This year’s World Health Day, 7 April 2026, kick-starts a year-long campaign to celebrate the power of scientific collaboration to advance health, save lives and transform societies. This includes using science to protect the health of people, animals, plants and the planet.
Human health is inextricably linked and interdependent with that of domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment, necessitating an integrated approach to sustainably balance and optimize the health of all of these elements – a so-called One Health approach.
“Health security begins where humans, animals and the environment meet,” explains Dr Ihor Perehinets, Health Security and Regional Emergency Director, WHO/Europe. “The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that it is not a question of if new health threats will emerge but when, so protecting human health requires strengthening all the systems that sustain life, through incorporating nature and biodiversity into health policy and investing in laboratories for disease surveillance, amongst other things. Each year, WHO/Europe analyses more than 240 000 potential signals of public health events, including disease outbreaks across the WHO European Region, drawing on data from all 53 Member States. We must take a One Health approach to prevent and prepare for future threats. By doing this and building bridges across sectors, we can better prevent, detect, respond and recover, while building a more resilient and collaborative approach to protecting health.”
To prevent future pandemics, it’s crucial to improve our understanding of the animal–human–environment connection. This requires collaboration, coordination, communication and capacity-building.
Collaboration on One Health
WHO is working with the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), forming a quadripartite for coordinated One Health action.
In practical terms, this means:
- integrated or interoperable surveillance systems linking human, animal and environmental health data;
- joint risk assessments between the health, agriculture and environment sectors;
- shared laboratory capacity and reporting systems;
- coordinated outbreak investigations;
- cross-border information exchange; and
- linking communities to regional, national and international prevention, preparedness and response efforts.
Collaborating centres key to global action
WHO’s worldwide network of collaborating centres support the translation of the One Health approach into practical action at country and regional levels. This is done by focusing on strengthening evidence, fostering cross-sectoral collaboration and supporting the implementation of One Health strategies.
Dr Tony Holohan is the Director of the University College Dublin Collaborating Centre, in Ireland, the first collaborating centre on One Health to be established in the Region.
“One Health is important for health security, and it's important to understand the way in which threats to our security or health can arise from a variety of different sources, and we need to frame our response based on that understanding,” he says.
He explains the work his centre does. "Our faculty is organized across 7 different clusters that cover things like antimicrobial resistance (AMR), pandemic preparedness, food security and food systems, governance, literacy, communications – all trying to increase understanding of the intersectoral nature of many of the threats that exist to human health, and to bring many people into the conversation.”
Dr Holohan gives an example of this through the centre’s work on tackling AMR. He believes that while the understanding of how antibiotics are used in human and animal populations is generally quite good, tackling the problem requires many different disciplines to come together as one.
“Scientists are not always as good as they would like to be in translating their knowledge into effective action – a much broader community of involvement is needed to include those who work in behavioural sciences, economics, the arts and the humanities, for instance, so that people can understand the issue and are willing to change their behaviour. That’s why we're building teaching programmes like a new Masters in One Health, new research programmes, and building capacity across the university generally to increase our ability to address these problems in a more coherent, transdisciplinary way.”
Professor René S. Hendriksen coordinates the work of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance in Foodborne Pathogens and Genomics at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen. He guides a multidisciplinary team supporting Member States to strengthen their AMR surveillance and whole genome sequencing capacity, while integrating One Health approaches.
“Our centre’s work is firmly anchored in the One Health agenda, recognizing that AMR emerges and spreads across the interconnected systems of human health, animal health, food production and the environment,” he explains. “We collaborate closely with WHO and agencies across Europe and the world; working together in this way allows us to harmonize laboratory methods, strengthen national reference laboratories and support the development of interoperable surveillance systems that reflect the true complexity of AMR.”
Together for health
Prevention and preparedness for future health threats requires more than technical solutions – it depends on trust, transparency, collaboration and engagement with communities.
As Dr Holohan emphasizes, building resilience means working closely with populations, strengthening understanding and ensuring people are equipped to act on scientific advice.
“And without that trust in science, that togetherness and solidarity, we can’t effectively implement the measures that, based on scientific research, we know are likely to work,” he says.
A One Health approach brings these elements together, ensuring that science, systems and societies work as one to protect health.