Moving Target(s): One Health at changing human-livestock-wildlife interfaces in tropical ecosystems

Nishant Kumar 

One Health approaches currently conceptualized for Western landscapes require fundamental rethinking for tropics, where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces exist as variegated mosaics rather than discrete zones. This overview examines why tropical ecosystems involve (i) Human mobility patterns shifting continuously through rural-urban migration and globalization (ii) Livestock health infrastructure concerns, creating dependencies on informal practitioners and perpetuating practices like diclofenac use cascading into public health disasters; and (iii) Environmental conditions that transform rapidly through agricultural intensification, habitat fragmentation, and climate change, while wildlife populations adapt to anthropogenic subsidies that fundamentally alter behavior and disease dynamics. Each component—human, livestock, environmental—changes independently while influencing the others, creating dynamic complexity amplified by economic inequities that shape health-seeking behaviors and risk perceptions. I argue that tropical One Health must embrace co-cultural frameworks recognizing interspecies cultural transmission, acknowledge how political-ecological forces structure disease interfaces, and develop context-appropriate interventions grounded in local social-ecological realities rather than imposing incompatible models.