Abstract: Biological control has been effectively exploited by mankind since 300 CE. By promoting the natural regulation of pests, weeds, and diseases, it produces societal benefits at the food-environment-health nexus.
The paper scrutinises biological control endeavours and their social-ecological outcomes through a holistic ‘One-Health’ lens, recognising that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the wider environment are linked and interdependent.
Evidence shows that biological control generates desirable outcomes within all One Health dimensions, mitigating global change issues such as chemical pollution, biocide resistance, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction. Yet, its cross-disciplinary achievements remain underappreciated. To remedy this, we advocate a systems-level, integrated approach to biological control research, policy, and practice.
Framing biological control in a One Health context helps to unite medical and veterinary personnel, ecologists, conservationists and agricultural professionals in a joint quest for solutions to some of the most pressing issues in planetary health.
Broad-scale recommendations to enhance the understanding and application of biological control in One Health:
Encourage more research on the diversity of natural enemy types and their diverse modes of action. Traditional agriculture-based biological control has tended to focus on the direct lethal effects of a relatively limited subset of natural enemies, yet there is a myriad of prospective biological control agents with varied modes of action and potential use strategies.
Conduct more rigorous evaluation of the direct and indirect benefits of biological control. Developing a robust evidence base for decision-making requires systematic outcome tracking using multidimensional One Health metrics across landscapes and sectoral boundaries.
Improve economic assessment to take into consideration the full costs and benefits of interventions so that diverse management options can be understood and compared. All too often decisions are based on direct economic costs of an intervention without consideration of the indirect costs and benefits (the spillovers and externalities).
Increase awareness of the value of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. This in turn could provide a foundation for mobilizing funding and unlocking novel funding streams, such as re-routing some of the very substantial resources tied in with conventional agricultural subsidies.
Increase the use of robust benefit-risk analyses to guide decision-making for biological control importations. Current practices are based primarily on the assessment of risks to native biodiversity with little regard to protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services that biological control can deliver.
Implement a diverse suite of hard and soft policy levers to support One Health goals. These could include command-and-control regulation, taxation for practices that degrade environmental health, and incentive strategies for sustainable biological control approaches.
Streamline regulatory and approval mechanisms to facilitate adoption of biological control tools without compromising necessary data on safety and efficacy. Current frameworks tend to be slow and overly burdensome, which disincentivizes innovation.
Promote transdisciplinary approaches involving multi-sector collaboration and engagement of stakeholders across the value chain. The One Health paradigm follows an explicit system-level perspective, yet current research and policy tend to be discipline-based, siloed, and top-down.
