Advancing Planetary Health through One Health Community Clubs in East Africa’s Cross-Border Areas

Southern Kenya and northern Tanzania form a shared rangeland system where climate stress, land use change, and intensifying human livestock wildlife interactions produce concentrated risks to planetary health. We assess the contribution of One Health Community Clubs in the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya and the Enduimet Longido landscape of Tanzania, two ecologically connected yet administratively distinct settings. Each club integrates local expertise in environmental monitoring, human health surveillance, and livestock and wildlife health, operationalizing One Health at community and landscape scales.

A spatially explicit approach links community observations to mapped grazing areas, wildlife corridors, settlement growth, and water point networks that shape exposure to disease, ecosystem degradation, and livelihood vulnerability. Long term monitoring from Amboseli, including rainfall, pasture biomass, wildlife movements, livestock health, and human wellbeing, demonstrates how community clubs act as localized observatories connecting environmental diaries with georeferenced datasets. In Enduimet, accelerating fencing, agricultural expansion, and drought driven mobility are tracked through participatory mapping, syndromic disease reporting, and seasonal resource monitoring.

Cross border comparison highlights asymmetric risks within shared ecosystems, particularly around wetlands and dry season refugia. We show that effective scaling depends on networked expansion rooted in spatial units and harmonized indicators, enabling aggregation across landscapes and time to support early warning, adaptive management, and policy relevant planetary health action.