Wildlife health surveillance is no longer a luxury. It is both a global conservation and health security imperative. Most countries still lack reliable systems to detect disease in wildlife, leaving the world dangerously vulnerable to the next conservation crisis—or the next disease threat that spreads across wildlife, livestock, and people.
In response, the Wildlife Health Intelligence Network (WHIN) has now published three papers that, taken together, provide a diagnosis of the challenge, a blueprint to help close this global blind spot before the next threat unfolds, and the tools to get there.
These papers point to a clear opportunity: by joining WHIN groups can more effectively and cost efficiently build wildlife health surveillance systems together. Through WHIN, shared tools (including HAWK, a data service for managing wildlife health surveillance data), training, data standards, and practical experience can help efforts move faster, avoid costly duplication, and strengthen preparedness before the next crisis emerges.
WHIN is an open, global community of practice uniting experts, organizations, and governments to build wildlife health surveillance systems that are locally led and aligned with international standards. WHIN was created because most countries still lack the consistent, long-term systems needed to understand and respond to health threats affecting wild animals and ecosystems.
These systems are essential for conserving wildlife populations and ecological integrity while providing an early warning system for threats before they spread to livestock, people, local economies, or global supply chains.
Published in separate journals, the three new papers deliver a coordinated global blueprint for building wildlife health surveillance systems from the local to international level. Collectively, the papers answer three practical questions:
- Why does wildlife health surveillance matter?
- How can countries build effective systems?
- What tools can they use to get started?
This work demonstrates that paying attention to health and disease in wild animal populations is not a niche technical activity, but essential infrastructure for conserving wildlife, maintaining healthy ecosystems, and supporting One Health, food security, livelihoods, and preparedness for emerging threats.
The first paper makes the case that wildlife health surveillance is not simply a conservation issue—it underpins progress on many of the world’s biggest environmental, health, and development goals. It explains why they matter, drawing a direct line between wildlife health and a majority of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, including Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-Being, Clean Water and Sanitation, Climate Action, and Life on Land and Below Water.
The paper recalls examples of outbreaks that have devastated both wildlife and livestock economies alike. Peste des petits ruminants, for instance, caused an estimated 80 percent decline in the endangered Mongolian saiga antelope and 90 percent mortality in unvaccinated sheep and goats. On the economic side, every $1 million injected into the economy by nature-based tourism to see Rwanda’s mountain gorillas creates roughly 1,328 jobs. Failures to detect wildlife disease early can thus carry enormous ecological and economic costs.
The second paper shifts from diagnosis to solutions, laying out a roadmap to overcome the barriers to implementing and growing locally sustainable and appropriate surveillance for wildlife health. Tiggy Grillo, co-chair of the IUCN SSC Wildlife Health Specialist Group, said.
“The goal is to connect local and national actors with the expertise and resources critical to build effective harmonized systems faster, while using international coordination to strengthen and guide local action, such as those developed via WHIN as well as IUCN (e.g. WOAH/IUCN General Guidelines for Surveillance of Diseases, Pathogens, and Toxic Agents in Free-ranging Wildlife).”
Meeting that challenge, WHIN concludes, will require progress on six mutually reinforcing fronts. These include, shifting mindsets away from viewing wildlife as an economic liability and toward collaborative models of cooperation, building the political will and aligned funding, strengthening the evidence base through research on cost-effectiveness and prioritization, developing open-source and interoperable technologies, and enhancing local capacity through training that empowers in-country experts.
The sixth element is a global community of practice, anchored by WHIN, that connects intergovernmental bodies, national programs, Indigenous communities, and field practitioners to share expertise and avoid reinventing solutions.
Rather than prescribing a top-down mandate, WHIN’s theory of change calls for collaboration from every direction to scale up solutions that already work—such as WildHealthNet in Southeast Asia and the WOAH South-East Asia Wildlife Health Network—rather than asking every country to start from scratch. As WHIN puts it, sustainable implementation “exceeds the capacity of any single institution.”
Finally, in the third paper, the authors embrace a Needs Assessment Tool, piloted in Thailand and Rwanda, that gives countries a practical instrument to evaluate an emerging or well-established WHS program. It helps countries identify the strongest parts of their wildlife health surveillance systems—and where the biggest gaps remain.
The tool covers topics ranging from diagnostic laboratories to communication and governance, helping pinpoint where investment will make the greatest difference. Built around detection, identification, analysis, management, communication, and applied research, the tool assesses each area by urgency and impact so that resources can be effectively targeted. It provides a concrete example of tools that can be shared across a community of practice to support similar needs.
Together, these findings make the case for collective action: WHIN gives partners a way to pool resources and expertise through shared training, common data standards, and hard-won field experience, so no single country or organization has to build wildlife health surveillance capacity alone, and the world is better prepared before the next crisis hits.
WHIN invites governments, international organizations, funders, and local communities to treat wildlife health surveillance as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Investing in wildlife health today is an investment in a safer, healthier, and more sustainable future.
