Through our findings, oneHEALTH seeks to understand the health implications of current and anticipated global environmental change to identify policy and practical solutions to promote human health, ecosystem integrity, and sustainable development.
In 2014 Future Earth developed its Strategic Research Agenda, highlighting health as one of 8 global sustainability challenges. This touches on many important aspects of health – environmental change, pollution, pathogens, vectors, ecosystem services, livelihoods, nutrition, and well being – and calls for study of and responses to their complex interactions. The Future Earth call to action also emphasizes full-cycle research that extends all the way to policy and societal outputs. Building on its strong past biodiversity and health research base, the oneHEALTH project’s 2015 – 2020 research and action model operationalizes a new era in health science.
The project takes an interdisciplinary “One Health” approach to exploring the integral connections between environment and health to better understand their dynamics and develop synergistic solutions. A greater appreciation of the sectors that influence health – including those involving agriculture, wildlife trade, pollution, extractive industries, deforestation, climate change, and human migration – can help identify mechanisms that affect wild and domestic animals, plants, and humans to better address infectious and non-communicable disease threats. The project’s key areas of research and policy focus include:
- Connections between biodiversity, ecosystems and infectious diseases
- Climate change, demography and health
- Economics of diseases – including their drivers and alternative policy scenarios
- Leveraging health to promote sustainable development
- Through its diverse partnerships, oneHEALTH produces innovative scientific knowledge on pressing disease and ecosystem challenges and translates it to direct policy applications. Currently, public health systems are highly reactive, typically responding to new health threats but not investing in their prevention. By considering projected environment and disease outcomes together in light of agriculture practices, land use changes, global trade and travel, urbanization and other trends we can work across sectors to optimize sustainable development and health gains.