One Health approach: Addressing data challenges and unresolved questions in agriculture

The One Health approach, which seeks to balance the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, is gaining increasing recognition. Although in 2022 the One Health High-Level Expert Panel refined its definition to explicitly include plant health, concrete integration of crop health into One Health strategies remains underdeveloped. As a result, the agricultural domain's contributions to the environmental chemical load are still insufficiently addressed. In addition, there is a general lack of studies aimed at estimating the relative contribution of each different One Health domain (i.e., the human, the animal, and the plant one) to this phenomenon. This discussion paper examines the current availability of data on main chemical outputs across these domains, specifically focusing on agrochemical and drug/medicine use in agriculture, animal, and human health. However, data collection proved challenging due to inconsistencies and gaps across sectors, making direct comparisons of environmental burdens difficult to establish. Instead, this study provides an indication of trends while primarily highlighting severe gaps in data availability and the unanswered research questions that arise from them. It also emphasizes the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration across all three domains. In particular, the integration of scholars, professionals, and experts in agriculture, forestry, livestock and environmental sciences is crucial to optimizing future One Health initiatives, especially in the context of crop and plant health.