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The multidisciplinary EcoHealth approach affirms that humans, animals, and their environment form complex socioecological systems and that destabilization can lead to disease. EcoHealth “examines the complex relationships among humans, animals, and the environment, and how these relationships affect the health of each of these domains” (Listza & Wolbring 2018). It provides a platform to bring together physicians, veterinarians, ecologists, economists, social scientists, health planners, and others to study, understand, and respond to the effects of ecosystem changes on human health. Moreover, it facilitates the integration of different epistemologies, including local, traditional, and indigenous knowledges (Rapport et al. 1998). EcoHealth seeks to build participatory frameworks that include more than conventional expert‐led research toward a richer participatory process that includes relevant community actors in everything from initial problem definition to project design to the interpretation and sharing of findings (Mertens et al. 2005). Underlying all this is the insight that interventions for improving health are more effective if they respond to local realities. In Waltner‐Toews’ (2009, p. 519) assessment, the goal of EcoHealth is “sustainable human and animal health and well‐being, [achieved] through healthier ecosystems.”

The leading journal of the approach, EcoHealth (n.d.), defines it as being:

committed to fostering the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems and to conducting research which recognizes the inextricable linkages between the health of all species and their environments. A basic tenet held is that health and well‐being cannot be sustained in a resource depleted, polluted, and socially unstable planet.

Alternately, Waltner‐Toews (2009, p. 520) states that EcoHealth:

can be defined as systemic, participatory approaches to understanding and promoting health and wellbeing in the context of social and ecological interactions. They reflect not only an understanding of social systems and ecosystems, and how they interact, but also a convergence of applied, organizational ideas from business management, environmental planning, community operations research, participatory action research, critical systems theories and a variety of other fields

Within veterinary medicine, EcoHealth is viewed as an expansion of the scope of the field from a focus on the health of individual animals to a concern about animal populations and herd health. Promoted especially by the International Development Research Centre, Canada (IDRC), the approach appraises “the effective multi‐sectoral collaboration and the engagement of multiple types of stakeholder” (IDRC 2008) through its six integrated principles—namely, system thinking, transdisciplinary research, participation, gender and social equity, knowledge to action, and sustainability—in order to provide a consideration of the human–animal disease interface. A medical perspective on EcoHealth is offered by the International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE), a not‐for‐profit organization based in Switzerland with member groups in 38 countries. The Australian chapter, for example, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), defines its mission as being to publicize “the relationship between the condition of the environment and human health, promote environmentally friendly behaviour amongst physicians, patients, and the public, and [cooperate] at all political levels in the reduction of harmful environmental influences on health” (DEA 2018). In the perspective of the DEA, doctors cannot narrowly focus on the health of individual patients in a world in which a descent into environmental chaos will seriously imperil their ability to use the findings of medical research and advances in patient care to relieve human suffering.

The IDRC supports research in developing countries by offering financial resources, advice, and training to address local problems. Since its foundation in 1970, it has provided funding for multiple projects. In 2002, for example, it funded a study in Molango, Mexico that traced the transport of locally mined manganese through various components of the ecosystem and examined its impact on human health. Researchers were able to track manganese from mine smokestacks, through wind and dust and along trucking corridors, into people’s homes. They showed that exposure to contaminated air led to motor skill damage in adults, especially in women, and they identified nervous system risks in children. These findings prompted changes in local policies (IDRC 2008). Similarly, in Lebanon, IDRC‐supported researchers implemented EcoHealth approaches to address water sanitation and waterborne diseases. In the town of Bebnine, they found that women played the greatest role in managing water at the household level. Consequently, they recruited more than 25 Bebnine women to shared their experiences working in the community. According to Iman Nuwayhid, who led the research, “In this way, researchers learned that some women preferred to use untreated well water rather than to pay for access to a new water network, even when they could afford to do so. They rejected the new network because they believed it was affiliated with certain political views or families, and refused to contribute to its shared costs” (IDRC 2010). Further, monthly water quality monitoring in 423 households revealed high levels of fecal contamination. These findings led the local municipality to install a water disinfection unit and to develop a health promotion communication strategy (IDRC 2010). In 2008, the IDRC co‐convened the International Ecohealth Forum in Mérida, Mexico with participants from around the world in order to consolidate an international community of practitioners around the EcoHealth perspective. It has provided funding to the Communities of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as to a Field Building Leadership Initiative on EcoHealth in Asia. Its work of this sort has continued through to the present.

Another critical step in the development of the EcoHealth approach occurred at the “Healthy Ecosystems, Healthy People” conference in Washington, D.C. in 2002, which initiated a process that led both to the formation of the professional journal EcoHealth and to the eventual establishment of the IAEH. The IAEH seeks to support transdisciplinary initiatives that combine the strengths of various scholarly disciplines in order to achieve hybridized innovative approaches to problem‐solving. In the organization’s perspective, “Today’s complex environmental public health challenges demand this level of strategic team‐based approaches to the tightly coupled human‐natural system interactions underlying many of our most pressing threats to our sustained health and environment” (IAEH 2019). The IAEH has sponsored a series of annual conferences at sites around the world. The theme of its 2018 conference, for example, hosted by the University of Valle, Cali, Colombia, was “Environmental and Health Equity: Connecting Local Alternatives in a Global World.” This theme emphasized the need to connect local initiatives in a world with global drivers that threaten healthy ecosystems and populations in pursuit of both health and ecological justice.

The first issue of the journal EcoHealth, published by the International Society for Ecosystem Health (ISEH), appeared in March 2004. It provides similar‐minded researchers across disciplines a venue in which to communicate and participate in sometimes lively debate. As Wilcox et al. (2012, p. 27) observe:

[t]he rationale for ecohealth articulated in the first issue of the journal EcoHealth centered on the increasing need for applying ecological concepts to understand and nurture sustainable human health and, conversely, applying health concepts to understand ecosystems; collectively, this was referred to as “integrative studies in ecology, health, and sustainability.” Issues identified as within the scope of the journal included: 1) global loss of biological diversity; 2) the drivers of human‐induced changes in climate and the degradation and pollution of natural habitats; 3) health of human populations influenced by large‐scale environmental changes, including the increasing gap between the rich and poor; and 4) interactions between environment, development, and health.

In sum, the core value of EcoHealth is addressing and improving human health through participation in collaborative efforts to protect biodiversity in the context of development, as expressed in the preceding review, and as derived from its grassroots practical focus on the relationship among health, ecosystems, and sustainable development.