Looking to the Future: Advancing Tactical Sciences for the Biosecurity Toolbox

Introduction

Advances in technologies, increased globalization, impacts of changes in climate and land use on food production practices, and the expanding world population will continue to exert significant pressures on global biosecurity systems. The world must be prepared to face novel biosecurity threats, whether a consequence of natural pest and pathogen emergence or an intentional or unintentional release into an environment, and whether agricultural or natural, or rural or urban. It is imperative that public and private sectors develop comprehensive and innovative strategies to mitigate these ever-evolving threats rapidly and effectively. As our scientific understanding of existing pests and pathogens as well as novel biology of new and emerging pests and pathogens expands, biosecurity practices of today may prove to be inadequate to manage the vulnerabilities of tomorrow.

This book has examined the continuum of biosecurity tactics in animal and plant systems, with the goal of driving informed decisions by policy makers, health experts, first responders, researchers, and educators to enhance preparedness, reduce risk, and prevent catastrophic outcomes. The intent of focusing on the tactical sciences was to highlight that animal and plant system biosecurity scientific principles are broadly overlapping. Economic considerations, processes that promote genetic variations, risk analyses, prevention tactics, diagnostics, surveillance, response, and microbial forensics run parallel in plant and animal biosecurity systems but are essentially interoperable.

The first chapter of this book was dedicated to the economic considerations of an effective biosecurity system. Globally, an estimated 95 million people entered extreme poverty in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an additional 80 million people became more undernourished relative to the pre-pandemic levels (Jackson et al., 2021). The global economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic may surpass US$20 trillion dollars; this highlights the tremendous financial burden of a reactionary response to a global disease threat, estimated at US$3-4 billion/year (Pimentel, et al., 2020). Moving forward, the investment of a small fraction of this cost may be sufficient to adequately plan, prepare and promptly mitigate the next pandemic threat. However, while learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, threats to the agricultural enterprises and natural ecosystems by invasive species have not stopped.

Several opportunities to enhance global biosecurity have been highlighted in the previous chapters of this book and fall into the following 4 categories:

• 1.

  Technology

• 2.

  Networking/Cooperation/Engagement

• 3.

  Standardization among global partners

• 4.

  Education and capacity development