One Health Framework

Introduction: one system, many disciplines

One Health starts from a simple claim with large consequences: the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems is a single, coupled system, so no one of them can be protected for long at the expense of the others. Most of the threats that define this century, from zoonotic spillover and antimicrobial resistance to collapsing fisheries and degraded soils, sit exactly at the seams between disciplines that were built to work apart.

That makes One Health more than a public-health policy. It is a design brief for how scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians frame problems, choose metrics and judge success. Read that way, it also supplies the working core of a steward's philosophy: the stance that whoever builds, studies or alters a system takes on a duty of care for everything that system touches, now and across generations.

At Soterium, One Health is one of several foundations for how we think about living well on Earth, at sea and in space. This page covers what One Health is and where it stands in 2026, the principles that carry over into STEM practice, concrete ways to apply them in research, engineering, data and education, and how they ground an ethic of stewardship. Its companion page brings One Health together with the other agreements and charters, from the Outer Space Treaty to the Astra Carta, that shape our vision for sea and space societies.

What One Health is

One Health is an integrated, systems-based approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems, recognizing that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment are closely linked and interdependent. That is a paraphrase of the consensus definition written by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), the scientific advisory body to the four UN-system agencies now called the Quadripartite: FAO, UNEP, WHO and WOAH (WHO).

Where it came from. The idea is old: nineteenth-century physician Rudolf Virchow argued there was no dividing line between human and animal medicine, and veterinarian Calvin Schwabe revived it as “one medicine” in the 1960s. The modern label took hold after the 2004 “Manhattan Principles” from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the SARS and H5N1 avian flu scares, which showed how quickly a pathogen can move from wildlife to livestock to people.

How it became institutional. The key milestones:

The Joint Plan of Action. The plan organizes global work into six interdependent action tracks (WHO event page):

1. Building One Health capacity to strengthen health systems
2. Reducing the risk of emerging and re-emerging zoonotic epidemics and pandemics
3. Controlling and eliminating endemic zoonotic, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases
4. Strengthening how food safety risks are assessed, managed and communicated
5. Curbing antimicrobial resistance
6. Integrating the environment into One Health

These run through three pathways of change: governance, organizational development, and data systems (UNEP). Originally set to run to 2026, the plan was extended in 2026 through 2029, while the Quadripartite carries out a structured review to design its next phase (UNEP).

Its neighbors. One Health overlaps with EcoHealth, which stresses community participation and ecosystem approaches, and with Planetary Health, which centers human civilization's dependence on Earth's natural systems. OHHLEP drew on both in writing its definition. In practice the three are best read as one family with different emphases.

Core principles

OHHLEP paired its definition with a set of foundational principles meant to keep One Health action effective, fair and sustainable (Springer Nature community). Distilled for use outside the health sector, six of them do most of the work:

• Interdependence. Human, animal, plant and environmental health are treated as one system with feedback loops, not as separate accounts.
• Transdisciplinarity. Problems are framed jointly across disciplines and with the people affected, not handed from one specialist silo to the next.
• Prevention upstream. The cheapest intervention addresses drivers such as land-use change, wildlife trade or antibiotic overuse before they become outbreaks.
• Equity and inclusion. Benefits and burdens are shared fairly, and local and Indigenous knowledge counts as evidence.
• Sustainability across time. Decisions are judged against the needs of future generations, not only current users.
• Shared responsibility. Accountability is distributed across sectors and institutions, which means data, governance and funding must be shared too.

Each of these maps directly onto how a STEM practitioner can work, which is the subject of the next section.

Applying One Health to STEM practice

Applied to STEM, One Health changes three things: where a project draws its system boundary, which outcomes it measures, and who sits at the table when it is designed. The table below shows how each discipline shifts.

Science and research

One Health research is defined by its questions, not its tools. A study of antibiotic-resistant bacteria might sample hospital wastewater, livestock manure, river sediment and shellfish beds in the same watershed, because resistance genes move freely between them. Practical moves:

• Build mixed teams from the proposal stage: an epidemiologist, an ecologist, a veterinarian or animal scientist, and someone from the affected community.
• Choose study sites at interfaces such as farm edges, wet markets, estuaries, aquaculture pens and urban green space.
• Use shared protocols and open data standards so results from different sectors can be combined.
• Report effects on all three domains, including null results, so trade-offs are visible.

Engineering and design

Engineering is where One Health becomes physical. Every structure, machine and material either strengthens or erodes the health of the system it is placed in. Useful habits:

• Widen the boundary. Run life-cycle assessment from extraction to disposal, and add ecological and animal-health indicators alongside carbon and cost.
• Design for co-benefit. A seawall can be grey concrete or a living shoreline that also builds habitat. An offshore platform can be a closed hull or a substrate that hosts reef life.
• Watch the interfaces. Water systems, HVAC, food processing, waste handling and aquaculture are the places where pathogens and pollutants cross between people, animals and environment.
• Choose materials as ecological actors. Antifouling coatings, microplastic shedding, leachates and noise all have biological effects. Prefer non-toxic, biodegradable or recoverable options.
• Biomimicry with humility. Borrowing from nature works best when the design also returns something to the system it learned from.

Technology, data and computation

Data systems are one of the Joint Plan's three pathways of change, and for good reason: most One Health failures are failures to connect information that already exists. Concretely:

• Integrated surveillance that links clinical, veterinary, agricultural and environmental monitoring, including wastewater and eDNA sampling.
• Remote sensing and sensor networks that track habitat change, water quality and vector ranges as early-warning signals.
• Coupled models (agent-based, network or system-dynamics) that let a change in land use or climate propagate through animal and human health outcomes.
• Open, interoperable standards and clear data-sharing agreements, designed with privacy and benefit-sharing in mind.
• AI tools that are trained and audited across domains, so a model that optimizes crop yield does not quietly increase pesticide exposure downstream.

Mathematics as a common language

Mathematics is what lets different disciplines argue productively. Network theory describes how disease or resistance genes move through contact webs. Dynamical systems show tipping points and feedback loops. Decision analysis and multi-criteria methods make trade-offs explicit instead of hiding them in a single cost figure. Uncertainty quantification keeps everyone honest about what is not yet known.

Education and training

The fastest way to change practice is to change how practitioners are trained:

• Build courses around real cases: a spillover event, a harmful algal bloom, a dam, a fishery collapse.
• Put engineering, life-science and social-science students on the same project teams.
• Pair field work with modeling so students see both the organism and the system.
• Teach ethics, equity and community engagement as technical skills, not electives.
• Bring in citizen science so learners and communities monitor their own environments.

A steward's philosophy grounded in One Health

A steward holds something in trust: they have real power over a system but do not own it outright, and they answer for its condition to others, including those not yet born. One Health gives that old idea a modern, testable form. It says what the steward is caring for (the whole web of human, animal, plant and ecosystem health) and offers ways to check whether that care is working.

From ownership to trusteeship

The extractive mindset asks what a system can yield. The steward asks what condition it should be left in. For a STEM practitioner this means treating every project as a temporary intervention in a living system that existed before it and will outlast it. Aldo Leopold's land ethic made this point in 1949: a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. One Health adds the health metrics that make “integrity” measurable.

Seven commitments of a One Health steward

1. See the whole system. Map who and what a project touches, including animals, microbes, soils, water and future users, before deciding what success means.
2. Do no net harm, then aim for net good. Treat neutral impact as the floor and regenerative impact as the goal.
3. Prevent before you repair. Put effort upstream, where design choices are cheap and reversible.
4. Share power and knowledge. Involve affected communities and Indigenous knowledge holders as co-designers, and share data and benefits fairly.
5. Stay humble about complexity. Use the precautionary principle when consequences could be severe or irreversible, and build in monitoring and the ability to change course.
6. Think in generations. Weigh long-term and cumulative effects, not just the project's operating life.
7. Be accountable in public. Publish methods, impacts and failures so others can check and improve the work.

Why stewardship needs One Health, and vice versa

Stewardship without One Health risks being sincere but vague: good intentions with no shared definition of the thing being protected. One Health without stewardship risks becoming a technical coordination exercise among agencies, missing the personal responsibility that drives individual designers and researchers. Together they give both a moral reason to care and a practical framework for knowing whether the care is working.

Toward sea and space

The frontiers where humans are now building, the open ocean and orbit, are where One Health thinking is most needed and least established. Both are shared commons, both are fragile, and both will host human habitats whose health depends entirely on the systems engineered around them.

The ocean is the planet's largest health system: it regulates climate, feeds billions and hosts most of Earth's biodiversity. Marine One Health links harmful algal blooms to shellfish poisoning, aquaculture antibiotics to resistant bacteria, plastic to the food chain, and warming water to shifting pathogens and coral disease. For anyone designing for the sea, stewardship means treating every structure as future habitat, choosing low-toxicity materials, planning decommissioning from day one, restoring coastal buffers such as mangroves and seagrass, and respecting the High Seas Treaty, in force since January 2026, which governs marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (OceanCare).

Space habitats are One Health in miniature. A station, lunar base or long-duration vessel is a closed loop where crew, microbes, plants, water and air recycle through the same small system. A microbial imbalance in the water loop is a crew health problem, an equipment problem and an ecosystem problem all at once. Stewardship there covers habitat microbiomes, bioregenerative life support, planetary protection under COSPAR guidelines, and the orbital commons of debris, light pollution and spectrum.

The Astra Carta (2023) extends the idea of caring for nature from Earth to the space environment. Read alongside One Health, it suggests a single test for every frontier project: does it leave the people, the living systems and the shared environment it touches healthier, or at least no worse, than it found them? Our companion page sets One Health beside the Outer Space Treaty, the Astra Carta, COSPAR's planetary-protection policy, the High Seas Treaty and other frameworks, and lays out how together they found societies at sea and in space.

A practical One Health checklist for STEM projects

These questions turn the principles above into a design review that can be run at the concept, prototype and deployment stages of any project.

Scope

• ☐ Have we mapped every human group, animal population, plant community and ecosystem the project touches, directly or downstream?
• ☐ Does our system boundary include manufacturing, operation, maintenance and end of life?

People and partners

• ☐ Are at least three disciplines (for example engineering, ecology, and human or animal health) involved in design decisions?
• ☐ Have affected communities, including Indigenous and local knowledge holders, had a real say, not just a consultation?

Metrics

• ☐ Do we track at least one human-health, one animal-health and one environmental-health indicator?
• ☐ Are baseline measurements in place so we can show change over time?

Risk and interfaces

• ☐ Have we identified where pathogens, pollutants or resistance genes could cross between humans, animals and the environment?
• ☐ Are materials, coatings and discharges screened for toxicity and persistence?
• ☐ Is there a precautionary plan for severe or irreversible effects?

Data and openness

• ☐ Is our data in open, interoperable formats that other sectors can use?
• ☐ Are benefits, including data and revenue, shared fairly with those who carry the risks?

Long-term care

• ☐ Is there a monitoring and adaptive-management plan after deployment?
• ☐ Is decommissioning or restoration designed and funded from the start?

Challenges and critiques

One Health is widely endorsed but unevenly practiced, and an honest steward should know where it falls short.

• Human-health dominance. Much One Health work still centers human disease, with animal and environmental health treated as risk factors rather than ends in themselves. Plant health and wildlife welfare are often afterthoughts.
• Silos persist. Ministries, funders, journals and university departments remain organized by sector, so joint work depends on goodwill and short-term grants.
• Weak legal teeth. Legal commentators note that the final Pandemic Agreement dropped One Health from its list of guiding principles, leaving it in an operational article instead (Völkerrechtsblog). The treaty still cannot open for signature: talks on the pathogen-sharing annex missed their May 2026 deadline and now run into 2027.
• Equity gaps. The places with the highest spillover risk often have the least funding, surveillance capacity and say in global decisions.
• Measurement is hard. There is no single agreed metric for ecosystem health, which makes trade-offs easy to ignore.
• Scope creep. A framework that includes everything can become too vague to guide action. Good practice keeps a clear question at the center.

None of these undercut the core idea. They are the design constraints for the next generation of One Health work, and STEM practitioners are well placed to address the measurement, data and engineering ones.

Conclusion

One Health asks STEM practitioners to accept a larger definition of their client: not just the user or funder, but the whole web of life a project touches. That is also the definition of stewardship. A steward who works this way draws wider boundaries, measures across species and ecosystems, invites more voices into design, and plans for the long tail of consequences.

The framework has gained real institutional weight, from the Quadripartite's Joint Plan of Action, now extended through 2029, to its place in the WHO Pandemic Agreement. Its success will still depend on everyday choices made by scientists, engineers, coders and educators. Whether on a farm, along a coastline, on the deep seabed or in orbit, the steward's question remains the same: will the systems we build leave life healthier than we found it?

Sources

• One Health High-Level Expert Panel, WHO
• The One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), One Health Outlook, 2023
• Behind the paper: OHHLEP, Springer Nature Communities
• One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022–2026), UNEP
• One Health Joint Plan of Action launch event, WHO
• Quadripartite collaboration extends the One Health Joint Plan of Action to 2029, WOAH, 2026
• Quadripartite collaboration extends the One Health Joint Plan of Action to 2029, UNEP, 2026
• The WHO Pandemic Agreement: a landmark for One Health, FAO
• One Health in the New Pandemic Agreement, Völkerrechtsblog, 2025
• PABS Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement: Member States extend negotiations into 2027, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2026
• PAHO and the Intergovernmental Working Group, PAHO
• High Seas Treaty, OceanCare

Further reading: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949); Wildlife Conservation Society, Manhattan Principles on One World, One Health (2004); COSPAR Policy on Planetary Protection; Astra Carta (2023).