Animal diseases cause serious social, economic and environmental damage, impact on animal welfare and can directly threaten human health. These diseases are transboundary, so an increasing number of the major threats to the livestock industry are global so they need global solutions, which can only be achieved through a coordinated research effort. To address these challenges, an international network of R&D programme owners, managers and international organisations from around 50 countries agreed to share information, improve collaboration on research activities, work towards common research agendas and coordinated research funding on the major animal diseases affecting livestock production and/or human health. This network operates as STAR-IDAZ IRC and has been supported by previous SIRCAH, Secretariat for the International Research Consortium on Animal Health (Horizon 2020, 2016-2022). SIRCAH2 will build on the success of its predecessor, in enabling the coordination of research at an international level, to identify and address critical gaps in knowledge and speed up the development of new or improved disease control strategies. To achieve these goals SIRCAH 2 will provide organisational and communication support to the IRC Committees and members and facilitate the development of research roadmaps for priority diseases/issues. SIRCAH2 will support gap analysis activities to develop these roadmaps, which will highlight research and knowledge gaps. Current and planned research will be mapped to identify which gaps are being address and which are underfunded. This will be the basis of funding recommendations to encourage programme alignment and a focused effort on priority research gaps. This will accelerate research on animal health, reinforce international research cooperation and provide veterinary innovations to support continuous development of fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food systems from primary production to consumption.

Ruminant farming is critically important in maintaining the viability of rural communities and ensuring food security. Because grazing ruminants are permanently exposed to helminth parasites, efficient worm control is a requirement to guarantee their health, welfare and productivity. Worm control is largely based on preventive use of anthelmintic drugs, but excessive use of anthelmintics has led to anthelmintic resistance, which has become a global threat for effective parasite control. To mitigate anthelmintic resistance in ruminants, sustainable worm control (SWC) strategies should be adopted. The SPARC Community of Practice of farmers, farm advisors and veterinarians will identify needs, practices, barriers and drivers for adoption of SWC practices, develop a list of good practices for SWC in different production systems and regions and demonstrate them on pilot farms. National and international stakeholder networks will share SWC practices among farmers, across borders and production systems (beef and dairy cattle, meet and milk sheep and goats). Dissemination of experiences and results will be facilitated by a Knowledge Exchange Platform on the SPARC website, hosting testimonies, case studies, videos, practice abstracts and decision support tools, available in local languages. SPARC activities and results will be communicated on social media and in professional journals. Overall, SPARC will initiate a lasting European-wide multi-actor community that develops solutions together to curb anthelmintic resistance, aiding in the green transition of European agriculture.

Given the multitude of interactions between animals, humans and production systems, a thorough understanding of infection transmission routes is key in designing good biosecurity measures. Transmission can occur via direct contact but also through a range of indirect routes such as clothing, footwear, contaminated vehicles, air etc. Although all these routes have been described, their relative importance and therefore the importance of the linked biosecurity measures are still poorly understood. Consequently, many of the current biosecurity guidelines are based on empirical evidence making it difficult to rank measures by importance. The overarching goal of BioSecure is to improve the capacity for key actors and decision-makers in livestock farming to understand, prioritise and implement evidence-based, cost-effective and sustainable biosecurity management systems in current and future terrestrial livestock production chains for pigs, poultry, cattle and small ruminants. This will be achieved by: • Setting up and facilitating a multi actor stakeholder forum to support interactive knowledge exchange, bottom-up behavioural change and uptake of the key exploitable results. • Collecting existing biosecurity intelligence throughout the livestock production chain and creating biosecurity risk maps at an EU level for improving future risk analysis. • Quantifying the impact of biosecurity practices through quantitative risk assessment and mathematical models as tools to quantify the probability of introduction and spread of pathogens at farm and sector level. • Improving and extending biosecurity scoring tools for accurate measuring the level of biosecurity and providing adapted and science based advices. • Evaluation and improvement of biosecurity measures through experiments and field studies. • Assessing the socio-economic impact of biosecurity measures both at farm level and beyond.