ST05 - Resilience to Disasters and Pandemics: What can a One Health approach deliver?

 

The ST05 - Resilience to Disasters and Pandemics: What can a One Health approach deliver? is a featured session broadcast from the Red Room at the FAO Headquarters in Rome. Organized as part of the World Food Forum (WFF) flagship events, this session focuses on how an integrated, cross-sectoral One Health approach can be leveraged to prevent global health crises, mitigate upstream drivers of disease, and build highly resilient agrifood systems.
By balancing and optimizing the interconnected health of humans, animals, plants, and their shared ecosystems, a systemic One Health approach delivers several critical outcomes to defend against future disasters and pandemics:

1. Robust Early Warning and Integrated Surveillance Systems

Cross-Sectoral Data Platforms: Delivers unified data management networks that combine human epidemiology, veterinary science, and environmental monitoring (such as tracking climate change impacts or habitat changes).
Rapid Risk Anticipation: By tracking how farming, land-use change, and environmental stressors cause pathogens to spill over from wildlife to domestic animals and humans, systems can catch outbreaks before they become full-scale global panzootics or pandemics.
Accredited Laboratory Networks: Strengthens the capacity of national and regional laboratories to rapidly transport, share, and accurately analyze specimens across sectors.

2. Safeguarding Global Agrifood Systems & Food Security

Broader Protection Beyond Zoonoses: Rather than focusing narrowly on animal-to-human disease transmission, the FAO's expanded framework protects the pillars of food production by integrating soil, plant, and water health.
Mitigating Supply Chain Shocks: Pandemics cause devastating ripple effects on agricultural workforces, logistics, and trade. One Health provides operational frameworks to keep food supply chains functional and bio-secure during ongoing disaster responses.
Actionable Policy Frameworks: Translates international guidelines—like the FAO Framework for One Health in Agrifood Systems—into direct country-level investments to protect rural livelihoods and agricultural biosecurity.

3. Comprehensive Management of Modern Health Threats

Combating Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR): Addresses the misuse of antimicrobials simultaneously across human medicine, livestock production, and aquaculture to preserve life-saving drugs.
Upstream Driver Prevention: Instead of relying on costly "command and control" emergency measures after a virus spreads, it targets root causes—such as unsustainable farming encroachment on wild environments, biodiversity loss, and unregulated wildlife trade.

4. Youth-Led Innovation and Shared Governance

Mobilising Future Leadership: In alignment with the World Food Forum's mission, the approach champions youth-inclusive initiatives, such as the WFF Transformative Research Challenge Prize on One Health, empowering young scientists to design novel resilience solutions.

The Quadripartite Partnership: Delivers a coordinated global strategy backed by the Joint Plan of Action across the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO), World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

  Watch the ST05 - Resilience to Disasters and Pandemics: What can a One Health approach deliver?

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