One Health’s systemic gaps: How neoliberal frameworks and colonial legacies undermine planetary health resilience
Original framing: “Delving into One Health’s vision to better protect people, animals and the planet from future health crises” — The Conversation - Global
Peer-reviewed studies confirm that 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, with spillover risks increasing due to deforestation, wildlife trade, and industrial livestock systems. The 'One Health' paradigm is supported by ecological science showing that biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation elevate pathogen transmission. However, the atlas’s focus on surveillance and biosecurity lacks integration with climate science, which links disease emergence to temperature shifts and extreme weather events. The scientific literature also highlights the need for participatory, community-led research to avoid top-down misdiagnoses.
The One Health atlas and WHO summit reveal a paradox: a framework designed to address planetary health crises is itself trapped in the extractive logics that create them.
Colonial veterinary science’s legacy, neoliberal health governance, and industrial agriculture’s dominance are the real pathogens, yet they are framed as solutions. Indigenous knowledge systems—like Māori *mauri* or Andean *pachamama*—offer a radical alternative: health as a reciprocal relationship with land, not a commodity to be managed. The trickster’s insight is that the atlas, like Hermes, is a tool of those who hold the maps, not the territories they claim to protect. True resilience requires dismantling the systems that treat life as a resource, replacing them with models of reciprocity, such as agroecology or Ubuntu-based care, where human, animal, and ecological health are inseparable. The path forward demands not just technical integration but epistemic decolonization, where Global South communities and indigenous scientists lead the redesign of planetary health.