Foresight scanning of wildlife health: Emerging risks, surveillance needs, and capability shifts for preparedness

Wildlife plays a central role in infectious disease emergence at the wildlife‐livestock‐human interface, increasingly shaped by climate change, land‐use change, biodiversity loss, and human mobility. This study applied foresight approaches to identify future drivers, emerging risks, and preparedness needs for wildlife health in Europe. A structured expert elicitation process combined online workshops, questionnaires, follow‐up interviews, and scenario‐based participatory activities. Qualitative thematic analysis and text‐mining were used to identify major drivers, surveillance gaps, and preparedness priorities. Participants identified three interconnected categories of future risk: environmental pressures (e.g. climate change and biodiversity loss), socio‐political challenges (e.g. weak governance, misinformation, and underfunded surveillance), and pathogen‐related threats such as spillover and antimicrobial resistance. Preparedness was considered dependent on integrated One Health approaches, stronger governance and coordination, improved surveillance and data systems, societal trust, and broader environmental transitions in food and energy systems. Experts highlighted major limitations in current European wildlife surveillance, particularly fragmented monitoring systems, poor data harmonisation, and limited long‐term sustainability. Hunting bag data were considered useful indicators of population trends but insufficient as direct density estimates because they are influenced by multiple sources of bias, including hunting effort, policy changes, and disease management measures. African Swine Fever represents a current example of a widespread factor affecting hunting bags, not only directly through its impact on wild boar populations and management strategies, but also indirectly through changes in hunting activities and regulations affecting other species. Emerging technologies including camera trapping, drones, acoustic monitoring, multitargeted environmental surveillance, telemetry, AI‐assisted analysis, and citizen science were identified as promising complementary tools for surveillance and early warning systems, although no single method was considered sufficient alone. Overall, preparedness was framed as a fundamentally interdisciplinary and cross‐sector governance challenge requiring systemic transformation across science, policy, society, and environmental management. Participants emphasised the need to move from reactive outbreak response toward preventive approaches addressing structural drivers of disease emergence, including climate change, biodiversity loss, land‐use change, and livestock intensification.