Putting people at the heart of One Health
Interview with Mandeep Dhaliwal, Director for the HIV and Health Group at UNDP
1. What motivated UNDP to join N4H and what role will it play to ensure its success?
UNDP works on addressing the social, economic and environmental determinants of health where the focus is placed on maximising the co-benefits of health and nature-based human development approaches.
We joined N4H to support the scaling of One Health approaches for pandemic prevention and preparedness. Within our development mandate, we will leverage, not just our presence, network and partnerships in over 140 countries, including our 250 ongoing ecosystem and biodiversity projects and health work in 140 countries, but also our role as ‘integrator’ in order to address many of the key challenges of the Anthropocene in an integrated manner. For us at UNDP, “integration” also means improving One Health governance – ensuring clear accountabilities, actions and coherence across sectors.
Zoonotic disease prevention and detection depends on the effective collaboration of health, agro-industry, agriculture, forestry, trade, transport, commerce, animal husbandry, and border control sectors, amongst others. One of UNDP’s core roles in N4H will focus on facilitating these partnerships.
Working with partners, UNDP will also build capacities in public health systems to connect with environmental drivers of zoonoses. In its USD1.4 billion COVID-19 response, UNDP helped 86 countries adopt digital solutions for COVID-19 vaccine delivery and strengthening systems for health. Building on this, we intend to support digitalization of One Health systems and better use of data in low resource settings across institutions in highest risk zones. Building on our deep experience in community engagement, we will be training communities, health workers and institutions in highest risk zones to develop and manage awareness raising and behaviour change.
2. From your perspective, as the UNDP Director for the HIV and Health Group, what is so unique about the Nature for Health initiative?
Combating infectious diseases cannot be achieved without addressing biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change. N4H is unique in that it takes a cross-sectoral and country-level approach towards tackling these issues in an integrated way. It will also operationalize the concept of ‘putting the last first’, by targeting outbreaks at their source, in the communities most vulnerable to emerging infectious diseases.
Rural communities, who depend on nature and natural resources for subsistence and livelihoods, are often the first to be impacted by zoonotic diseases. Mitigating the threat of pandemics must start with building the capacities and resilience of these communities to potential threats. UNDP will also support country level mapping of hotspots for zoonotic disease outbreak prevention and containment through the UN Biodiversity Lab.
3. What does success look like to you and your organisation when it comes to N4H?
The world is beset by intersecting crises which is further adding to the risk of severe implications for the rise of infectious diseases. Their drivers and impacts are increasingly interlinked with this interplay of ecological degradation, climate change and socio-economic crisis. For example, the growing destruction of ecosystems, human encroachment on wildlife, and expansion of unsustainable human activities have increased these risks of infectious diseases, necessitating solutions that redress the connections between biodiversity, ecosystems and economic development.
For UNDP, N4H success therefore would be where, through its implementation, these connections have been recalibrated at both the global and national levels and the rise of infectious diseases has fallen dramatically and human health and wellbeing have been safeguarded against future pandemics. Institutions within and critically beyond the health sector along with vulnerable communities become demonstrably better able to prevent, detect and react quickly in the event of an outbreak. Success means achieving, sustaining and scaling this.