One Planet Summit: the FoFauPopU project revisited

Monday 11 January 2021 is the date for the fourth edition of the One Planet Summit, organised by France in conjunction with the United Nations and the World Bank. This event will be attended by heads of state and governments, directors of international organisations, business leaders and key players in civil society. This year sees biodiversity replace climate change as the main theme. In fact, 2021 has a full calendar of international events on this topic: COP15 Biodiversity organised by China will take place in May and the IUCN World Congress on Nature is scheduled for September in Marseilles. One Planet Summit represents a major milestone for political mobilisation to reach an ambitious international agreement on biodiversity in 2021.

Biodiversity will be addressed in four streams: Protect marine and terrestrial areas; Promote agro-ecology; Mobilise finance for biodiversity, and Protect tropical forests, species and human health. It’s an opportunity to look back on the FoFauPopU project, the One Health approach of which mirrors the issues being tackled at the Summit. 

The FoFauPopU project (A new balance between Forest, Fauna and local Populations), instigated by the French National Museum of Natural History and co-funded by the French Ministry for Ecological Transition, considers human, animal and environmental health in a cross-cutting approach. It studies the effects of agricultural pesticides on the chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park and local populations. The objective is to preserve the forest ecosystem and fauna in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, while reducing the human-fauna conflicts along its borders and helping to develop sustainable agriculture. 

Sabrina Krief, a primatologist at the Museum, looks back on her work with the great apes in the Kibale National Park in this 3-minute video.