WOAH and UNEP: Nature and wildlife health

WOAH and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hosted a joint webinar, “Nature and wildlife health: making the case for investment in Asia and the Pacific”

Human, animal and ecosystem health, as well as the environment, are fundamentally interconnected.   

Policymakers often neglect Wildlife and environmental health, with insufficient human and financial resources allocated. This webinar focused on the case for investment to improve environmental competencies at the country/territory level through multisectoral collaboration between Veterinary Services and the environment/wildlife sector.

The event brought together veterinary, agriculture and environment sector stakeholders. It focused on the human-animal-ecosystems interface. These are the agricultural and productive spaces where biodiversity loss is declining rapidly, which is destabilising the ecosystem services on which local people depend for food and livelihoods. This has consequences for all of society.    

As such, we focused on the value of wild agro-biodiversity, and particularly fauna – the birds, bats, frogs, crabs, insects, rodents, snakes, that live in and around the rice fields, crop farms, wood plots, wild borders, grazing areas, riverbanks of populated areas in the Asia Pacific region.