Active Climate, Earth & Environment Plants, Animals & Ecology

Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of St Andrews
Funding £1.1M
Period Nov 2025 — Nov 2030

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Conservationists and global health officials are increasingly working together, but this alliance has a history stretching back more than a century. This project will uncover that history for the first time, examining how protecting species and landscapes became a strategy for preventing pandemics and mitigating climate change from the 1890s to the 2020s. The research addresses a gap in understanding: while the scientific case for conservation as a health measure is now widely accepted, the historical roots of that idea—and the controversies and consequences it has generated—remain unexplored. By coining the term "Conserving Global Health," the project will trace how conservation theories and practices functioned as public health measures, and how they shaped the health of humans, animals, plants, and microbes. The findings could inform current debates about planetary health, offering lessons from past ecological crises and their resolutions. This is fundamental historical research with no immediate practical application, but understanding how conservation and health became entangled could help policymakers avoid repeating past mistakes and design more effective strategies for the future.

View original technical description
Conservation is becoming a global health strategy. There is a growing scientific consensus that protecting species and landscapes acts as a prophylactic against the emergence of new pandemics or the acceleration of climate change through the loss of carbon sinks. But is this only a recent development? How did conservation gain prominence as a measure of protecting health? How were controversies over ecological crises addressed in the past and can they help navigate the future? And how has conservation shaped the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems on local and global scales? This project will provide the first major investigation of how species, landscape, and biodiversity conservation became global health strategies, and their consequences for humans, animals, plants, and microbes in the 1890s-2020s. To do so, it will uncover the connections between conservation and zoonotic disease emergence, climate change, and the health of Indigenous communities. Coining the term "Conserving Global Health" to describe the alliance that emerged between conservation and health, this project will show how conservation theories and practices were also public/global health measures. It will thus chart the prehistory of Planetary Health, make ground-breaking contributions to medical/environmental history, and be of relevance to conservation sciences and practices.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Jules Skotnes-Brown (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

Career Development Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.