Bridging the gap between global health and biodiversity involves enhancing the relationship between healthy ecosystems and healthy communities including mitigating risk and impact of emerging diseases especially HIV/AIDS. This involves reducing the risk of disease transfer among wildlife, people and livestock; and mitigating the impacts of emerging diseases on wildlife, the environment, and people.
In addition, humans depend upon healthy freshwater ecosystems for sustaining the provision of multiple services over the medium and longer term—including providing drinking water, sanitation and hygiene benefits. Ecosystem services support some 126,000 species, and these systems can be affected by water, sanitation and health (WASH) projects -either degraded or enhanced depending on how they are designed and implemented.