Conference Description:

Conference Overview
The One Health movement, which has come to prominence in the last decade, advocates greater cross-sectoral collaboration and communication across the human-animal-environment interface. There has been a long-standing recognition that population health is intrinsically linked to both animal and environmental health, and that issues such as population growth, changes in climate and land use, and the movement of animals and people, have a huge impact on the collective health of our world today.

But the One Health concept takes this much further. By designing and implementing programmes, policies, legislation and multidisciplinary research, it seeks to deliver the best possible public health outcomes on a global scale. This has become increasingly urgent, as many of these changes have occurred in our very recent history: through the prevalence of deforestation and intensive farming, with the increase in forced migration due to climate change, or simply through modern methods of travel and trade (which allow diseases to spread quickly across the globe).

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 by recognising the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment”[1]. This synergistic concept has enormous potential to not only impact some of the biggest public health challenges of our time, from antimicrobial resistance, pandemic preparedness, to food safety and biosecurity – but also wider planetary health.

The 2021 Science & Society Conference will examine the potential societal benefits of the multifaceted One Health methodology, analyse how successful it has been to-date, determine whether One Health could be the key to future pandemic prevention, and ascertain what steps are needed to accelerate implementation. It will explore whether the interpretation of One Health has been biased towards an anthropocentric view of “health”, and it will also seek to answer the question: will something as far-reaching as the COVID-19 pandemic be the catalyst needed to finally make the aspirational goals of One Health a reality?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html

For more information about previous meetings in this series please check the Science and Society Website.