International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade
Summary
With increasing global human activity encroaching on wildlife habitats, growing demand for wildlife consumption & expanding global trade, the risk of pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans is escalating. There is not a simple answer on how to prevent this & not a single person who could do it alone. The only chance we have is to work together towards this as a common goal with a holistic, cross-cutting & synergistic approach.
The International Alliance therefore offers a solution by serving as an inclusive & interdisciplinary platform for stakeholders. It is a collaborative space to join forces to better understand & reduce the threat of pathogen spillover from wildlife trade & consumption, providing & communicating evidence, and supporting interventions. Thereby we reduce the risk, while improving health, equity & well-being for all species through a One Health approach.
Classifications
Region
Scale of implementation
Ecosystem
Theme
One Health
Challenges
Sustainable development goals
Aichi targets
Challenges
Due to the expanding of civilisation the contact between wildlife and human gets even closer and therefore the risk of pathogen spillover from wildlife trade and markets is highly increased. At the same time the pace of translating information into actions is not keeping pace with the unprecedented rate of social and environmental changes that result in existential health risks from global pandemics to local family illnesses. This is because stakeholders work in siloes and knowledge remains disconnected. The International Alliance helps decision makers to take faster action and prevent pandemics directly at their source, it supports interventions from its members to better understand and reduce the threat of future spillovers, to improve health, equity, and well-being for all species.
Beneficiaries
- Global human population, lowered risk of health and economic crises from spillover of zoonoses through pandemic prevention
- Wildlife, their health and conservation
- Environment through a better understanding of its connection to humans and animals
Building blocks
How do the building blocks interact?
The International Alliance is a diverse, multi-stakeholder platform with several key components: a feature-rich website, funded projects, country packages, and a governmental facility. Members and communication management play a vital role throughout the context.
Our global community, as of September 2023, consists of 180+ national and international political, academic, and civil society organizations, along with individual scientists, experts, and academics.
The website serves as a hub to explore the Alliance's concept, showcase member support, share information with the public and community, and facilitate knowledge and experience exchange of knowledge and experiences. The Project Map and Members Area are particulary valuable tools for achieving these goals.
Working groups actively engage members in the Alliance development, leveraging the community's expert knowledge to create collective outputs.
The Alliance's offers support by—funding projects, country packages, and governmental facilities to promote best practices and address health risks coming from wildlife trade and consumption. This empowers stakeholders to develop tailored solutions for their contexts.
Impacts
We have created an interdisciplinary, international, and inclusive multi-stakeholder platform with the space where different stakeholders meet, exchange, and synergize through the Newsletter, seminars, workshops, expert-talks, and working groups. To translate knowledge and science into actual change, our members work together on specific topics like the Science-Policy-Interface, Transformative System Change, or Evaluation & Effective Interventions.
We develop context-specific policy recommendations, drive public awareness and therefore behavioural changes as well as fill knowledge gaps.
We work together with governments, ministries, and the public health sector through a Governmental Consultation Facility to ensure that evidence-based knowledge reaches decision-makers.
We lay the groundwork to provide stakeholders with the know-how about the health risks of wildlife trade so they can take informed action and reduce the risks of future outbreaks and pandemics.
Contributed by
Log in or register to post comments.