WOAH’s 3rd Global Conference on Biological Threat Reduction

WOAH convened its 3rd Global Conference on Biological Threat Reduction in Geneva from 28 – 30 October, marking a major milestone in global biosecurity. Building on previous editions in 2015 and 2017, this landmark event brought together international experts to strengthen preparedness against biological threats.

The year 2025 was a historic one for health security, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Biological Weapons Convention and the centenary of the Geneva Protocol. Against this backdrop, WOAH united Members, partners and specialists to review past challenges, anticipate emerging risks and identify bold strategies for world-changing action.

What are Biological Threats?

Biological threats involve the deliberate release of pathogens or toxins into a population. While most disease outbreaks occur naturally, accidental or deliberate introductions cannot be ignored. Though the likelihood of such events may be low, their potential impact on animal and human health is catastrophic – at national, regional and global levels.

Animal pathogens pose a serious concern. They can be weaponised or exploited in agro-crime and agro-terrorism because they have high impact, are easy to propagate and can cross borders undetected. Learn more in our Animal Echo article: From Fiction to Reality: The Threat of Agro-Terrorism and watch the short fictional film The Fever, created for the Conference.

Biological Threat Reduction: Our Shared Responsibility

Combating biological threats is a shared responsibility. It requires collaboration across sectors and expertise – from animal health to public health, security and beyond. That was the purpose of the Global Conference: to unite people with knowledge, interest and willingness to act.

Global Conference Highlights

In her opening remarks, WOAH Director General Dr Emmanuelle Soubeyran urged Veterinary Services to take biological threats seriously, noting they are on the frontline of defence. She called on the security sector to integrate Veterinary Services into both national and international biosecurity policies, stressing the importance of coordinated prevention, detection and response.

Keynote speaker Lord Andrew Parker, former Director General of MI5, reinforced this message, urging participants to not ‘let differences between nations divide us’. His words set the scene for the Conference: strengthening international efforts in biological threat reduction and fostering multisectoral partnerships in global health.

Nearly 500 participants from 95 countries attended, representing:

• Veterinary Services and animal health
• Law Enforcement
• Public health
• Disarmament
• Academia
• Students
• Private industry
• International organisations

The programme highlighted key components of biological threat reduction.

• Day One: Understanding the threat landscape – drivers, deliberate events and underrepresented risks.
• Day Two: Advances in science and technology – surveillance, diagnostics and emergency management.
• Day Three: Action – global frameworks, advocacy and investment strategies.

Access full replays and presentations on the Conference website.

Side Events

Participants explored specialised topics through side events, including:

• Safeguarding Africa’s bioeconomy
• Countering mis/disinformation
• Collaboration between Law Enforcement and Veterinary Services
• Reviewing the EU CBRN Centres of Excellence
• A cross-sectoral simulation exercise

Looking Ahead

WOAH aimed for an action-oriented outcome. Participants were invited to submit commitments to action before and during the event, resulting in over 50 concrete pledges from Delegates, Law Enforcement, international organisations, private sector actors, regional bodies and investment partners. These commitments form a solid foundation for follow-up and real-world impact.

The most effective way to limit animal-related biothreats is to strengthen animal and human health systems for surveillance, early detection and rapid response – while building partnerships with the security sector.

This often-invisible work is crucial to keeping systems safe and functional.

The Global Conference highlighted innovative solutions and the partnerships needed to combat biological threats effectively. It was not just a discussion – it was a call to action.

Learn more about WOAH’s biothreat reduction initiatives

Contact: Madison Wimmers ([email protected]) or Dan Donachie ([email protected]).

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) are partners in an international project to build sustainable global resilience against animal health emergencies caused by agro-terrorism and agro-crime.

Established in October 2018, the project aims to foster coordination at the national, regional, and international levels. It focuses on regions where the previous work of the three organisations has identified gaps in various aspects of emergency management that may make countries vulnerable to agro-crime and agro-terrorism. The target regions include the Middle East, North Africa and South-East Asia. However, while the project concentrates on these regions, its outputs will be relevant to all countries worldwide.

To ensure that the resulting capacity building is fit for purpose, the project is currently assessing the global situation for emergency management by identifying areas that are vulnerable to agro-crime and agro-terrorism; understanding the cost-effectiveness of investing in preparedness; and using OIE, FAO and INTERPOL tools to examine emergency management, including the relationship between the law enforcement and veterinary sectors.

Based on this evidence, the project team is designing tools, workshops, and simulation exercises to pilot in the target regions. Training will include workshops on the principles of emergency management, including how to design, deliver and learn from a simulation exercise, how to write a contingency plan, and how to command and control the situation during an agro-terrorism event. To test capacity at the national and regional levels, tabletop simulation exercises will be held, based on an agro-crime or agro-terrorism scenario. All activities will include participants from both the law enforcement and veterinary sectors.

These activities will culminate in an international simulation exercise to test coordination and communication at the national level (of selected countries), as well as at the regional and international levels. The exercise will be designed around the response to an agro-terrorism scenario in which law enforcement and veterinary sectors must cooperate.

Finally, a Global Conference on Emergency Management will be held at the end of the project to showcase the project’s activities to a large multisectoral and interdisciplinary audience. The project partners hope to rally support from the international community to adopt an all-hazards approach to animal health emergencies; promote the inclusion of Veterinary Services in whole-of-government emergency and disaster frameworks by enhancing coordination between the law enforcement and veterinary sectors; and to foster a much stronger international emergency management network.

Thanks to the Weapons Threat Reduction Program (WTRP) of Global Affairs Canada for supporting this project.

An article from the OIE Bulletin: read the original

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that infectious disease outbreaks – whether natural, accidental or deliberate – have the ability to paralyse the planet and cause unparalleled, whole-of-society impacts. It is therefore imperative to mitigate biological threats.

As the international community comes together to fight COVID-19, it must also heed the warning issued by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, that ‘the weaknesses and lack of preparedness exposed by this pandemic provide a window onto how a bioterrorist attack might unfold – and may increase its risks’.

Bioterrorism and bio-weapons threats are daunting but not new. And therein lies the good news: as an international community we know how to meet them. For nearly two decades, Canada’s Weapons Threat Reduction Program (WTRP) and other members of the G7-led Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction (GP) have been working at the health−security interface to deliver capacity-building programmes and mitigate global biological threats.

We are pleased that the programming implemented by Canada and other members of the 31-country GP is currently supporting the global response to COVID-19. This includes a long-standing partnership between Canada’s WTRP and Ghana’s Veterinary Services Directorate, supported by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which has paved the way for COVID-19 testing in Ghana.

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) has played an instrumental role in enabling successes like this. For more than a decade, the OIE and GP have collaborated to strengthen global biosecurity. Together, we have worked to maintain global freedom from rinderpest, to convene global conferences on biological threat reduction, to protect countries from agro-terrorism and to design more sustainable laboratories.

The veterinary and security sectors have accomplished much together, but much more remains to be done to achieve our common goal of preventing, detecting and responding to all manner of disease threats.

An article from the OIE Bulletin: Read the original here