Two decades of One Health in action: Enabling sustainable wildlife conservation and livestock production in southern Africa

Abstract The AHEAD (Animal & Human Health for the Environment And Development) program was launched in 2003 at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa. We defined our mission as serving as “a convening, facilitative mechanism, working to create enabling environments that allow different and often competing sectors to literally come to the same table and find collaborative ways forward to address challenges at the interface of wildlife health, livestock health, and human health and livelihoods.” We continue on this mission more than 20 years later, convening stakeholders, helping delineate conceptual frameworks to underpin planning, management and research, and providing technical support and resources for projects stakeholders identify as priorities. As one of the first applied One Health programs, our work is premised upon the fact that the challenge of managing transboundary animal diseases (TADs) often lies at the heart of whether transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) will succeed or fail in their aspirations to become the ecologically resilient land-use entities required for long-term delivery of poverty alleviation and related development as well as biodiversity conservation benefits. As the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area’s (KAZA’s) remaining key wildlife corridors, needed for wildlife populations to survive and thrive for generations to come, continue to be blocked by veterinary cordon fences, the urgency of improving regional animal disease management cannot be overstated. This is especially relevant for those European donors to TFCAs whose nations set up the veterinary cordon fencing-based disease management system in the first place – starting in the 1950s when today’s KAZA partner countries were European colonies or protectorates. The prevailing veterinary fencing paradigm is rooted in the colonial era, but with impacts on KAZA’s wildlife that have persisted on up to the present. If we fail to help all countries within a given TFCA actually co-manage disease threats to the livestock sector that all value highly – culturally, economically, and politically – then how can we expect significant progress in terms of fostering habitat connectivity across international boundaries? When a given country fears diseases they believe or know are across the border, how can we lower the perceived or actual risks of the vision of restoring wildlife migrations through removal of segments of the most environmentally damaging fences? The AHEAD program continues to work on these challenges, with recent progress on sectorally integrative approaches providing reasons for cautious optimism. One Health impact statement What was arguably the first applied One Health program, AHEAD (Animal & Human Health for the Environment And Development) was launched in 2003 at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban – a year before one of us led the drafting of The Manhattan Principles on ‘One World, One Health’ (Cook et al ., 2004 ). As AHEAD has recently marked its 20th anniversary, some introspection certainly seems prudent. Our goal, our raison d’etre , has been to serve as ‘a convening, facilitative mechanism, working to create enabling environments that allow different and often competing sectors to literally come to the same table and find collaborative ways forward to address challenges at the interface of wildlife health, livestock health, and human health and livelihoods’ (available at: http://cornell-ahead.org ). We continue on our One Health mission to convene stakeholders, help delineate conceptual frameworks to underpin planning, management and research, and provide technical support and resources for projects stakeholders identify as priorities. AHEAD’s One Health framing recognises the need to look at health, disease, and the environment together, while always taking a given region’s socio-economic, political, and policy context into account.