Zoonotic diseases in animal agriculture and beyond: a one health perspective

This publication focuses on a group of vignettes to help understand zoonotic diseases, the anthropogenic factors accelerating their emergence, and the consequences of these events. While human activities and behavior are mostly responsible for creating this new era, the world struggles to prepare, change behavior, and rethink strategies to effectively address the inevitability of more frequent occurrences and severity of disease outbreaks and pandemics. Although we know and have experienced the cost of failure, past disease outbreaks seem to be quickly lost from our collective memories and new innovative interventions have not been imagined or adopted. This publication highlights examples that challenge our traditional actions and thinking and emphasize the need to adopt new approaches to prevent or ameliorate zoonotic diseases. The consensus of the experts contributing to this publication is that One Health should be embraced to achieve these results. The growing costs and societal disruptions of outbreaks and pandemics demand that zoonoses be part of our national security planning and deserve commensurate investments in preparedness, prevention, research, and resilience. This publication also highlights the necessity to fundamentally rethink and reestablish new relationships among institutions, organizations, and countries and especially between humanity and our natural systems worldwide.

Sugar taxation for climate and sustainability goals

Recovering from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic while achieving environmental goals requires creative policy measures. This study analyses the sustainability co-benefits of reducing sugar consumption through redirecting existing sugar cropland to alternative uses via sugar taxation. Meeting environmental sustainability goals while simultaneously recovering from the health and economic crises arising from the coronavirus pandemic requires creative policy solutions. Sugar taxation presents one such policy as sugar crops are arguably the least efficient to consume from a health perspective but the most efficient for biofuel production. Here we analyse the sustainability co-benefits of reducing sugar consumption through redirecting existing sugar cropland to alternative uses. Emissions could fall 20.9-54.3 Mt CO(2)e yr(-1) if the EU were to reduce its sugar consumption in line with health guidelines and the excess Brazilian sugar cane redirected to ethanol. These savings would be around four times higher than an alternative strategy of afforesting existing EU sugar beet cropland and double those from producing sugar beet ethanol in the European Union. Achieving this through policies aimed at behavioural change, with a serious role for sugar taxation, would not only reduce the environmental impacts of biofuels but also provide health and economic benefits.