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One Health for the Future: Three Pathways Against Tomorrow’s Crises

Report

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the past two and a half years have highlighted more than ever the need for a holistic policy approach when tackling phenomena such as zoonotic diseases (infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans). At the same time the way humanity is interacting with its environment needs to radically change to preserve not only our own but also our ecosystem’s health. If the status quo remains, future crises seem unavoidable.

Indeed, humanity is confronted with pressing challenges such as zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and food safety and security threats. These challenges are directly and indirectly linked to the way we treat our ecosystems, interact with non-human animals, organize our food systems and handle the use of antibiotics. The concept of One Health is a much-needed paradigm shift as it explores the interlinkages between human health, animal health, and the health of the ecosystems we inhabit, and has the potential to support solutions to overcome the above-mentioned challenges. While international organizations and their Member States are increasingly aligning and integrating One Health as a concept into their action plans, we at foraus believed that it was crucial to go one step further by looking into the future and thinking about the One Health approach of tomorrow in an open and inclusive process, outside of usual thinking patterns and existing multilateral processes. This project brief summarizes the main results and ideas crowdsourced through this participatory process involving interested citizens and experts from the field. It presents policy pathways that should be further explored.

Workshop

How can food security be ensured while adapting food systems to environmental and public health considerations in East Africa? How can we design food systems more holistically and sustainably taking into account the concept of One Health in the region? As a next step of the One Health for the Future project, foraus is focusing on the topic of food security in the East African region to tackle these questions together with our Kenyan partner Youth Café.

Worskop details

Place: Online (Zoom)

Date and time: 6 October 2022 at 13:00 – 15:00 (Eastern Afrian time) / 12:00 – 14:00 (Central European time)