The GEO BON Secretariat is excited to announce the official endorsement of the One Health Working Group and Knowledge to Action (K2A) hub.
The mission of this group is to structure and organize the efforts of the GEO BON community to contribute to the mainstreaming of environmental expertise in the One Health approach.
The One Health Quadripartite Organizations–the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO)–have recognized that the path to sustainable and equitable planetary health involves the mainstreaming of environmental expertise, data, and research. This has been formalized in the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026, OH JPA). The idea that One Health represents the way forward to leverage biodiversity to act on the threat of emerging disease is now enshrined in Article 5 of the forthcoming WHO Pandemic agreement.
The GEO BON One Health working group aims to establish guidelines to adapt the concept of EBVs to One Health and collaborate with the BON Development working group, to ensure that future BONs will be usable for One Health, and for the surveillance of infectious diseases of zoonotic origin. The purpose of the K2A hub will be to coordinate this work with external stakeholders, to ensure that the data products delivered by GEO BON are tailored to their needs.
The activities of this working group will help GEO BON contribute to the operationalization of biodiversity data and expertise for One Health, which is a core requirement to help with the existential challenge of preventing disease spillover at the source. The working group aims to engage existing and new members, contribute to BON in a Box, and provide incentives to refine existing, or develop novel, EBVs.
The One Health groups of GEO BON will be led by Timothée Poisot of Université de Montréal, Canada and is seeking interested GEO BON members. Get in touch with Tim (timothee.poisot@umontreal.ca) if you’re interested and have questions.
Stay tuned for more information about One Heath on Discourse and on our website. In the meantime, we welcome this excellent new initiative that is expected to expand the GEO BON network and broaden the application of EBVs.