A bottom up approach
Ultimately, efforts to develop effective strategies and policy frameworks that promote human and animal health through the sustainable management of ecosystems, must be guided by a clear understanding of the processes that link human and animal health to the environment through people’s actions.
The ongoing COVID pandemic, like many of its predecessors, lays bare the grave implications that our environmental footprint on this planet has for human health. Pandemics, though, are just one of a growing number of health challenges that humanity is facing as a result of how we interact with nature.
A bottom up approach to understanding risk
Emerging health risks are not evenly distributed across landscapes. Instead, when and where people encounter pathogens is dependent upon how driving forces (climate, land-use and demographic changes) manifest on small-scale processes such as animal ecology, animal health and human behavior. We take a bottom-up approach to understanding how these processes align and amplify one-another to determine how risk is distributed across landscapes.
Actionable intelligence on the factors that promote formation of high-risk interfaces can then be harnessed to design locally relevant solutions, and broader-scale measurements that map and quantify the impacts of environmental change on health.
Risk emerges from landscape-scale drivers that influence how people come into contact with animal-borne pathogens, and their susceptibility to them
Addressing evidence gaps through research
Collation and Synthesis of Evidence Gaps
The message that environmental degradation endangers human and animal health fits an appealing narrative. However, this topic is beset by poor quality data and correlational studies, from which proposed mechanisms linking human environmental impacts to health are rapidly taken up as fact. It is therefore important that the assumptions and limitations of existing evidence on this topic is clear to decision-makers.
For example, by 2030 an additional 1.2 billion people are forecast to live in urban areas around the world, with a total footprint of 1.9 million km squared. Meeting the needs of this growing urban population requires equitable urban development that prioritizes health and well-being. To deliver this, policy makers need reliable evidence on how these landscapes are primed to expose people to disease.
We seek to highlight critical knowledge gaps and define research priorities moving forward.
