The common vision toward One Health

Human health is intertwined with plants, animals, and our shared environment. Every subtle change in the environment will ultimately impact the global ecosystem and our health. It is the mission of Eco-Environment & Health to showcase this kind of understanding to help pave the way toward One Health.

Increasing anthropogenic activities around the globe, from high on Mt. Everest to deep in the Mariana Trench, and from the Antarctic to the Arctic, have been dramatically shaping our planet over the past few decades; their profound impacts on Mother Nature, for example, environmental pollution and climate change, are also emerging. Such disruptions, if without interventions, will not only threaten the well-being of plants and animals but also put human survival at risk. Therefore, scientists and the international community in recent years have been calling for collaborations to tackle this dilemma.

To this end, a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach, that is, One Health, has been curated. The One Health approach has been constantly evolving but the perspective of One Health considering the unified relationship between humans and nature or practical regulations to safeguard One Health can date back to ancient times. For example, the traditional Chinese philosophy values the Unity of Nature and Man (“天人合一” in Chinese), aiming to achieve a harmonious and unified relationship between human society and the natural world. Nowadays, the One Health approach involves collaborative efforts working at the local, regional, national, and global levels to recognize the interconnection between and achieve optimal health outcomes for humans, animals, plants, and their shared environment (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

A schematic drawing illustrating the overall view of the “One Health” concept and its related research topics, with the Eco-Environment & Health logo embedded in the center. Top keywords are extracted from previously published articles related to the searching topic “One Health” in the Web of Science Core Collection Database and grouped into six different color-coded categories using VOSviewer, depending on their intrinsic relationship (co-occurrence link). The font size of each keyword is in proportion to its frequency detected in the keyword and abstract sections of previous studies.

The One Health approach has been gaining recognition and gradually taken the center stage in the past few years as an effective way to fight health issues at the human-animal-plant-environment interface due to climate change and especially the COVID-19 pandemic, with the groundbreaking G20 Rome Leaders’ Declaration, clarifying that:

“… We commit to pursue a One Health approach at global, regional, national and local levels. To this end, we will enhance global surveillance, early detection and early warning systems, under the coordinating role of the WHO, FAO, OIE and UNEP, and address risks emerging from the human-animal-environment interface, particularly the emergence of zoonotic diseases, while pursuing global efforts to fight antimicrobial resistance, while ensuring access to antimicrobials …”

In line with the comprehensive One Health approach, advancing our understanding of the human–animal–plant–environment interface & interactions requires thoughtful and professional insights into various research domains, from both intra- and interdisciplinary viewpoints. This includes but is not limited to ecology and biodiversity conservation in a broad content, environmental behaviors and bioprocesses of emerging contaminants, their potential human exposure and health effects evaluation, and management and regulation of such environmental risks (Fig. 1). All these advances will find their niches in Eco-Environment & Health. Under the concept of One Health, we believe that all research will be of great value and contribute to the One Health approach, either theoretically or practically, or both.

As a journal initiated by multidisciplinary scientists all over the world, Eco-Environment & Health will focus on the concept of One Health and explore how the environment and ecology affect our health in the past, present, and future. We hope all contributions to Eco-Environment & Health will help us understand the interactions among ecology, environment and health, and their underlying mechanisms, which will promote and ultimately achieve green and sustainable development. While admittedly ambitious, the efforts we devote should be unremitting so that the future we make shall be promising!

Welcome to Eco-Environment & Health.