The Global Plant Health Assessment, conducted under the aegis of the ISPP, has highlighted essential functions which healthy plants perform in the biosphere for some plant systems of a few world ecoregions. The Global Plant Health Assessment has also demonstrated that a common good – plant health – may effectively be addressed by a collective. The new phase in the Global Plant Health Assessment involves two nested collectives: a collective of individual scientists, and a collective of independent projects. These collectives would address two themes:
(1) State of Plant Health concerns elements that are critical to its assessment. Among these are missing pieces of the GPHA’s first phase. This includes documenting the consequences of plant health on additional plant systems of some world ecoregions. This first theme would also include the development of a global, open, and web‐based database on Losses to Plant Diseases. To this date, no such resource exists, and it has been over 40 years since a serious attempt at measuring disease impacts globally has not been made. Such resource is vital to research planning, technology deployment, and policy‐making. This database would concern field‐based, but also forest and post‐ harvest systems. This first theme is to be conducted by a collective of individual scientists.
(2) The Future of Plant Health. Assessing the future of plant health requires research in several projects. This involves therefore a collective of projects instead of individual scientists. Research projects may concern specific plant health cases is specific contexts and/or the consequences of global environmental changes on diseases and impacts. Future of Plant Health will link projects within a shared vision generated by a common set of scenarios designed collectively. Scenarios for the future will include their connected features: social, economic, political, sociological, climatic, and ecological. These scenarios necessarily will also include future human diets and ways of life.