5th Science Policy Forum for Biodiversity COP 15 session 3

Key messages from the session

One-Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach — working at the local, regional, national, and global levels — with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.

This session explored how to address health-related challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change using evidence-based solutions and the holistic, integrated approach of One Health solutions. Interdisciplinary speakers from non-governmental organizations, academia, and youth demonstrated their global, regional, and local efforts and concrete examples that range from co-designing inclusive and coherent decision-support tools for the health sector to implementing One Health policies to building a strong community of practice that both meaningfully engages with and supports the aims of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and biodiversity-inclusive One Health efforts, and the right to a healthy environment.

• Health makes the negative consequences of global environmental change more tangible. Making health outcomes explicit can help to foster individual and political will to protect biodiversity.
• Transformative change is needed in our relationship with the environment and how we tackle disease emergence, spill-over, and spread. We must acknowledge that biodiversity loss undermines life-support systems essential to human existence. The costs of investing in surveillance and early warning systems and in wildlife health management are not negligible, but the costs and risks of not doing so are far greater both from a public health perspective, and health for domestic animals’ standpoint, as well as for the preservation of biodiversity. Thus, restoration of biodiversity should be included in all public health policies.
• Coordinated global action is needed now, more than ever, to ensure that biodiversity including wildlife health is fully integrated into the One Health discussions along with the environmental sector and is adequately considered in the future governance of One Health currently negotiated.
• The prevention of pathogen spillover – i.e., prevention at the source or upstream prevention, including protecting forests and improved wildlife trade regulation – can be the first line of defence against outbreaks and the emergence of new diseases; it is cost-efficient and comes with co-benefits for biodiversity and climate mitigation and adaptation, yet attention and resourcing is currently focused on preparedness and response once an outbreak occurs.
• The Quadripartite OH Joint Plan of Action provides a framework for action and proposes a set of activities that the four Secretariats can offer together to enable countries to advance and sustainably scale up One Health in managing health threats to humans, animals, plants, and the environment.
• One Health is not the easy option. It takes dedication to foster collaboration across disciplines, communication across silos, coordination for integrated solutions and capacity building. All these are key to the International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade.
• The evidence-based impact of our community-guided, Radical Listening model Health in Harmony has been practicing and refining for the last 15 years provides a unique, scientifically validated framework to governments and multilaterals for achievement of multiple SDGs simultaneously, including positive human health, biodiversity, and climate outcomes.
• Transdisciplinary approaches bring together biophysical and social sciences with actors outside academia to jointly develop solutions. This process increases the likelihood that co-created tools/information is used by decision-makers, communities, and other knowledge users.
• In developing early warning systems and other evidence-based solutions as part of the post-2020 GBF, it is critical that health sector leadership is engaged and that strong partnerships are built across climate-environment-health sectors.
• The nature-based wisdom and expertise of indigenous and local peoples of place should guide humanity’s planetary health/ one health solutions to nature’s collapse and the climate crisis.
• Youth are the vectors of change to implement the post-2020 GBF and demand a rights-based approach to the biodiversity and health nexus. Resource mobilization for youth-led research is needed with the meaningful involvement of the voices of indigenous youth and youth from local communities.

Co-creation with youth experts, scientists and practitioners is a key principle for the design and development of innovative capacity building tools for transformative and integrated education and policy frameworks with tangible actions for mainstreaming biodiversity in the health sector and the health messaging and scientific evidence for centralizing One Health and intergenerational equity in the climate and biodiversity loss agenda