| 9 | “3 questions to” Nicolas Antoine-Moussiaux, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, ULg
1. How is the relation between nature & human health part of your work/activities? I am first working from the perspective of livestock and animal health in the Global South. Livestock is one of the many links between nature and human health. Providing food, work, fertiliser and as a means of savings, livestock contribute to livelihoods, food and nutrition security, hence to human health. However, the environmental impact of livestock is also important to consider, as well as the direct risk posed by zoonotic diseases, originating from livestock or wildlife. There is a balance to seek, which I try to understand and promote with a social science approach, analysing the decision-making of stakeholders. 2. How important is collaboration between different groups in networks like the Belgian Community of Practice Biodiversity & Health? These networks are obviously crucial for an interdisciplinary topic like this. Since institutes are most often organised along disciplines, interdisciplinary sciences are most often developed based on such networks. As a matter of fact, I met and kept working with several of my partners through the Belgian Community of Practice Biodiversity & Health. 3. Where would you like the work on nature – health linkages to be in a few years? I hope it will grow along interdisciplinary lines, in a way that we cannot imagine at present. Many constraints still apply to the development of such research, some relating to the availability of relevant funding sources but also to the state of mind of researchers, the pressure they are subjected to, and the diversity of cultures and epistemologies across disciplines. An important work would be in fact a reflexive one, to understand where interdisciplinarity is needed and how it can be |
