DEVELOPMENT

Health is one of the most visibly affected sectors in the growing global sustainability challenges with consequences at the nexus of human, animal and ecosystems health. One Health has emerged as an umbrella framework to address multiple, intersectoral health related sustainability challenges today. The One Health linked ideas of indigenous and local knowledge of non-western contexts, especially in low-and middle-income countries, have been largely neglected and marginalized by a biomedicalized, medico-industrial complex centered care. This article showcases certain conceptual and practical aspects of integrating traditional and indigenous knowledge practices in the implementation of One Health. By highlighting a One Health case study of a large-scale programme on reducing antibiotic use in livestock farming in India, the article calls for critical attention on diverse worldviews, knowledge systems and contextualized experiences towards strengthening and advancing One Health.

The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed healthcare systems around the world, but in the aftermath it has now sharply focused policy attention. With the crisis being multi-dimensional it has ensured that with the many challenges we face, governments must now map a new way forward on global health. The clearest opportunity to enable this new path is the flagship WHO instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, currently being negotiated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body of the WHO and its Member States. Whether the decisions they make affect meaningful change will depend on the extent to which they prioritize achieving equity for the most vulnerable communities, especially those who come into daily contact with pathogens, at the human-animal-environment interface, and across the entire pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response pathway. Prioritizing equity to more effectively prevent pandemics would seem intuitive but truly achieving this goal will require international institutions and governments to embrace a new way of designing and implementing health policy. In this article, we share the paradigm shifts that are mapping this new way forward, of which One Health has become central. We will also elaborate on the changes that the international community needs to make to enable those developments.

Indigenous peoples across the world share an intimate knowledge of ecosystems acquired from hundreds of generations of observation. Today, commercial land exploitation, resource extraction and the effects of global warming are destroying these water and land ecosystems exacerbating the climate crisis. The threat to life support systems posed by the ecological crisis we witness is combined with the cultural and ethnic crisis and the erosion of social structures that make cultural diversity and plurality possible as a democratic reality in a decentralized framework. The cosmovision that Indigenous Peoples have always embodied and transmitted across generations opens our understanding to a holistic approach that is essential today to interpret and implement One Health according to the contemporary challenges and needs.

Based on colonial capitalist logics, global biosecurity strategies have long relied upon downstream measures of surveillance and control to reduce disease burden and address the rising risk of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). One Health aims to address this through what it describes as a systems approach, yet in failing to grapple with capitalist hegemony, the framework reproduces the microbial and logical diseases it intends to prevent. Calls for a Structural One Health approach embed the principles of agroecology as a pathway toward food sovereignty, joining the calls of peasants, smallholders, Indigenous Peoples, fishers and forest dwellers globally. This paradigm of food production takes a truly ecosystems approach in embedding place-based production systems within political economies centred on human and more-than-human relations rather than on extraction and division. Working outside the standardized monoculture of industrial agriculture, agroecological food producers the world over embrace biodiversity as an effective safeguard against harmful pathology, creating and living the alternative paradigms necessary for unwinding our interconnected planetary crises. One Health without structural integrity is only as strong a framework as status quo production systems and biosecurity measures, serving to reinforce rather than transform the current dominant global system.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated a plethora of fissures within society, and between society and nature. In its wake, there is a consensual recognition that the world is living through an era of severe multiple crises. In this complex context, the One Health approach has been adopted as the conceptual and policy framework for meeting the lofty aim of strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, with the intent to avoid the sort of calamitous dynamic of COVID-19 in the future. But there are legitimate concerns on the way and manner that the approach is currently being unfurled, as being undesirably more anthropogenic than the biocentric logic which is at the core of its conceptualization. Through an overview of the new sciences emerged in the wake of increasing evidence that human activities are driving the world to the tipping edge of catastrophe, this article advocates for Structural One Health as the strategy that could provide the alternative vision needed, coupled with the call for financial justice and democratic mobilization.

In 2013, nobody could believe that the old identarian Apulian trees—the symbol of beauty and the building block of the local economy—were rapidly drying and dying because they had been hit by a new pathogen that had never colonized Italy and its olive trees before. But the story of Xylella fastidiosa—the bacterium that has dramatically affected the landscapes and livelihoods of the Apulia Region (in Southern Italy) for the last ten years—is a textbook example of the parallel kinetics that determine the routes of diseases in plants and human beings alike. In drawing a very efficacious comparison between the olive plants’ disease in the fields and the COVID-19 disease in human bodies, the account explains the wide-ranging consequence of natural calamities and their origins in human actions and choices. Xylella fastidiosa still menaces olive trees in Apulia, and other countries in Europe, but in ten years it has triggered off the collective psychosis of local communities, still under shock. A stark reminder that nature is not disposable and that humans are intimately connected with it.

The One Health (OH) approach emphasizes the need to tackle the challenges of human, animal and ecosystem health using a more integrated approach. Since the mid-2000s and even more since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health scholars and policymakers have been paying an increasing attention to the One Health approach. The authors retrace the different reconstructions on the origins and meanings of the One Health approach also by referring to a case study jointly conducted by sociologists and veterinary epidemiologists in the context of dairy cattle farms located in the provinces of Turin and Cuneo. According to Beck (1992), in risk societies, the division of labour between science, politics and economics breaks apart and must be renegotiated. Moreover, according to Pierre Bourdieu, One Health is understandable, in sociological terms, as a social field, that is arenas where actors’ relations stem from the different positions in the field and from their different dispositions (habitus). Dominant groups are also recognizable. In this perspective OH takes shape as a peculiar form of real (or possible) utopia: that of using the network of connections by which we grasp the risks to formulate an integrated strategy able at promoting health from a global and systemic standpoint and preventing the potential for irreversible destruction.

The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental NGO, has launched an audacious plan to negotiate debt-for-ocean swaps in Southern coastal and small island states, linked to the international pledge of 30 × 30. Representing an evolution from the debt-for-nature swaps popularized in the 1990s, these new variants are regularly praised as ingenious solutions to the debt and biodiversity crisis. Gabon is the latest country to have concluded a swap, bringing the total value of debt exchanged to over US$2.5 billion. However, there are several concerns about these opaque transactions from the perspective of debt justice and the democratic and equitable governance of marine resources. Debt-for-ocean swaps illustrate the pace at which financialization has transformed international approaches to conservation and the risks that this brings.

This article examines four measures that challenged global capitalism during Ecuador’s Citizens Revolution (2007–2017). These include debt renegotiation, government control over central bank and multinationals, and restricting private banks’ power. These measures may be seen as an ambitious attempt to shape and embrace the country’s own path of development, inspiring discussions for alternative solutions to address growing dissatisfaction with the current development model, even in developed countries.

This article unfolds a recorded conversation between three people and a sacred clear-flowing River (Wonga Beerie Balan, Rocky River), across cultures, ontologies, and languages. Here, Cultural Elder Uncle Lewis Walker (Uncle Lewis) shares little-known knowledges of the Wahlurbal (West Bundjalung) of the Northern Rivers, NSW, Australia, about Water—as sentient, agentic, and sovereign.

This article focuses on Illegal, unreported and nnregulated (IUU) fishing by distant water fleets. It is based on a study titled ‘Fishy Networks’, which exposed that Africa concentrates 48.9% of identified industrial and semi-industrial vessels involved in IUU fishing, leading to an economic loss of illicit financial flows of up to US$11.49 billion originating from the continent alone. The article argues that financial secrecy of vessels, the companies behind them, and their beneficial owners plays a key role in aggravating this problem, as even if actors are caught for offences that are considered to account for IUU fishing, the fines tend to be small, the instances are not reported publicly. IUU fishing does not tend to harm the reputation of the company in question, or enable for importing states to apply more robust supply chain legislation, or apply anti money laundering laws that also apply extraterritorially. Finally, it recommends greater financial transparency, supply chain and reporting transparency in the fishing industry to tackle this problem and bring those responsible to justice.

Honduras is a Central American country with significant natural richness but threatened by climate change and environmental degradation. It has one of the lowest human development indicators of Latin America, making it difficult to provide an adequate socio-economic environment to realize fundamental human rights. In a context of institutional weakening and with a legal framework that, in many cases, facilitates the widening of society’s inequities, Honduras is confronted with new challenges, also in conjunction of recent announcements of financial opportunities towards the Blue Economy. This initiative is featuring the prospective development of mining in the seabed, and doubtful strategies of coastal ecosystems’ use for energy production, among other proposals with economic purposes rather than environmental ones. This article aims to contribute to the reflection on the pertinence of the Blue Economy, and if it could effectively contribute to the satisfaction and promotion of human rights, particularly the right to food and the right to a healthy environment.

This article looks at the importance of fisheries in Uganda on one hand, the reducing trend of fisheries revenue and catch volumes on the other hand as well as the various measures taken to revive the fisheries sector over the years. It argues that although restoring fisheries and ensuring the sustainability of fisheries resources is paramount, this should not be done while grossly violating human rights and depriving poor people of their sole source of livelihood. There is need to manage fisheries in a more holistic manner.

The issue of climate refugees needs urgent attention at global level. After illustrating the complex relationship between climate change and migration, this article analyzes the issue of climate refugees from a socio-political and legal point of view, arguing for the need to address this issue both at regional and international level but also to discuss the issue directly with citizens through the innovative approach of game-based learning.

Water habitats provide essential ecosystems to humankind, but their health is under threat from an array of human activities. Examples of these threats range from climate change, overfishing and destructive fishing, marine pollution, ocean acidification, under water noise, habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and invasive species. Science has been responsible for both acknowledging the critical importance of the ocean and other water habitats’ sustainability as well as identifying their multiple stressors and delicate ecological limits. With the increasing significance of environmental and water-related discussions in international fora, scientists are asked to provide evidence on life-threatening challenges associated to the current industrialized development model, particularly human-induced hazards like intensive food production and pollution drivers (plastic, pesticides, fuels, etc.). More recently, science has been pushed in the ocean international arena to play a more relevant diplomatic role in both unveiling the water unknowns and using the water’s physical disregard for boundaries as a good excuse to overcome uncertainties in international diplomatic relations. Could such integration of water science and diplomatic principles lead to shaping a better multilateral landscape and impose a new economic paradigm for the world? We have tackled these issues with Dr. Mounir Ghribi.