Lincoln University is launching a new research centre to tackle the big biosecurity issues facing New Zealand and the world.
The Centre for One Biosecurity Research, Analysis and Synthesis (COBRAS) will be the first of its kind in the world, with a focus on predicting and mitigating the impact of invasive weeds, animals and pathogens.
It will bring together more than 100 of the world’s top biosecurity researchers and stakeholders.
The COBRAS multi-disciplinary team comprises highly respected researchers from the domains of animal, environmental and plant health, Mātauraka Māori, economics and climate change, and is led by Distinguished Professor Philip Hulme, one of NZ’s leading biosecurity scientists.
COBRAS will also work closely with relevant ministries, industry, regional councils and iwi, as well as international partners – for example the Australian Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis.
Hulme said COBRAS has been established to answer a pressing need for a co-ordinated global response to address the growing biosecurity risks to animal, plant and environmental health.
“The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the need to more effectively protect international and national borders against invasive species which can cause multiple impacts to people, plants and animals, with significant sociological, political and environmental implications.
“We recognise that we need to act collectively and co-operatively to mitigate these impacts, yet strong and enduring sectoral silos persist, severely limiting our ability to mount an effective ‘one biosecurity’ holistic approach,” Hulme said.
“COBRAS will deliver that ‘one biosecurity’ response, and will at the same time establish Lincoln University as the international leader in land-based interdisciplinary biosecurity policy and research.”
COBRAS will generate accelerated scientific discovery through synthesis, data access and collaboration, implementing an extensive series of question-led workshops to tackle emerging local and international biosecurity issues.
“With teams of researchers and stakeholders from all over the world contributing to COBRAS, the centre will have a consequential and immediate impact on biosecurity science,” Hulme said.
“We have already established links with new interdisciplinary centres in the United States and Chile that are addressing the interface between biosecurity and disease biology as well as biocultural diversity.
“Longer term milestones will include establishing an international collaborative biosecurity research network, a corpus of interdisciplinary publications in high-profile journals and securing ongoing funding.”
COBRAS hosted its first state-of-the-art synthesis workshop at Lincoln University in June, when the key focus for the participants was identifying research priorities across the NZ biosecurity system, and the extent to which current expertise meets those needs.
“It is quite clear that the days of lone entomologists or pathologists beavering away in the lab are no longer sufficient to address the social and policy challenges of biosecurity, yet the opportunity to bring different disciplines and ideas to bear on these problems has been missing in New Zealand up until now,” he said.
