Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa: Ecosystems, livestock/wildlife, health and wellbeing

健康是人类福祉的一个重要方面，与物质和社会关系相互作用，有助于人们的自由和选择。特别是在非洲，一系列健康和疾病问题不成比例地影响到穷人。健康的生态系统和健康的人是相辅相成的，但人们对两者之间的确切关系仍然知之甚少。非洲疾病动态驱动因素联盟将围绕生态系统-健康-福祉相互作用提供新的理论概念化、综合系统分析和证据基础，并与预测模型和情景、工具和方法、影响途径和能力建设活动联系起来，以便在非洲环境中实施“一个健康”议程。生态系统可以通过提供和调节疾病的服务来改善人类福祉；然而，它们也可能产生生态系统的“危害”，例如充当野生动物新“出现”传染病的储存库。事实上，60%影响人类的新发传染病源自家畜和野生动物。这些人畜共患病对全世界的人类社会都有巨大的潜在影响，影响今世后代。了解疾病出现和传播的生态、社会和经济条件是当今人类面临的主要挑战之一。我们假设疾病调节作为一种生态系统服务受到生物多样性、气候和土地利用变化的影响，对人们的健康和福祉有不同的影响。该联盟将调查这一假说与四种疾病的关系，每种疾病都以不同的方式受到生态系统变化的影响，对野生动物和牲畜宿主的不同依赖，对人、人的健康和生计产生不同的影响。这些病例分别是塞拉利昂的拉沙热、加纳的亨尼帕病毒、肯尼亚的裂谷热以及赞比亚和津巴布韦的锥虫病。通过这些案例，我们将比较研究通过生态系统服务在非洲不同环境中的疾病调节过程。这些病例位于一系列不同的非洲生态系统类型，从加纳的潮湿森林，到塞拉利昂的森林-稀树草原过渡，再到赞比亚和津巴布韦的树木繁茂的miombo稀树草原，以及肯尼亚的半干旱稀树草原。这些案例能够对一系列环境变化过程进行比较探索，因为它们具有鲜明的生态系统结构、功能和动态，代表了非洲的一些主要生态系统类型。它们还允许对生态系统变化的关键政治、经济和社会驱动因素进行比较调查，这些驱动因素包括农业扩张和商业化、野生动物保护和利用、定居和城市化、采矿和冲突等。理解生态系统变化、疾病调控和人类福祉之间的相互作用必然是一个跨学科的挑战。该联盟汇集了研究环境变化和生态系统服务的顶尖自然和社会科学专家；社会经济、贫困和福利问题，以及健康和疾病问题。它将通过研究与政策/执行机构之间的新伙伴关系开展工作，以建立新型能力并确保产生影响的持续途径。在所有五个非洲国家，这些小组都有环境、社会和卫生科学家参与，是大学研究人员与政府执行/政策机构之间的伙伴关系。为支持与综合案例研究工作相关的一系列跨领域主题，该联盟还汇集了爱丁堡大学、剑桥传染病联盟和动物学研究所（支持关于疾病动力学和变化驱动因素的工作）；ILRI（生态系统、健康和福祉背景）；苏塞克斯大学STEPS中心（政治和价值观）和斯德哥尔摩复原力中心（机构、政策和未来情景）。

Health is a critical aspect of human wellbeing, interacting with material and social relations to contribute to people's freedoms and choices. Especially in Africa, clusters of health and disease problems disproportionately affect poor people. Healthy ecosystems and healthy people go together, yet the precise relationships between these remain poorly understood. The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium will provide a new theoretical conceptualisation, integrated systems analysis and evidence base around ecosystem-health-wellbeing interactions, linked to predictive models and scenarios, tools and methods, pathways to impact and capacity-building activities geared to operationalising a 'One Health' agenda in African settings.Ecosystems may improve human wellbeing through provisioning and disease regulating services; yet they can also generate ecosystem 'disservices' such as acting as a reservoir for new 'emerging' infectious disease from wildlife. Indeed 60% of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originate from animals, both domestic and wild. These zoonoses have a huge potential impact on human societies across the world, affecting both current and future generations. Understanding the ecological, social and economic conditions for disease emergence and transmission represents one of the major challenges for humankind today.We hypothesise that disease regulation as an ecosystem service is affected by changes in biodiversity, climate and land use, with differential impacts on people's health and wellbeing. The Consortium will investigate this hypothesis in relation to four diseases, each affected in different ways by ecosystem change, different dependencies on wildlife and livestock hosts, with diverse impacts on people, their health and their livelihoods. The cases are Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, henipaviruses in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through the cases we will examine comparatively the processes of disease regulation through ecosystem services in diverse settings across Africa. The cases are located in a range of different Africa ecosystem types, from humid forest in Ghana through forest-savanna transition in Sierra Leone to wooded miombo savanna in Zambia and Zimbabwe and semi-arid savanna in Kenya. These cases enable a comparative exploration of a range of environmental change processes, due to contrasting ecosystem structure, function and dynamics, representative of some of the major ecosystem types in Africa. They also allow for a comparative investigation of key political-economic and social drivers of ecosystem change from agricultural expansion and commercialisation, wildlife conservation and use, settlement and urbanisation, mining and conflict, among others. Understanding the interactions between ecosystem change, disease regulation and human wellbeing is necessarily an interdisciplinary challenge. The Consortium brings together leading natural and social scientific experts in the study of environmental change and ecosystem services; socio-economic, poverty and wellbeing issues, and health and disease. It will work through new partnerships between research and policy/implementing agencies, to build new kinds of capacity and ensure sustained pathways to impact. In all five African countries, the teams involve environmental, social and health scientists, forged as a partnership between university-based researchers and government implementing/policy agencies. Supporting a series of cross-cutting themes, linked to integrated case study work, the Consortium also brings together the University of Edinburgh, the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium and Institute of Zoology (supporting work on disease dynamics and drivers of change); ILRI (ecosystem, health and wellbeing contexts); the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex (politics and values), and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (institutions, policy and future scenarios).