One Health: health crises prevented… and 99% savings

Results & impact 18 September 2026
Prevention is better than cure, and cheaper, in terms of both human lives and financial consequences. That prevention necessarily means adopting so-called One Health approaches, which build on the interconnections on which the living world relies. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, One Health programmes have blossomed worldwide. According to the initial results, the cost of these new prevention systems is estimated at… 1% of the potential annual cost of the pandemics they prevent. CIRAD participated in a recent investment brief published by FAO, WHO and WOAH.
Taking samples and measurements in a bat colony in Zimbabwe

Taking samples and measurements in a bat colony in Zimbabwe. Bats are reservoirs of viruses that are sometimes very dangerous for humans.  © A. Jimu

The essentials

  • Each year, health threats cost billions of dollars worldwide. The risks include zoonoses such as Covid-19, and also animal diseases that devastate herds, plant diseases that destroy crops, and the consequences of the over-consumption of antibiotics, which has brought a global rise in antimicrobial resistance.
  • According to the World Bank, investing in prevention would cost less than 1% of the sum spent on managing and the losses caused by repeated health crises. However, the funding available for One Health approaches unfortunately remains limited, notably because of the lack of coordination between health services, the authorities and the economic sectors concerned.
  • A new investment brief published by FAO, WHO and WOAH sets out the opportunities for investing in One Health, and reports on the colossal returns on investment already enabled by several programmes rolled out since 2020. 

The World Bank estimates the annual cost of adopting a One Health approach to prevent pandemics at roughly 11 billion dollars worldwide. That is less than 1% of the cost of responding to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. 

Those 11 billion dollars are spread across various sectors, primarily agricultural or relating to the "living world": 2.1 billion for veterinary services, 5 billion for agricultural biosecurity and between 3.2 and 4.4 billion to reduce deforestation in high-risk countries. 

Prevention is a global public good.
FAO, WHO, WOAH
Investment brief, 2026

A tiny investment, with hugely underestimated returns

Marisa Peyre is an epidemiologist at CIRAD and co-founder of the PREZODE international initiative. She contributed to the investment brief, and says: "There is a tendency to overlook the economic benefits of prevention, precisely because prevention works. Health crises are avoided; hence the benefits are invisible. However, they are there, and they are more significant than we might think". 

One Health approaches are effective in cases where isolated strategies are not enough. And the "return on investment" is often much broader than the initial issue. The brief highlights examples of recent initiatives in this field. In Egypt, for instance, to reduce pollution of the Nile by waste chicken carcasses, FAO supported a private-public collaboration aimed at promoting on-farm fertiliser production by composting carcasses. The farms involved have seen their profits rise by 1.4% per year. On a national scale, this represents a profit of 45.9 million US dollars per year. Moreover, in addition to the reduction in disease risks due to water pollution, crop productivity has improved and the country's dependence on fertilisers has fallen. It is these types of "indirect advantages" that scientists are now attempting to quantify more effectively.

Funding mechanisms are too focused on sectors and too inflexible

The originality and strength of One Health lies in the fact that it takes account of the interconnections within the living world, but paradoxically, that is also what makes it difficult to fund. As the brief notes, "Sectors relevant to the One Health approach tend to have delineated structures with mechanisms of management, budgeting... and economic and financial analysis".

Yet One Health cannot work without coordination between the health, agriculture and environment sectors in particular. All over the world, there is still a cruel lack of institutional incentives and mechanisms designed for inter-sector collaboration.

Diseases do not understand borders between either countries or economic sectors. In response to epidemics, isolated investments in individual sectors often prove inadequate, if not totally useless. Antimicrobial resistance management is a prime example: over-consumption of antibiotics is a problem for human health, for livestock farming, for animal product consumers, for environments polluted by animal droppings that may themselves contain resistant bacteria, and by extension for any human activity alongside (often market gardening or annual crops, which take up polluted water).

While the sector-related obstacles may seem insurmountable, the brief contains avoidance strategies in the form of easily imaginable investment scenarios. Above all, it pinpoints a crucial element: the dynamic is already under way. Collaborative governance mechanisms already exist more or less everywhere, primarily on a local level. Research has to prove the relevance of such mechanisms and provide the authorities with evidence of their rollout. What remains is for the players concerned to fund the approach.

Determining the return on investment better to plan better

FAO, UNEP, WHO and WOAH launched a Quadripartite for One Health. The Quadripartite has given rise to several communities of practice, one of which specialises in the return on investment in the One Health approach. 

That community of practice, created with the World Bank and CIRAD, aims to plan investment better by improving the economic indicators for One Health. The cross-sectoral nature of the approach means building suitable holistic assessment methods, different from sectoral methods.

It was this community of practice that produced the investment brief.

See also