One Health
One Health is the recognition that the health of people, animals, plants, and the shared environment is not separate but one connected system — a disturbance in any one of them tends to surface in the others. A contaminated water source, an antibiotic used on a farm, a cleared forest: each ripples across the whole. It is the diagnostic lens of OneHealing — the way we read what is wrong across the living system rather than in one corner of it.
- One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), Adisasmito WB, et al. One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future. PLOS Pathogens 2022;18(6):e1010537.Open access
- FAO, UNEP, WHO & WOAH (Quadripartite). One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022–2026). Rome, 2022.Open access
EcoHealth & Planetary Health
EcoHealth studies how the integrity of ecosystems — their biodiversity, water, soil, and cycles — underpins the health of everything living within them. Planetary Health widens the lens to civilization scale: it examines how the state of the Earth's natural systems ultimately shapes human health and wellbeing. Together they define what OneHealing is trying to protect — the living planet as the patient — and remind us that the systems keeping us alive can be pushed past safe limits.
- Whitmee S, Haines A, et al. Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health. The Lancet 2015;386(10007):1973–2028.
- Lerner H, Berg C. A comparison of three holistic approaches to health: One Health, EcoHealth, and Planetary Health. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 2017;4:163.Open access
- Richardson K, Steffen W, et al. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 2023;9(37):eadh2458 — the measurable "safe operating space."Open access
One Health Testing
One Health Testing is the initiative's evidence layer: integrated, field-deployable instruments — a "Lab-in-a-Box" — that read the chemical, nutrient, and biological health of soil, water, food, and living systems right where people live, in near-real time. It turns "we think it's bad" into "here is exactly what's in it." The idea builds on decades of point-of-care and point-of-need diagnostics developed for human health, now extended outward to the environment — the direction the OMI Lab's optofluidic platforms have already begun to take.
- Yager P, Edwards T, et al. Microfluidic diagnostic technologies for global public health. Nature 2006;442:412–418 — a foundational statement of point-of-need diagnostics.
Assessment — OHTA & PHVA
Assessment is how OneHealing turns measurements into fair, transparent decisions. It extends the discipline of Health Technology Assessment — long used to weigh the value of medical technologies for health systems — to socio-ecological choices. Crucially, it keeps health, ecological, economic, resilience, and distributional evidence as separate, comparable, auditable lines rather than collapsing them into a single score that would hide the trade-offs. OHTA supports operational and local choices (a product, a practice, a restoration method); PHVA supports strategic ones (a programme, a policy, an investment). Both insist on one question the usual tools skip: who bears the hidden cost?
- O'Rourke B, Oortwijn W, Schuller T. The new definition of health technology assessment: a milestone in international collaboration. Int. J. Technology Assessment in Health Care 2020;36(3):187–190.
- Thokala P, Devlin N, et al. Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Health Care Decision Making — An Introduction (ISPOR MCDA Task Force, Report 1). Value in Health 2016;19(1):1–13.
- Richardson K, et al. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 2023;9:eadh2458 — the ecological reference ceiling.Open access
Regenerative Systems Design
Regenerative Systems Design is OneHealing's "treatment" — using nature's own tools (constructed wetlands, agroecology, restoration ecology, living soil, good design) as engineered infrastructure that removes harm at its source and actively rebuilds the capacity of living systems, rather than only doing less damage. Its research frontier asks a harder question: how can such systems be measured and managed to increase, not merely sustain, their ability to recover — a challenge OneHealing frames in the language of control systems, the convener's home discipline.
- Seddon N, Chausson A, et al. Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2020;375:20190120.Open access
- Schreefel L, Schulte RPO, et al. Regenerative agriculture – the soil is the base. Global Food Security 2020;26:100404.Open access
- Ferguson RS, Lovell ST. Permaculture for agroecology: design, movement, practice, and worldview. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development 2014;34:251–274.
- Scheffer M, Bascompte J, et al. Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature 2009;461:53–59 — the regenerative-control frontier.
- Holling CS. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 1973;4:1–23 — the roots of resilience thinking.
An evolution of control theory toward regenerative systems
Control theory is the engineering science of steering a system toward a goal through feedback — the mathematics behind everything from a thermostat to a spacecraft. Over the last century it has evolved from holding a machine at a fixed setpoint to managing complex, adaptive, and networked systems. OneHealing proposes a further step in that evolution: toward living, socio-ecological systems, where the aim is not to hold a value steady but to increase a system's own capacity to recover and regenerate. This is an open research direction rather than a finished theory — the through-line that could one day connect measuring, deciding, and treating into a single, learnable loop.
Nature Labs
Nature Labs are living laboratories — real field sites where measuring, treating, assessing, and learning happen together in one place. Science becomes practice, and local practice feeds back to improve the science and the assessment. They are where OneHealing stops being an idea and becomes something demonstrated, measured, and taught, beginning at IISc's Challakere campus with upgraded mobile testing laboratories. They draw on the traditions of living labs, translational research, and adaptive management.