One Health
Benefitting the health, welfare, and economic resilience of organisms, humans, and the wider aquatic ecosystem by detecting, analysing, and managing aquatic hazards and stressors.
One Health is a systems framework for analysing and managing the interdependencies of organismal, human, and environmental health. Threats and stressors influencing healthy and sustainable outcomes range from known to unknown factors, individual to combinations of factors, and vary hugely in our ability to measure and analyse them. Such factors include pathogens, chemicals, climate change, other environmental stressors, and human influences. We aim to reduce the impact of hazards in aquatic systems via direct and indirect assessment of these factors using new, real time, and predictive abilities to generate evidence for effective decision-making and One Health-informed policies. This endeavour is inherently interdisciplinary, and necessitates co-design and input from multiple partners to generate a holistic and interactive understanding of - and ability to manage - ‘marine health’, and its relationship to human health and wellbeing.
The One Health Hazards theme will work closely with other themes, overarching Cefas initiatives (e.g. SeaScope, CERRP), and Defra policy and evidence leads, to improve and develop our collective abilities in ecosystem diagnostics, data generation and multimodal analytics, and implementation into practice and policy. Core aims are to empower the protection and restoration of aquatic systems, and therefore provision of safe food, clean energy, human livelihoods and wellbeing, and a sustainably functioning ecosystem as a cornerstone of national security and growth. Achieving this ‘data to policy’ trajectory requires 1) technical developments (e.g., ‘omics, bioinformatics, sensors, automated samplers and other next generation monitoring methodologies), 2) socio-economic sciences (scientific comms, community engagements & science, metacommunity engagement, valuing biodiversity, economic innovation), and 3) strategic alignment and networking (e.g. R&D Commission, Defra CSD strategy and Centres of Excellence, Cabinet Office and other HMG Departments), UKRI/funders, and international engagement and influence (e.g. WOAH, FAO, Quadrapartite).
To achieve this, we:
Develop R&D activities in organism-biota-environment interactions to better understand ecosystem resilience, health states, causative pathways, and outcomes.
Develop novel metrics and diagnostic tools for real time assessments and predictive capabilities in marine health.
Integrate health data into multimodal analytics, including SeaScope and monitoring innovations beyond Cefas.
Make data and analyses accessible and operational via visualization and interpretative platforms.
Embed One Health principles and practices into relevant areas of Cefas science, comms, and response.
Work towards policy readiness and suitability of Cefas evidence for decision-making relating to One Health.
Ensure One Health objectives and outcomes are designed into X-Defra, and X-HMG R&D and monitoring/assessment programmes and initiatives.
