You are here: Home / Projects / One Health Hub

One Health Hub

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is supporting CABI to manage a knowledge, learning and evidence platform focused on One Health to facilitate learning and evidence synthesis. The One Health Hub will engage with stakeholders to identify research gaps and promote evidence-informed research and policy decision making in One Health. The Juno Evidence Alliance will lead the One Health Hub’s work to synthesize evidence on One Health issues and will be working with the secretariat and communication teams to share and debate evidence widely. The One Health Hub will work closely with the FAO One Health Knowledge Nexus and seek to engage with the One Health Quadripartite and One Health High Level Expert Panel.

Project Overview

So, what’s the problem

Today’s world faces a wide variety of health challenges. The multifaceted, complex nature of these threats means that they cannot be approached from a purely medical, veterinary, plant health or ecological viewpoint. Instead, collaborative, multi-sector approaches that cut across human, ecosystem, plant and animal health are essential to ensuring that responses to health hazards are both sustainable and effective.

In the past two decades, One Health has emerged as a compelling framework for improving the health of people, animals, plants, and ecosystems. In contrast to human-centric paradigms of health, One Health is based on the assumption that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the wider environment is closely linked and inter-dependent. This interdependency means that no single discipline or sector can tackle threats to health in isolation. Advocates of the concept argue that removing the barriers which divide disciplines and sectors and moving away from siloed methods are pivotal to achieving a “whole of society” approach to health. Communication, coordination, and collaboration across multiple sectors, disciplines, government departments and international organizations is seen as essential to optimizing health security across One Health’s domains.

However, there have been numerous difficulties translating One Health from ideas into practice, and many barriers still exist to operationalizing the concept effectively. Moreover, there are numerous knowledge gaps in One Health research.  Nevertheless, One Health continues to gather significant momentum and gain popularity across the globe.

What is this project doing?

The One Health Hub aims to provide a responsive knowledge and learning platform to inform a cross-sectoral One Health agenda encompassing human, animal, plant, and ecosystem health. Working in partnership with the Juno Evidence Alliance, the One Health Hub will identify One Health research gaps and carry out synthesis of evidence on key topics that can inform research and policy decision-making within donor funded programmes as well as in the global One Health community.

Activities and deliverables include:

  1. Evidence synthesis, using the Juno infrastructure to identify gaps in One Health knowledge including through horizon scanning and bibliometric analysis that will inform commissioning of research to address those gaps and inform policy and programming decisions including within FCDO animal and plant health portfolios.
  2. A learning function to support synergies, coherence and knowledge related to One Health across FCDO animal and plant health investments as well as a broader use of evidence outputs and research priorities.
  3. A platform secretariat to support the delivery of knowledge, evidence and learning activities related to One Health, through the development and management of relevant procedures, structures and learning events and exploring opportunities to encourage integration of one health approaches.

Results

In the first year of implementation, One Health Hub deliverables will include:

  • A bibliometric analysis to map research around the action tracks in the Joint Plan of Action (JPA). The analysis will seek to understand which low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) participate in One Health research, existing areas of research focus and how this has changed over time. Topic modelling will be used to map publications against the six JPA action tracks as well as against disciplines.
  • A systematic evidence map of research on emerging zoonotic diseases to identify what evidence indicates are the factors influencing the emergence of zoonotic disease and to identify interventions used to mitigate these factors and whether there are identifiable patterns in the use of interventions at a regional level.
  • A horizon scanning exercise to identify future needs in One Health research and prioritize areas for further investigation to inform a research roadmap. The horizon scanning will involve stakeholders from human, animal, plant and ecosystem health disciplines, ranking critical One Health issues by impact and novelty.

Related resources

Related publications



Project Manager

Helen Coskeran

Senior Project Manager, One Health

Nosworthy Way, Wallingford, OX10 8DE, UK