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Impacts of alien species on human health have recently become a major issue in medical research and invasion ecology, but comprehensive assessments of this subject are largely lacking. Here, we provide a literature review of alien species with public health impacts in Europe based on a systematic search in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science. We detected 77 relevant articles, of which 21 were reviews and 56 were original research articles. The taxonomic focus was on vascular plants (n=31 articles) and dipterans (n=25 articles). The original research articles mainly covered the spread of the study species, while early invasion stages (introduction, establishment) as well as impact and management were less investigated. Alien species of health concern in Europe are mostly introduced as contaminants, and mostly originate from climatically similar regions of the Northern Hemisphere. In those cases (36% of all articles) when information on the trend in range and abundance was provided, this trend was mostly increasing. We detected little information on the severity of the impacts (two articles) and the interaction with climate change (three articles). In 15 original articles (28%) specific management measures were suggested, in only one article the socioeconomic costs were assessed. We conclude that European research on human health impacts of alien species is biased towards few species, and that several important aspects such as early invasion stages, severity of impact and its temporal trends, and the scale of the socioeconomic costs caused are poorly understood. Interdisciplinary projects bridging gaps between ecologists medical researchers, socioeconomists and public health authorities are required to link alien species to severity and trends of impacts, which is a crucial requisite for risk assessment and decision making.
Making agriculture sustainable is a global challenge. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing with respect to biodiversity, climate, soil, land degradation as well as socio‐economic challenges.
The European Commission's proposal for a CAP post‐2020 provides a scope for enhanced sustainability. However, it also allows Member States to choose low‐ambition implementation pathways. It therefore remains essential to address citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture and rectify systemic weaknesses in the CAP, using the full breadth of available scientific evidence and knowledge.
Concerned about current attempts to dilute the environmental ambition of the future CAP, and the lack of concrete proposals for improving the CAP in the draft of the European Green Deal, we call on the European Parliament, Council and Commission to adopt 10 urgent action points for delivering sustainable food production, biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation.
Knowledge is available to help moving towards evidence‐based, sustainable European agriculture that can benefit people, nature and their joint futures.
The statements made in this article have the broad support of the scientific community, as expressed by above 3,600 signatories to the preprint version of this manuscript. The list can be found here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3685632).
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.