World Health Summit 2025
The 2025 World Health Summit (WHS) took place on 12-14 October 2025 in Berlin, Germany, with over 40,000 digital participants, 4,000 on-site participants, 400 speakers and 75 sessions. Five months after the historic adoption of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Agreement, political leaders, practitioners and participants from across sectors gathered at WHS under the guiding slogan “Taking Responsibility for Health in a Fragmenting World,” showing that it is a critical time to keep health, including pandemic prevention and One Health high on the global agenda.
As the largest field-based conservation organization and with a unique embedded Health program, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been proud to play a role as a founder and leader in the One Health space. WCS has followed and attended the World Health Summit annually in Berlin, recognizing its relevance as a global platform to highlight the important role that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity play in promoting human health and wellbeing. This year, sessions featured many critical topics and high-level speakers, some of which are outlined below.
The session Beyond Symptom Control: One Health and the Transformation of Global Health Governance emphasized the interconnectedness of the health and wellbeing of humans, animals, and the environment, placing the One Health approach at the heart of discussions on how to effectively tackle and reduce cross-cutting health risks. Organized by FOUR PAWS, PREZODE and the German Interministerial Network for One Health, with speakers including Dr Georg Kippels, Parliamentary State Secretary of Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) and Anne-Claire Amprou, Ambassador for Global Health at France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, the session articulated the impacts and consequences of biodiversity loss for human health and made the case for pandemic prevention (at source) as a smart investment. The panellists discussed One Health as an integrated and holistic way to address and reduce health crises and emphasised the historic significance of One Health being included and endorsed in the legally binding Pandemic Agreement.
Other sessions explore the links between climate change and health, a priority topic for WCS, given the critical connections between biodiversity loss, degradation of high-integrity ecosystems and climate change, as well as health. The session titled Climate in Crisis, Health at Risk showcased examples of the various, wide-ranging effects of climate change, warned of the rising costs of inaction, and the need for robust climate action. The session featured a keynote from Carsten Schneider, Federal Minister at the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, who highlighted that different policy areas – climate and environment, food and health – need to be interlinked, again emphasizing the need for a One Health approach.
At WHS 2025, we were encouraged to hear numerous speakers and leaders committed to One Health and collaborative approaches to addressing shared health challenges, across sectors, partners, and countries. We look forward to continuing to advance this momentum at WHS 2026 (11-13 October) in Berlin.
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Pandemic prevention at source
Links between Ecological Integrity and Human Health
Best Practices to Confront Pandemics at the Source
WCS Recommendations to Reduce Pandemic Risk