Start of the project ZOE - Zoonoses Emergence across Degraded and Restored Forest Ecosystems.

What are the relations between biodiversity loss and the risk of zoonoses, that is, the transmission of diseases between animals and humans? How can we create synergies between holistic approaches to health and biodiversity conservation to reduce the risk of zoonoses emergence? And what is the role and impact of human behaviour in increasing or reducing risks, for example, by altering forest ecosystems through the expansion of agriculture and urbanisation?

These are some of the guiding questions of the EU Horizon-Europe project ZOE, which are being addressed by an interdisciplinary consortium of 12 partner organisations working across geography, geobotany, ecology, virology, immunology, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, and science communication. The project is led by Jan Felix Drexler from the Institute for Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Nadja Kabisch from the Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Over the next four years, the team will map biodiversity and land use/land cover changes from macro- to micro-scales and model disease risk. Moreover, it will develop social-cultural pathways to better understand changes in the relations between forest ecosystems, biodiversity, and disease emergence and to influence these dynamics positively. The consortium will work together with diverse case studies in Slovenia, Slovakia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, to highlight the contextual complexities that are embedded into these social and ecological relations.

Prof. Kerstin Krellenberg and the Urban Studies Working Group will contribute particularly to the development and implementation of the project´s trans- and interdisciplinary methodology: through a literature review on the drivers and mechanisms of relations; the co-creative development of context-specific methods to assess risk perception, vulnerabilities, and coping and adaptation practices in the case studies; as well as through a series of workshops to strengthen the resilience of local actors and reduce health risk and biodiversity loss.

Financed by: EU Horizon Europe

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