With its One Health concept, JPA Health focuses on the intersection of human health, animal health and the health of the planet. "What's happening is we see our climate change; we see increasing impacts of that on human health and animal health," JPA Health EVP Tish Van Dyke tells Doug Simon. "So, it's something really important for us to love all of those three areas as much as we love one."

Van Dyke makes the case that this approach can pay dividends for brands as well as much at it does for an NGO. "Certainly, brands specifically working in so many of these spaces" can benefit, she says. "If you're a food and beverage brand, you want your foods and your beverages to certainly be more sustainable. If you are a brand working in the pharmaceutical space, whether it's in human health or animal health, you want to be talking about how you are optimizing the resources that you are using in this space to make a more resilient health system."

She adds that the One Health concept "allows companies to move beyond that ESG space and really make it part of their core business and bring it into their operations and make it part of the companies and the brands and the products that they're producing."

As part of the One Health initiative, JPA Health recently released the "One World, One Health" report. Van Dyke cites three main findings from the study: "Number one, the One Health community is a really small, limited community. The second thing we found was that climate and conservation stakeholders are not engaged in the One Health discussion. And then finally we looked at the policymaker communities. So, we looked at global and EU policymakers. They're pretty disconnected from the One Health conversation."

But Van Dyke says that such developments as the Covid pandemic bring home the fact that all stakeholders need to pay attention to all components of the One Health paradigm. "With the earth warming, things like that are happening with people moving around the Earth more frequently than we have in the past. So, we have to have a health system that is ready for that."

And while the challenges the One Health concept faces are considerable, Van Dyke is optimistic in light of the changes that have already taken place. "Personally, 15 years ago, I wasn't thinking about how my health was connected to the health of the environment and the health of animals and how that works together. I think building that knowledge, sharing that knowledge, interacting with each other, bringing these different stakeholder communities together, there's a real opportunity."

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