One Health, One National Park: A Contribution to New Perspectives and Economics for Modern Times

Abstract

One Health is a concept that sees human, animal, and environmental health as parts of a single interdependent system. The Covid-19 pandemic, its implications reaching far beyond the direct effects of a coronavirus on people’s health, underlines the importance of this increasingly influential perspective. In practice, One Health has its roots in early affiliations of human and animal health science. Over time, each sphere of inquiry evolved to address its own agenda. Recently, veterinary scientists have led the reintegration, extension, and promotion of One Health sciences to address modern-day problems in which health and people’s general wellbeing are viewed as inseparable. A prerequisite is to set out a framework of concepts and principles enabling clear definition of problems, interrelationships needing to be understood, and the level of aggregation appropriate for quantitative analysis. This paper extends the framework by considering economic trade-offs that inevitably must be made in the human, animal, and environmental sub-systems, and the consequences when policy interventions are superimposed on them. The New Forest National Park in southern England is a case where this perspective is essential. Following the Stone Mountain definition of One Health, first a conventional approach linking human and animal health is taken. Lyme disease, Alabama rot, bovine tuberculosis and strangles are examples of diseases known to be of significant concern. The focus is finding scope for socially efficient risk reduction in response to mitigation resource use. Superimposed on the grazing livestock subsystems are support payments for commoner farmers. The financial incentives provided by what effectively are headage payments have caused animal inventories to grow so much that the wider environment may well be subject to adverse spillover effects that merit investigation.