A new paper in the journal CABI One Health captures a pioneering One Health effort that reinforces the reality that meaningful policy change across sectors often takes significant time and patience.

Steve Osofsky, DVM '89, Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health & Health Policy and director of the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, launched the AHEAD (Animal & Human Health for the Environment And Development) program in 2003 at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, back when he was with the Wildlife Conservation Society. AHEAD defined its mission then, as now, 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.”

The AHEAD program continues 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, AHEAD’s work is premised upon the fact that the challenge of managing transboundary animal diseases 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 biodiversity conservation benefits.

The 520,000 km2 Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) is the world’s largest terrestrial transboundary conservation landscape, and its remaining key wildlife corridors, needed for wildlife populations to survive and thrive for generations to come, continue to be blocked by veterinary cordon fences. Thus, the urgency of improving regional animal disease management through means other than vast fences 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 five 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.

As Dr. Osofsky notes, “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 the removal of segments of the most environmentally damaging fences?” The AHEAD program and its critical regional partners continue to make genuine progress on these challenges, with recent agreement among KAZA partner nation officials on a new, sectorally integrative approach providing reasons for cautious optimism.

The paper, Two Decades of One Health in Action: Enabling Sustainable Wildlife Conservation and Livestock Production in Southern Africa, is coauthored by Shirley Atkinson, AHEAD team member and associate director of the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, along with regional partners Nidhi Ramsden, based in Botswana, and Dr. Mary-Louise Penrith of the University of Pretoria.