SMEA director Dr. Nives Dolšak and Dr. Eduardo Gallo Cajiao, a David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow at SMEA, along with a team of  scholars from Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the U.S., consider what the pending ‘Pandemic Treaty’ should incorporate  regarding the prevention of pandemics from the wildlife trade. Prevention of pandemics should focus on prevention at source, which means that zoonotic spillovers need to be avoided as globalization creates challenges for outbreak containment. With this in mind, but also acknowledging the complexity of the issue, there is a need to reduce uncertainty for decision-making without blanket bans of the wildlife trade. Hence, the authors of this paper propose that the ‘Pandemic Treaty’ should incorporate four goals: 1) increase risk understanding, 2) risk assessment, 3) risk reduction, and 4) enabling funding. This work was published in The Lancet Planetary Health (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519623000293) and it was presented at the second hearing of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body for a Pandemic Treaty last September (https://inb.who.int/home/public-hearings/second-round). For more information, you can watch the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research video here.