Integrating socio-ecosystemic factors in One Health approaches: A scoping review in zoonotic disease research

It is widely accepted that zoonoses pose an ever-growing threat which should be tackled using a One Health approach. Like One Health, the socio-ecosystemic framework is a powerful concept that has been used to study complex systems. The aim of this work is to identify the socio-ecosystemic factors influencing zoonotic risk, while assessing and highlighting the importance of using this framework from a One Health perspective. To do so, we conducted a scoping review following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines on articles written in English, published between 1986 and 2023, and extracted from three scientific databases (PubMed®, Scopus® and Web of Science™) in January 2023 or identified by snowball sampling. Eligibility criteria were applied to select relevant scientific articles from various disciplines, related to the epidemiology of zoonotic agents in a context of epidemic risk. Among the 1661 articles extracted from the databases, to which must be added articles identified by snowball sampling, a total of 195 articles that underwent full-text analyses were included in our work. We identified 47 socio-ecosystemic factors influencing the risk of zoonotic emergence: 15 were categorized as ecological, 15 as economic, and 17 as social. The social factor “hunting, poaching and wildlife trafficking” was the most referenced, with 24 citations. Only 15 % of the studies were considered truly “interdisciplinary” because they integrated all three dimensions of the socio-ecosystem, and their publication dates show that the issue has only recently been taken up. These results provide a relevant synthesis of knowledge on the subject, in an original way that underlines the equal importance of these three dimensions. The corpus of articles is covered with a good saturation of references, ensuring the representativeness of the results. This work could contribute to a more holistic and effective consideration of the risk of zoonotic emergence, by emphasising the importance of interdisciplinarity.