinari Webb in 1993, while studying orangutans in Gunung Palung National Park. Bearing witness to the dichotomy of a beautiful and simultaneously threatened rainforest, and experiencing firsthand the travesties befalling local communities with regards to healthcare, Kinari vowed to complete medical training and return to Indonesia.

Dr Webb graduated from Yale University’s School of Medicine with honors and completed her residency in family medicine at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, California in 2005; Health In Harmony was founded shortly thereafter. She then moved to Indonesia and began work around arguably the most precious national park in the country called Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan. In listening to local rainforest communities, Dr. Webb and her Indonesian colleagues found that the need for affordable healthcare and training in sustainable agricultural techniques were driving illegal logging. Through a co-designed healthcare system and integrated economic development work, over 10 years illegal logging households dropped by 90%, infant mortality declined 67%. Loss of primary forest was halted and over 52,000 acres of new forest grew back. The carbon impact is estimated conservatively at $53 million dollars. With Health In Harmony’s support, this model is now operating in 9 million hectares of land in Indonesia, Madagascar and Brazil.

Given the success of these sites, Health In Harmony is preparing to scale globally in partnership with Pawanka Fund and Woodwell Climate Research Center. Dr Webb was honored with an Ashoka Social Entrepreneur Fellowship in 2014 and was selected as a Rainier Arhnold Fellow through the Mulago Foundation in the same year.

In 2017 she gave the commencement address at Yale medical school. Kinari’s work has been profiled in Oprah Magazine, BBC, PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, National Geographic, the Sierra Club, Mongabay, Four Indonesian TV channels, Tempo Magazine, Kompas Newspaper and the Voice of America. Her memoir Guardians of the Trees was published in 2021 to critical acclaim.