A Need for a Paradigm Shift in Planetary Health Science
Jason R. Rohr
University of Notre Dame, United States of America
“We hope that our innovation will serve as a prototype and inspiration for other planetary health innovations that address multiple SDGs”
Humanity faces no greater challenge than addressing the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which emphasize meeting the needs of all people equitably while remaining within planetary boundaries. Importantly, societies must better appreciate the degree to which SDGs intersect. For example, poor health and inadequate education keep communities stuck in poverty traps; human needs drive the conversion of natural areas to agriculture increasing climate change and biodiversity loss and often degrading water access and quality. Despite these common intersections, solutions that simultaneously address multiple SDGs are rare. Even more rare are studies demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of these innovations and thus their potential for scaling.
To make transformative progress towards achieving SDGs, there must be a paradigm shift in how science is conducted and translated. Rather than taking the traditional siloed approach of addressing each SDG individually, typically through a single disciplinary lens, scientists, engineers, and local communities must embrace their interconnections through a systems-based approach and search for sustainable, scalable “win-win” planetary health solutions for multiple SDGs. To uncover innovations that can help advance human flourishing while navigating the planet back towards a safe operating space, we must promote broad, diverse, collaborative thinking and training and truly interdisciplinary and multicultural science.
Our winning project (Figure 1) addresses the devastating neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis, the world’s second most common parasitic disease after malaria with >800 million people at risk of infection globally. Schistosomiasis, which is caused by snail-transmitted flatworms (Schistosoma species) that penetrate human skin, reinforces poverty and defies control efforts via drug administration because humans get re-infected when they return to parasite-infested waterbodies. Snail hosts, which serve as an intermediate stage in the life cycle of the parasites, use invasive aquatic vegetation as habitat, such as coontail or hornwort, and fertilizer runoff promotes proliferation of this vegetation. We established that removing this invasive vegetation from water access points in West Africa reduced schistosomiasis in schoolchildren. We then converted this vegetation into compost and livestock feed, recapturing leached nutrients as private agricultural inputs whose benefits greatly exceed their costs. This innovative approach provides an economic incentive for poor rural communities to facilitate sustainable development and return nutrients back to agriculture, closing nutrient loops, while simultaneously helping these marginalized communities escape disease-poverty traps and improve food and water access, and livelihoods. Additionally, localized vegetation removal does not measurably disrupt the local aquatic ecology in the long term.
Figure 1. In our award-winning Frontiers Planet Prize project, we gathered support for the hypothesis that agriculture increases the devastating human disease schistosomiasis by increasing fertilizer runoff that fuels invasive submerged vegetation that is the habitat for snails, the intermediate hosts of the Schistosoma parasites. We then removed the invasive vegetation and returned the nutrients captured in it back to agriculture by converting the vegetation to compost, livestock feed, and fuel for biodigesters. This innovation increased food, energy, and incomes while reducing schistosomiasis, pollution, and climate change.
We also showed that removed vegetation can be profitably combined with cow manure as inputs to biodigesters (system that biologically digests organic material) that produce both fertilizer and gas for cooking or electricity production. This important finding allowed us to partner with the Senegal National Biogas Program to leverage the Swiss government’s investment in 60,000 biodigesters in Senegal for carbon credits, of which only ~2,000 have been installed. Currently, 87% of households in Senegal use firewood and charcoal as cooking fuel, which contributes to deforestation. Additionally, methane, the predominant gas released from manure, accounts for ~16% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is 80x more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide, further supporting the carbon credit designation. However, the more biodigesters get installed, the more limiting cow manure becomes. Hence, co-digesting aquatic vegetation with cow excrement is a more sustainable option for meeting energy and fertilizer demands, while having the co-benefits of diminishing deforestation, mitigating climate change, and reducing human schistosomiasis.
Our team has made major progress scaling this innovation. We developed remote sensing technology to detect the vegetation, which facilitates targeting the innovation where it is needed most. In partnership with the Senegalese Ministry of Health, we are providing education and training related to the public health and private agronomic benefits of the innovation to 88 communities. These trials also test whether the innovation increases equity by offering greater benefits to poorer households. Finally, to further increase this innovation’s adoption, we are working on commercially viable scaling approaches and testing the innovation in East Africa.
Our work capitalizes on an interdisciplinary, systems-based approach and synergistically leverages principles of ecology and the social, economic, environmental, and agricultural sciences to establish a rare example of a profitable win-win planetary health innovation that simultaneously addresses numerous SDGs, including no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, affordable and clean energy, and sustainable cities and communities. An exciting lesson of our work is that many communities in low-income countries have untapped opportunities to use seemingly simple, low-cost, effective local interventions, such as converting nuisance vegetation into a valuable input for crop, livestock, or energy production. Working in close collaboration with local communities and researchers enables us to add value to extant local knowledge to promote a sustainable development technique that seems to simultaneously improve equity, wealth, health, and food, water, and energy access. Moreover, by developing and testing a scaling plan after demonstrating the intervention’s effectiveness, we are facilitating widespread innovation diffusion with the potential for transformative changes to development in Africa that will help keep conditions within planetary boundaries. Importantly, this presented project is only one of several examples of interdisciplinary work being conducted by our international team that leverages interconnections among SDGs to creatively develop solutions to major challenges facing societies, such as health, hunger and poverty.
In summary, a radical shift is necessary in the way science is conducted and scientists and engineers are trained if humanity is going to make truly transformational progress towards SDGs and return to a safe operating space. Scientists and engineers must work alongside local communities to adopt interdisciplinary, systems-based approaches to beneficially modify the built and natural world and design incentives for community-led maintenance of innovations with both public and private benefits. For the good of all, I hope that the examples I provide in this piece inspire widespread searches for other scalable, win-win planetary health innovations and galvanize a shift towards systems-based approaches that leverage common co-dependencies among SDGs.
Photo 1. Planetary health team involved in the award-winning Frontiers Planet Prize project.
