BACKGROUND :

If PMAC 2018 is aiming to make the world safe from the threats of emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), then a cadre of people will need to develop skills that enhance our capacity to transform the future—and ideally—to co-create a preferred future. We need to ‘get ahead of the game’ and start solving tomorrow’s problems today. The objectives of PMAC 2018 explicitly recognize some of the precursors for such work. For example the PMAC objectives include: • To promote a greater understanding of the range and nature of the “drivers” underlying the emergence of new disease threats and options for their mitigation; • To highlight emerging demographic, climatic and travel trends to better understand how disease emergence will evolve over the course of this century; and • To underscore the collateral socio-economic and development benefits associated with a One Health Agenda This side event workshop will seek to use the future to better understand and appreciate a wide range of emerging issues, to better anticipate how the world is changing and what might happen—and alert us on how to respond adequately and in a timely manner. In addition to examining the data, this workshop will help participants expose some assumptions and navigate the meanings that we give to the data. Futures work uses methods and rigorous ways of thinking to transform both the present and the future. Participants will be challenged to examine their own worldviews as part of this journey toward developing preferred futures to address emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Do you see the future fast enough? In our current roles as technical experts, policy makers, decision makers, funders etc., we rarely take the time to develop these skills that help us ‘see the future faster’. To develop these skills, we actually need to focus on the deeper drivers and the longer term, not the short term. The workshop will encourage dialogue and exchange between participants from different sectors, disciplines and countries around some issues of common concern within the One Health arena.