The One Welfare concept emerged from One Health (the recognition that human, animal, and environmental health are linked) but extends beyond disease to encompass wellbeing. The term was popularized by Rebecca Sommerville and colleagues, with a formal definition: "One Welfare is a framework that recognizes the interconnections between animal welfare, human wellbeing and the natural environment and the potential opportunities for enhancing human, animal and environmental wellbeing through understanding these connections."
The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) endorsed One Welfare as a guiding framework in 2021. The One Welfare Support Group and One Welfare International network have grown significantly as vehicles for implementing the framework across sectors — development, agriculture, veterinary medicine, social services, and environmental management.
One of the most documented One Welfare connections: when animals are healthier and better-treated, farmer livelihoods improve. Healthy livestock are more productive, require less treatment, and live longer. Livestock are the primary assets of hundreds of millions of smallholder families globally — their wellbeing is inseparable from family food security and income. Working animal welfare programs consistently demonstrate that when a family's donkey, horse, or ox is healthier, the family's economic productivity and children's school attendance improve.
The Brooke's One Welfare evidence base: in communities where SPANA and Brooke provide working equine veterinary services, animal health indicators improve alongside measurable improvements in farmer income, household food security, and children's education outcomes. This integrated evidence base is compelling for development funders who might not otherwise prioritize animal welfare.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated a catastrophic One Welfare failure: poor animal welfare in wildlife markets and intensive livestock production creates disease spillover risk that affects human health globally. One Welfare integrates the recognition that investing in animal welfare — reducing wildlife-livestock interfaces, improving biosecurity in livestock production, reducing wildlife trade — is simultaneously an investment in pandemic prevention. The cost-benefit analysis for animal welfare investment looks very different when pandemic prevention benefits are included.
The human-animal bond generates wellbeing for both species. Research consistently shows that companion animals reduce human stress, loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Elderly individuals with pets have lower blood pressure and longer lifespans. Children raised with animals show higher empathy and social competence. Animal-assisted therapy programs provide documented benefits for post-traumatic stress, autism spectrum conditions, and dementia. One Welfare recognizes these benefits as genuine bidirectional connections — companion animal welfare supports human mental health, and human mental health is enhanced by positive relationships with animals.
Environmental health and wildlife welfare are deeply connected. Habitat degradation causes wildlife welfare harms — animals displaced by deforestation face increased predation, reduced food security, and conflict with humans. Rewilding and habitat restoration improve wildlife welfare by providing environments where animals can meet their behavioral and physiological needs. Climate change is simultaneously an environmental, animal welfare, and human wellbeing crisis — the same solutions (emissions reduction, ecosystem protection) address all three.
Development organizations including FAO, CGIAR, World Bank, and bilateral donors have increasingly integrated One Welfare thinking into agricultural development programs. Rather than treating livestock welfare as a luxury concern for wealthy countries, these organizations recognize that welfare improvements in developing country livestock systems are productive investments. The CGIAR Research Program on Livestock explicitly includes welfare as a component of its framework.
Veterinary education is incorporating One Welfare: the recognition that veterinarians improve not just animal health but human communities. One Welfare modules are now included in veterinary curricula at Edinburgh, Utrecht, São Paulo, and other leading schools. The OIE/WOAH Day of Veterinary Medicine has featured One Welfare as a central theme.
The UK government's Animal Welfare Action Plan (2021) explicitly references One Welfare thinking. The EU's Farm to Fork Strategy integrates animal welfare with human health and environmental sustainability objectives. Scotland's Good Food Nation Act (2022) includes considerations of animal welfare alongside human nutrition and environmental impact.
One Welfare is not without critics. Some animal welfare advocates worry that the framework instrumentalizes animal welfare — framing it primarily in terms of human or environmental benefits — rather than recognizing animals' intrinsic welfare interests. There is legitimate concern that "One Welfare" framing may be used to justify animal welfare compromises when conflicts with human welfare are claimed.
Defenders of the framework argue that it is pragmatically essential for gaining traction in development, policy, and public health contexts where purely animal-focused advocacy has limited reach. The framework expands the coalition of stakeholders invested in animal welfare improvement, even if some are motivated primarily by human welfare or environmental goals.
The evidence base for One Welfare connections has grown substantially. A 2024 systematic review in One Health found 243 studies documenting quantifiable connections between animal welfare interventions and human wellbeing outcomes. Working animal welfare programs generate the strongest evidence (with livestock productivity and family income as measurable outcomes), followed by companion animal mental health research. Wildlife-disease-human health connections are increasingly quantified. Environmental-animal welfare connections remain the least quantified but arguably the most significant in terms of scale.
Tags: One Welfare Framework Human Wellbeing Environment Policy 2025