Biodiversity Conservation to Mitigate the risks of emerging infectious diseases

Biodiversity loss in hotspots of biodiversity is, among other socio-ecological factors, key to understand, prevent and react to future pandemics. However, despite this knowledge, the current COVID-19 crisis highlights the limitations of the implementation of One Health approaches. A main limitation is the lack of context-adapted solutions that stakeholders could easily implement on the field.

To overcome this, BCOMING will build on past international projects to co-construct innovations with all stakeholders of biodiversity hotspots to reduce the risk of infectious disease emergence through biodiversity conservation and disease surveillance strategies.

The activities of the project will be implemented in Europe and three tropical biodiversity hotspots in Southeast Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean and will have the following expected impacts:

• BCOMING will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the impact of biodiversity on the risk of infectious disease emergence
• Participatory tools developed will facilitate the design of context-adapted biodiversity conservation and restoration strategies that reduce zoonotic risk
• The surveillance strategies and pathogen detection tools developed will improve the capacities to detect emergences and stop future epidemics before they can turn into pandemics

The consortium constitutes a strong multi-actor group of partners with a history of successful cooperation including academics from biomedical, environmental and social sciences, private companies, NGOs, local and international stakeholders who bring together the wide range of disciplines and expertise required to reach all the expected outcomes of the call.

The embedment of BCOMING in the Prezode initiative will help to scale up the project innovations and disseminate cutting-edge socio-economic environmental strategies.