Abstract
The idea of the interdependency of the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems emerged from the interplay of theory and concepts from medicine, public health and ecology among leading thinkers in these fields during the last century. The rationale for One Health and its focus on the “human, animal, and environmental interface” stems from this legacy and points to transdisciplinary, ecological and complex systems approaches as central to One Health practice. Demonstration of One Health's efficacy, its wider adoption and continual improvement require explicit operational criteria and evaluation metrics on this basis. Social-Ecological Systems Theory with its unique conception of resilience (SESR) currently offers the most well-developed framework for understanding these approaches and development of performance standards. This paper describes operational criteria for One Health developed accordingly, including a protocol currently being tested for vector borne disease interventions. Wider adoption of One Health is most likely to occur as One Health practitioners gain an increasing familiarity with ecological and complex systems concepts in practice employing a transdisciplinary process. Two areas in which this inevitably will be required for significant further progress, and where the beginnings of a foundation for building upon exist, include: (1) Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic diseases, and (2) successful implementation of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The former includes the challenge of stemming the threat of new microbial pathogens, anti-microbial resistant variants of existing pathogens, as well as resurgence of malaria and other recalcitrant diseases. The applicability of SESR in this regard is illustrated with two case examples from the Greater Mekong Subregion, Avian Influenza (H5N1) and Liver Fluke (Opisthorchis viverrini). Each is shown to represent a science and policy challenge suggestive of an avoidable social-ecological system pathology that similarly has challenged sustainable development. Thus, SESR framing arguably is highly applicable to the SDGs, which, to a large extent, require consideration of human-animal-environmental health linkages. Further elaboration of these One Health operational criteria and metrics could contribute to the achievement of many of the SDGs.
Highlights
The interdependence of the health of humans, animals, and of ecosystems, along with the biological diversity they represent, is commonly described as the underlying tenet of One Health [1,2,3,4]
We review the key elements of SESR applicable to One Health and elaborate on recently developed explicit operational criteria including a protocol for One Health projects
A regional agroecosystem consists of many agroecosystem subtypes on the landscape scale, for instance, spanning smallscale traditional and small-holder systems to intensive large scale corporate industrialized systems. It can be envisioned how each has its own adaptive cycle whose dynamics operate on different time and space scales, including smaller, faster cycles being embedded in larger, slower ones (Figure 2B)
Summary
The interdependence of the health of humans, animals, and of ecosystems, along with the biological diversity they represent, is commonly described as the underlying tenet of One Health [1,2,3,4]. Along with the adaptive cycle as metaphor of these system’s dynamics, the complex systems-based conception of resilience arguably provided the linchpin, which explains the science underlying sustainable development [27] This tying together of humans and nature, and subsequently the economics and ecology of biodiversity [28], represented critical break-throughs in our understanding of ecosystems as coupled human-natural systems and their transformations based on a synthesis of social and ecological system change theories [22]. SESR represents a revolution of practical insights about how coupled human-natural systems learn, adapt to continuously changing internal and external conditions, based on extensive quantitative and qualitative model development and testing with real world cases [29] This includes models of knowledge-system integration, counting the critical roles of visioning and scenario building, leadership, agents and actors, social networks, and institutional change, all of which underlie adaptive capacity. Given its validation on the basis of extensive research and real world application, including continual refinement of understanding how to avoid these pathologies [15], SESR warrants serious consideration as the primary framing system for operationalizing One Health
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