Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/J001422/1
Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa: Ecosystems, livestock/wildlife, health and wellbeing
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Dr D Grace, ILRI (International Livestock Res Inst), Livestock Systems and the Environment
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr R Sang, Int Ctr of Insect Physiology and Ecology, Research
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr E Mwangi, University of Nairobi, Research
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr B Bett, ILRI (International Livestock Res Inst), Food Safety and Zoonoses
- Science Area:
- Atmospheric
- Freshwater
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Zoonoses
- Animal diseases
- Area & Development Studies
- Population Ecology
- Ecosystem Scale Processes
- Abstract:
- Health is a critical aspect of human wellbeing, interacting with material and social relations to contribute to people's freedoms and choices. Especially in Africa, clusters of health and disease problems disproportionately affect poor people. Healthy ecosystems and healthy people go together, yet the precise relationships between these remain poorly understood. The Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium will provide a new theoretical conceptualisation, integrated systems analysis and evidence base around ecosystem-health-wellbeing interactions, linked to predictive models and scenarios, tools and methods, pathways to impact and capacity-building activities geared to operationalising a 'One Health' agenda in African settings. Ecosystems may improve human wellbeing through provisioning and disease regulating services; yet they can also generate ecosystem 'disservices' such as acting as a reservoir for new 'emerging' infectious disease from wildlife. Indeed 60% of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originate from animals, both domestic and wild. These zoonoses have a huge potential impact on human societies across the world, affecting both current and future generations. Understanding the ecological, social and economic conditions for disease emergence and transmission represents one of the major challenges for humankind today. We hypothesise that disease regulation as an ecosystem service is affected by changes in biodiversity, climate and land use, with differential impacts on people's health and wellbeing. The Consortium will investigate this hypothesis in relation to four diseases, each affected in different ways by ecosystem change, different dependencies on wildlife and livestock hosts, with diverse impacts on people, their health and their livelihoods. The cases are Lassa fever in Sierra Leone, henipaviruses in Ghana, Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through the cases we will examine comparatively the processes of disease regulation through ecosystem services in diverse settings across Africa. The cases are located in a range of different Africa ecosystem types, from humid forest in Ghana through forest-savanna transition in Sierra Leone to wooded miombo savanna in Zambia and Zimbabwe and semi-arid savanna in Kenya. These cases enable a comparative exploration of a range of environmental change processes, due to contrasting ecosystem structure, function and dynamics, representative of some of the major ecosystem types in Africa. They also allow for a comparative investigation of key political-economic and social drivers of ecosystem change from agricultural expansion and commercialisation, wildlife conservation and use, settlement and urbanisation, mining and conflict, among others. Understanding the interactions between ecosystem change, disease regulation and human wellbeing is necessarily an interdisciplinary challenge. The Consortium brings together leading natural and social scientific experts in the study of environmental change and ecosystem services; socio-economic, poverty and wellbeing issues, and health and disease. It will work through new partnerships between research and policy/implementing agencies, to build new kinds of capacity and ensure sustained pathways to impact. In all five African countries, the teams involve environmental, social and health scientists, forged as a partnership between university-based researchers and government implementing/policy agencies. Supporting a series of cross-cutting themes, linked to integrated case study work, the Consortium also brings together the University of Edinburgh, the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Consortium and Institute of Zoology (supporting work on disease dynamics and drivers of change); ILRI (ecosystem, health and wellbeing contexts); the STEPS Centre, University of Sussex (politics and values), and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (institutions, policy and future scenarios).
- Period of Award:
- 1 Feb 2012 - 30 Apr 2016
- Value:
- £471,287 Split Award
Authorised funds only
- NERC Reference:
- NE/J001422/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Directed - International
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- ESPA
This grant award has a total value of £471,287
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Exception - Other Costs | Exception - Staff | Exception - T&S |
|---|---|---|
| £234,853 | £231,830 | £4,604 |
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