At the heart of the Mediterranean, during the European BEeS 2025 Conference dedicated to biodiversity, ecosystems and e-Science, research infrastructures, organisations and institutions studying the biosphere transformed a well-established scientific certainty into a shared commitment. The health of humans, animals, plants and the environment is intertwined and interdependent: when one of these systems is altered, the entire balance is weakened. With this awareness, our Foundation has also signed The Crete Declaration: Uniting Science for One Health, a step that strengthens European collaboration to address today’s major challenges in an integrated manner.
A declaration designed to build a shared roadmap
The Crete Declaration was signed on 30 June 2025 within the “Working Table on Life component of the Biosphere: Complementarities and Synergies”, a working group that brought together European Research Infrastructures (RIs), projects and organisations with the aim of exploring operational complementarities and scientific synergies. Coordinated by LifeWatch ERIC, the Declaration responds to the need to define a collaborative roadmap among the parties, capable of networking expertise, tools and digital infrastructures in the field of the biosphere and its vital processes.
The starting point is clear: major contemporary risks never occur in isolation. Climate change accelerates biodiversity loss or degradation, alters ecological balances, modifies the distribution of vectors and pathogens, and amplifies the vulnerability of food and water systems. In such a scenario, the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems becomes a single field of analysis and intervention. This is precisely the One Health logic that the Declaration seeks to advance as a shared strategy at the European level.
One Health as the operational integration of research, data and tools
The Crete Declaration defines One Health not only as a conceptual framework, but as an operational method: a strategy to jointly optimise human, animal and ecosystem health through structured collaboration, integration of research outputs and Open Science. In practical terms, this means making information produced by different disciplines comparable and interoperable, in order to read the signals of the biosphere in a unified and timely manner.
To guide this process, the Declaration focuses the commitment of the signatories around four strategic directions:
- Strengthening collaboration among the parties, as no single infrastructure can, on its own, address the complexity of current challenges.
- Advancing data integration and FAIR principles¹, making datasets findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
- Supporting open science procedures by sharing data, software, workflows and protocols in a transparent manner.
- Orienting policies and practices through robust and integrated evidence, making the transition from knowledge to public action more effective.
From the signature to the European community: an invitation to participate
The Declaration has now been published as a policy brief. This publication makes the Crete Declaration a shared working basis available to the entire scientific and institutional community concerned, and strengthens its role as an impact-oriented document.
The text also invites all European stakeholders committed to One Health, including institutions, scientific clusters and the private sector, to endorse the Declaration and actively contribute to its implementation, with the ambition of achieving a federated and coordinated approach to One Health research and innovation in Europe.
“Signing the Crete Declaration means firmly stating that health is a systemic good: there is no human health without healthy ecosystems, and there is no ecosystem protection without shared scientific knowledge,” emphasises Luca Ferraris, President of CIMA Research Foundation. “We are joining this European alliance to put our expertise on natural risks, climate and resilience at the service of a common, open and concrete pathway.”
Antonello Provenzale, Programme Director of CIMA Research Foundation and among the authors of the policy brief, adds: “One Health is the most scientifically robust response to problems that do not respect disciplinary boundaries. The Declaration commits us to integrating data and tools according to FAIR principles and Open Science, because only in this way can we transform complex signals from the biosphere into actionable insights for prevention and public decision-making.”
- FAIR principles define guidelines for scientific data management, ensuring that data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The objective is to maximise interoperability and reusability throughout the entire data life cycle, enabling integration across different disciplinary domains and the reproducibility of results. ↩︎