The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions

Francis Banville , Claire Burnel, Colin J Carlson , Elodie Eiffener, Gabriel Munoz Acevedo, Andrea Paz Velez , Timothée Poisot 

The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding actions on: One Health capacity building (track 1), zoonotic diseases (tracks 2 and 3), food and agriculture (track 4), antimicrobial resistance (track 5), and environmental health (track 6). However, there are currently no indicators for monitoring the implementation, state and progress of these tracks. Our research examines the extent to which they can be assessed by the existing monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). We evaluated (1) the link between each indicator of the KM-GBF monitoring framework and human, animal, plant, and environmental health, respectively, and (2) the usability of these indicators for monitoring the One Health action tracks. We found that 75% of the KM-GBF indicators are associated with either human (56%), animal (53%), plant (51%), or environmental (63%) health, and that 91% of them can be used for monitoring at least one action track. Reusing existing indicators can alleviate the costs associated with the development and measurement of new indicators, thus improving the efficiency of monitoring systems. Our work supports the idea that multilateral progress on the monitoring of biodiversity, through its indissociability from all facets of health, provides a way to retrospsectively and prospectively measure progress accomplished on ambitious One Health actions.