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Strengthening health of
rangelands as third pillar of One
Health in – Experiences from
Ethiopia and Mongolia
HEAL ONE HEALTH WEBINAR 6th May 2021
F. Flintan, Senior Scientist, ILRI

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In pastoral areas a One Health approach is vital for ensuring healthy people and healthy
livestock. Pastoralism is a livelihood system in which livestock dominates, and
movement across a rangeland or dryland landscape is necessary to utilize patchily
distributed resources including grass, tree fodder, water and minerals.

Source: Johnson & Kaneene
2018
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HEAL-Afrique One-ASPIRE 06.08.2020
The health of these resources and the rangelands
landscape or ecosystem of which they are a part
cannot be separated from the health of the people and
the livestock. All three are interlinked, and changes in
one will have an impact on the other. At the same time
external forces can impact all three whether political
and economic forces or environmental forces such as
climate change.

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As the Mursi pastoralists of Ethiopia say:
“If you only have two cooking stones, you will never cook anything?”
Source: paddinglight. com

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Rangeland Health
….is the degree to which the integrity of the soil and the ecological processes of rangeland
ecosystems are sustained (NAS 1993).
• Rangelands are ecosystems, not individual organisms.
• The use of the term ''health'' should not imply that simple analogies can be made
between the health of an organism and the health of an ecosystem.
• Health is used to indicate the proper functioning of complex systems; the term is
increasingly applied to ecosystems to indicate a condition in which ecological processes
are functioning properly.
• The capacity of rangelands to produce commodities and to satisfy values on a sustained
basis depends on internal, self-sustaining ecological processes and the impacts of
humans.
• The minimum standard for rangeland management should be to prevent human-
induced loss of rangeland health.

Linkages to animal and human health
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General:
* Healthy rangelands lead to healthy livestock, lead to healthy humans
More specifically:
- Life cycles of pests, diseases, and parasites that live in rangelands affecting animals and
humans
- Number and type of livestock and wildlife supported by rangelands influenced by the
health of the rangeland
- Role of animal densities in disease transmission
- Reduction of zoonotic infectious pressure in healthier animals (p.e. Trypanosomiasis)
- Rangeland foods are a source of human food during drought periods
- Rangeland products can be used by humans as medicines, detergents and disinfectants
(e.g. aloe vera)
- Human interventions impact on rangelands negatively (bad management) and positively
(good management).
- Land use change a key cause of disease spillovers from wildlife to humans

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The HEAL Project, Ethiopia
Members of pastoral
communities are engaged in
defining sustanable, demand-
driven and need based One
Health units for Humans,
Environment, Animals and
Livelihoods (HEAL)
Aims to enhance the well-being and resilience to shocks of vulnerable communities in
pastoralist and agro-pastoralist areas in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia:
Context specific, cost
effective One Health service
delivery models are in
operation
HEAL-OHUs recognized as a
solution for service delivery for
pastoralist communities in the
Horn of Africa by policymakers
and investors

The HEAL project is supporting PRM (participatory
rangeland management)
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Figure 1: Stages and steps of PRM (Flintan and Cullis 2010)

Mapping
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Credit: Kelley Lynch

Strengthening management institutions
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Developing an integrated rangeland management plan

Steps taken in HEAL on rangeland health:
- A rangeland management assessment and foresight
report providing (i) an overview of how communities
currently manage rangelands; (ii) a summary of the site-
specific status and next actions needed for PRM; and (iii) a
brief initial analysis of specific One Health opportunities
that can be addressed.
- Livestock route mapping.
- Working to integrate livestock health in the HEAL one
health units.
- Management planning in Arda Olla (Moyale-Somali)
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Challenges
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- Working in a coordinated manner with other
partners and across sectors to ensure
environment/rangelands health is integrated with
other components
- Also addressing the wider environmental influences
that can have an impact on all three components.
- Need for full-time local presence.

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Film from Mongolia -
showing an expanded
rangeland health component

Conclusions
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- Rangelands health is a critical component of One Health
(a third pillar). In addition there are environmental factors
that have an influence on all three components.
- Important to understand the local context before
interventions start; important to have a solid
management/governance context including institutions
before activities begin.
- Rangelands health interventions can clearly benefit the
value chain, health of livestock and marketing of livestock
products

For more information
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Email us: heal@vsf-suisse.org
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