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A new article published in The Lancet Planetary Health brings attention to a critical, yet often overlooked issue in the One Health approach—a global framework designed to tackle the interconnected health challenges at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. Scientists Amélie Desvars-Larrive and Fariba Karimi from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) argue that the current One Health framework fails to explicitly address the importance of workforce diversity.
Desvars-Larrive and Karimi highlight that solving complex public health problems requires more than just an interdisciplinary approach. It calls for a diverse workforce that represents a broad spectrum of human differences, including ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and nationality.
“We usually think of diversity in One Health in terms of teams with experts from different knowledge areas,” says Desvars-Larrive, who leads CSH’s research on Health Across Species and is also a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. However, after collaborating with Karimi, she realized that diversity goes far beyond disciplinary expertise.
“Diversity has multiple facets,” adds Karimi, who leads the CSH team on Algorithmic Fairness and serves as a professor of Social Data Science at Graz University of Technology. “Differences in social constructs such as ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation contribute to varied lived experiences, which are essential for addressing complex health challenges.”
The article argues that teams that reflect a wide range of human differences are more creative, reduce groupthink, and produce higher-quality research. Diverse teams, particularly those inclusive of different genders and sociocultural backgrounds, are also better equipped to engage with and understand minority populations—an essential factor in health research.
Karimi’s research focuses on understanding social inequalities and biases within social networks, and her work highlights the importance of including diverse voices in scientific research. “Global challenges are often complex problems, and to solve them we need a diverse group of people to examine the problem from different angles,” she explains.
In their collaboration, Desvars-Larrive and Karimi emphasize how CSH’s interdisciplinary environment fostered discussions that led to a deeper understanding of the role of diversity in One Health. “CSH allowed me to engage in these conversations with Amélie, ultimately leading to this publication,” notes Karimi.
The scientists conclude that for One Health to achieve its full potential in addressing global health challenges, fostering inclusiveness and diversity within its workforce is essential.
For more information, readers can access the full article: Amelie Desvars-Larrive et al, Beyond silos: integrating diversity for a stronger One Health, The Lancet Planetary Health (2024).
