IUCN Veterinary Specialist Group (VSG) members are playing a key role in helping to lay the scientific foundation for an international animal health and natural resources management initiative that a consortium of organizations launched within the context of the September 2003 IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa. The initiative is called AHEAD – Animal Health for the Environment And Development.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), IUCN VSG, and other partners helped to start AHEAD in recognition of the importance of animal health to both conservation and development interests. Around the world, domestic and wild animals are coming into ever-more-intimate contact, as we all of course know, and without adequate scientific knowledge and planning, the consequences can be detrimental on one or both sides of the proverbial fence. But armed with the tools that the health sciences provide, conservation and development objectives have a much greater chance of being realized – particularly at the critical wildlife/livestock intersection, where conservation and agricultural interests meet head-on.

We hope to catalyze work focused on several themes of critical importance to the future of animal agriculture, human health, and wildlife health (including zoonoses, competition over grazing and water resources, disease mitigation, local and global food security, and other potential sources of conflict related to overall land-use planning and economics). To date, neither the nongovernmental organizations nor the aid community nor academia have holistically addressed the landscape-level nexus represented by the triangle of wildlife health, domestic animal health, and human health.