A Commentary on the Progress, Achievements, and Perspectives of the Global Plant Health Assessment

The Global Plant Health Assessment is a collaborative project involving approximately one hundred scientists across the world, addressing the global state of plant health as a common good. The project is unusual in that it relies entirely on voluntary contributions from scientists, operates without dedicated funding, and incorporates internal collaboration mechanisms for peer review and publication. Plant Health Reports have been developed by teams of scientists for more than 30 cases, each focusing on a purposely selected keystone plant species representing plant systems in multiple world ecoregions. These plant systems encompass forests, field crops, perennial crops, household and periurban systems, as well as urban forests, in both the Global North and the Global South. Despite this necessarily fragmented information, an overall view however emerges on the current state and recent evolution of world plant health, as well as on the consequences of declining plant health on three categories of ecosystem services generated by healthy plants: provisioning, regulating, and cultural-spiritual. Additional reports are being developed to improve this view, along with new developments where the future of plant health and its consequences will be addressed. As a project structure and organisational model, the Global Plant Health Assessment could serve as a template for future collective scientific efforts addressing major questions about global common goods.