Rural communities across the world are experiencing fundamental environmental, economic, and social changes. Large-scale deforestation for plantation forests, mineral extraction, and commercial agriculture—often enabled by land concessions and acquisitions by multinational firms—are colliding with rising temperatures, drought, and wildfires due to climate change. Economically, land commodification, globalization, and neoliberal policy have led to a transition in agricultural systems from polycultures for local consumption to monocultures for international export, and the increasing adoption of wage-based livelihoods in rural communities, often in precarious and informal labor markets. Socially, rural exodus and reduced family sizes have left behind a dwindling and aging rural populations, as younger generations leave rural communities to seek out education and employment opportunities in urban locations.
Collectively, these environmental, economic, and social transitions have profound impacts for the health of humans, other animals, and the other biotic and abiotic beings that comprise their shared ecosystem. As such, a One Health approach, which considers human, animal, and environmental health to be interconnected, must be adopted in order to fully characterize these impacts, and devise ethical, equitable, and sustainable solutions.
We will present three case studies from drylands communities in Brazil, Kenya, and Mongolia, focused on arboviruses and endemic zoonoses. Applying the Relational One Health framework, which rejects anthropocentrism and biomedical reductionism in its application of One Health, we will motivate each case study through conceptual models developed from pilot research, and pair these conceptual models with tools and methodologies that can be used to test the embedded hypotheses.
