Interview – From Data to Action: Inside the Mission to Make “One Health” a Policy Reality
Interview-Partner
Gaia Bertarelli is Associate Professor of Social Statistics in the Department of Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses on statistical methods for integrating complex data, including small area estimation, robust statistics, latent variable models, multidimensional indicators, and methods for combining different data sources. Her applied work addresses health systems, social inequalities, poverty, gender differences, and sustainable well-being. Within PLANET4HEALTH, her contribution is closely connected to the project’s ambition to transform fragmented environmental, health, and socioeconomic data into evidence that can support more equitable, timely, and actionable policy decisions.
Questions:
The PLANET4HEALTH project operates under a powerful and urgent mission: translating science into policy. From your perspective at Ca’ Foscari University, how does your team’s focus on data analysis, health inequalities, and climate vulnerabilities help bridge this gap, and what is the biggest challenge when turning such complex environmental risk data into actionable policies?
At Ca’ Foscari, our role is to transform complex environmental and health data into information that is meaningful at the level where decisions are actually made. It is not enough to establish that climate change or pollution affects health. Policymakers need to know which populations and territories are most vulnerable, how risks are distributed, and where an intervention could have the greatest impact.
We therefore combine environmental, climatic, health, and socioeconomic information and use statistical methods capable of detecting inequalities that may be hidden in national or regional averages. This is particularly important for vulnerable groups and smaller geographical areas where conventional indicators may not provide a sufficiently detailed or reliable picture.
The greatest challenge is not simply the volume of data. It is the heterogeneity of the data: they come from different institutions, cover different periods, use different geographical scales, and have different levels of quality and accessibility. We need to communicate these limitations and uncertainties without making the results unusable. Good policy evidence must be scientifically rigorous, but it must also be interpretable, timely, and connected to a realistic course of action. PLANET4HEALTH was designed precisely to address this fragmentation and develop interoperable tools that can support preparedness and policy decisions.
A key element of Horizon Europe projects is governance, and PLANET4HEALTH places a strong emphasis on continuous dialogue with its External Advisory Board (EAB). Can you share an example of how the EAB’s feedback has directly shaped the development of your technical tools and early warning systems?
One important contribution by the External Advisory Board has been to remind us that technical tools must be designed from the beginning with their final users in mind. An early warning system is not useful simply because it produces a prediction; it becomes useful when public authorities can understand the signal, trust it, and know what kind of action it should trigger.
For example, in the development of our digital tools and early warning approaches, the EAB’s feedback has helped us focus not only on model performance, but also on interpretability, comparability across case studies, and usability for decision makers. This means paying attention to questions such as: What indicators are most relevant for local authorities? How should uncertainty be visualized? What level of spatial detail is useful without creating misleading precision? And how can alerts be linked to feasible preparedness or prevention actions?
This feedback has encouraged us to think of the platform not as purely scientific output but as a decision-support environment. The tools must allow users to explore data, understand drivers of risk, and compare possible scenarios. In this sense, the EAB helps us keep the work grounded in practical governance needs, rather than developing models that remain only in the research community.
Dealing with diverse case studies, from air pollution in South Africa to food safety in Central Europe, requires a vast bird’s-eye view. How does the EAB help you maintain a cohesive global vision while addressing highly localized environmental issues?
The diversity of the case studies is one of the strengths of PLANET4HEALTH, but it also creates a methodological and governance challenge. Air pollution in South Africa, food contamination in Central Europe, vector-borne diseases, and climate-related mental well-being are very different issues. They involve different data sources, institutions, exposure pathways, and policy contexts. At the same time, they all raise a common question: How does environmental degradation affect human, animal, and ecosystem health, and how can societies respond earlier and more effectively?
The EAB helps us maintain this common frame. It brings an external perspective that is not limited to one case study or one discipline. This is very valuable because it pushes us to identify what is transferable across contexts: common indicators, shared principles for data integration, comparable approaches to vulnerability, and common standards for communicating uncertainty.
At the same time, the EAB helps ensure that we do not impose a one-size-fits-all approach. Local context matters enormously. Data availability, institutional capacity, cultural practices, and policy priorities differ from place to place. The challenge is to develop tools and lessons that are general enough to be replicated but flexible enough to be meaningful locally. The EAB supports precisely this balance between global coherence and local relevance.
Policy making often operates on different timelines compared to scientific research. What specific strategies is PLANET4HEALTH implementing to ensure that local and European policy makers don’t just receive data at the end of the 4-year cycle, but are engaged throughout the process?
We are treating engagement as part of the research process, rather than as a communication activity that begins after the research has finished. Stakeholders are involved in identifying problems, assessing available data, defining useful outputs and discussing how the tools could fit into existing decision-making procedures.
During the project’s first year, stakeholder workshops were already organized around the early warning system for vector-borne diseases, the adoption of air-pollution tools in South Africa, and an early reporting system for PFAS and other pollutants in Central Europe.
The South African case study illustrates the value of this continuous dialogue. Researchers engaged directly with government departments to understand their immediate concerns. A discussion about waste collection and a rat infestation revealed a connection to informal waste burning and air pollution. Listening to what authorities were dealing with in practice helped the researchers identify a concrete area where evidence could support action and helped build trust between the parties.
Alongside local workshops, the project uses its External Advisory Board, consortium reviews, policy briefs, training activities and collaboration with the wider Planetary Health Cluster to create repeated points of contact with decision makers. This allows feedback to influence the research while there is still time to adapt it.
Data fragmentation across different institutions is a known bottleneck. How will the open-access digital platforms and tools developed by Ca’ Foscari and its partners empower public authorities to make truly “proactive” rather than “reactive” decisions?
A proactive system brings together information that is usually considered separately. Instead of waiting for mortality, disease, or contamination data to reveal that a crisis has already occurred, authorities can examine environmental conditions, exposure patterns, vulnerable populations, and emerging trends within an integrated system.
PLANET4HEALTH aims to collect and organize existing and new data, develop interoperable digital prototypes, and provide open-access tools and research materials to public authorities and researchers. These tools should help users move from asking “What happened?” to asking “Where is the risk increasing, who is likely to be affected, and what intervention can be made now?”
Open access alone, however, is not sufficient. Data must be documented, compared, managed ethically , and presented in an understandable form. Planetary health governance must also integrate animal, environmental, and food-system data rather than relying only on human health datasets.
Finally, looking ahead to the completion of the project, what would a “successful policy impact” look like for you? What is the main legacy you hope PLANET4HEALTH leaves in the field of planetary health governance?
For me, successful policy impact would mean that PLANET4HEALTH does not remain only a research project but becomes part of how institutions think and act on environmental and health risks. A strong outcome would be seeing our tools, indicators, and methodological approaches used by public authorities to support prevention, adaptation, and more integrated planning.
Success would also mean that the project helps policymakers recognize health inequalities as an essential part of environmental governance. Climate and environmental risks are not distributed equally, and policies should reflect that. If our work helps institutions identify vulnerable territories and populations earlier and design more targeted responses, then the project will have made a meaningful contribution.
The legacy I hope PLANET4HEALTH leaves is a practical model for planetary health governance: interdisciplinary, data-driven, transparent, and oriented toward action. This means stronger connections between researchers, public authorities, citizens, and stakeholders; better integration of fragmented data; and tools that help transform early signals into early action.
Ultimately, the goal is not only to produce knowledge but to make that knowledge usable. If PLANET4HEALTH helps embed a One Health and planetary health perspective into everyday policy decisions, then its impact will continue beyond the formal end of the project.
The interview was conducted by Giulia Ballarin (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
About the project:
PLANET4HEALTH – TRANSLATING SCIENCE INTO POLICY: A Multisectoral Approach to Adaptation & Mitigation of Adverse Effects of Vector-Borne Diseases, Environmental Pollution and Climate Change on Planetary Health; funded by the European Union. Grant Agreement No. 101136652. (2024 – 2028)
Project’s LinkedIn
Browse through the project’s deliverables and publications on its Zenodo webpage
Meet the partners on the YouTube channel
Do you want to know more about the policy engagement toolkit?
Do you want to share your experience in policy engagement? Do you think about contributing to the policy engagement toolkit? Feel free to contact Tome Sandevski via science-policy@pvw.uni-frankfurt.de
Key Features in a Nutshell
Challenges (and way to address them)