Planning: CRISES: Center for One Health Policy, Education, and Science (COPES)

The greater frequency and intensity of hazard events such as viral outbreaks and extreme weather events requires new solutions to strengthen human resilience, security, and quality of life. The traditional approach to this complex problem is usually from one scientific perspective, and yet solutions to decrease the devastating effects of hazards require understanding the dynamics of the human as well as the natural environments. This project is designed to investigate a One Health approach to crisis prevention and management, which says that the health of humans, animals, and the environment are interdependent and require expertise that crosses disciplines and agencies. This planning grant cultivates a new approach to One Health through the creation of the Center for One Health Policy, Education and Science (COPES) that reimagines One Health strategies across three focal areas: education, science, and policy. COPES serves to fill a critical need for effective integration of a human-centered approach to develop comprehensive and durable strategies to address preparedness and prevention solutions to hazard events. There is a growing realization that anthropogenic (e.g., land use change) and human-centered dimensions of hazard issues (e.g., travel, population densities/movements) are needed to converge with biomedical, ecological, and abiotic discoveries to generate effective and sustainable solutions to contemporary global health challenges. COPES provides critical insights into the various factors within and across the various policy areas (e.g., public health, healthcare, the environment, economic development) that are responsible for contributing to the challenges in governance of complex hazards to inform both the academic and applied work on public policy. COPES also provides a first-of-its kind venue for facilitating the integration of human data within One Health research, thereby facilitating more accurate and comprehensive understandings of the interconnected drivers of disease transmission across multiple systems. Lastly, by helping to educate the next generation of One Health leaders, COPES contributes to the creation of shared understandings of One Health across diverse disciplines, which will be critical to One Health’s long-term growth as a subdiscipline. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.