One Health Scorecard

The One Health Scorecard is a collaborative effort of four African research groups. It aims to improve local health by a guided operationalization of transdisciplinarity and adaptive management in the context of social-ecological systems.  

One Health as a field of research and practice presents challenges the health and allied fields with a new paradigm centered on understanding and managing health and disease at the human-animal-environment interface.  Axiomatically, this entails integration of human and animal medical and public health sciences and practices along with those of environmental management including ecology. 

Associated with this is the imperative to articulate the evidence-basis for One Health including principles and testable postulates toward the development of an implementation science around One Health.  These form the basis of the fundamentals of One Health, which are key to the achievement of core competencies; thus, knowledge and skills development for One Health research and practice.

To illustrate and build toward further articulation of One Health fundamentals, we draw on the findings of a five-year project, the TDR-IDRC Research Initiative on VBDs and Climate Change in Africa, with a human-animal-environment focus.  The Initiative’s more than fifty researchers from multiple disciplines and countries produced new insights and tools linking disease ecology, epidemiology, meteorology and traditional knowledge across a wide-range of environments.  A follow-up phase was recently initiated to systematically review and translate the findings generated from the research into strategies for prevention, preparedness, and response for population adaptation and resilience to VBD threats linked to climate change.

The findings include new insights into how to conduct integrative research on the basis of transdisciplinary, systems approaches and their operationalization, which are central to One Health practice. They are essential to its wider adoption and continual improvement on the basis of explicit One Health operational criteria and evaluation metrics.