As human activities like global trade and travel continue to accelerate and climate change worsens, many pests and pathogens are rapidly expanding their ranges and impacts on human and agricultural health. At the same time, changes in land use bring more frequent contact with new pathogens, and the widespread use of antimicrobials and biocides encourages the development of resistance. The impacts of emerging pests and pathogens can cascade in unexpected ways and affect multiple regions, or even global society.

To build social and ecological resilience to future emerging pests and pathogens and the social-ecological cascades they trigger, governments and NGOs need to work together across political and administrative boundaries and develop effective strategies for predicting and responding to risks, as well as building capacity for social and ecological resilience to system shocks. The INFLUX (Emerging pests and pathogens as a novel lens for unravelling social-ecological cascades) project aims to explore how EPPs cascade across scales in social-ecological systems and how these cascades can be governed for positive outcomes for sustainable development.

People: Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Melissa A. Barton, Kate Bjorklund, Diana Luna Gonzalez, Luong Nguyen-Thanh, Ege Pehlivanoglu

Methods: social-ecological network analysis, structural topic modelling, risk modelling, policy analysis

Keywords: emerging pests and pathogens, infectious disease, public health, international policy, social-ecological cascades, EcoHealth, One Health