Pacific, Climate & Environment Profile Series: Dr Anne Loarec

As AFRAN celebrates 10 years of connecting researchers, institutions and communities across France, Australia and the Pacific, our Pacific, Climate & Environment Profile Series continues to highlight the people whose work contributes to a more sustainable, resilient and connected region. Today, we are pleased to feature Dr Anne Loarec, Head of the Medical Epidemiology Group at the Institut Pasteur de Nouvelle-Calédonie, whose work explores the complex connections between human health, environmental change and the social and economic realities of the Pacific.

From medicine to a One Health approach

Originally trained as a general practitioner, Anne progressively specialised in public health, project coordination, epidemiology and research. Her career has taken her to different parts of the world before bringing her to Nouméa around a year and a half ago. Her arrival in New Caledonia opened a new chapter in that journey—and a new regional perspective on health. The Pacific makes particularly visible the connections between human health, the environment, climate, and economic and policy decisions. Anne's work therefore increasingly follows a One Health approach, seeking to understand how these different dimensions interact and ultimately affect people's health. It is an approach particularly relevant to a region where climate and environmental changes can interact with existing health vulnerabilities and rapidly changing lifestyles.

From infectious diseases to chronic health challenges

Anne's research in New Caledonia covers a broad range of public health priorities, many of which resonate across the wider Pacific. Her team works on acute febrile illnesses, including clinical research, as well as acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, seeking to better understand disease burden and associated risk factors. Her research also extends to population health in mining territories and major chronic health challenges such as diabetes and obesity. Across these different areas, a common objective remains: producing research that is not only scientifically robust, but also locally relevant and useful. Anne is therefore working to strengthen clinical research in collaboration with hospitals while developing community-based studies that involve local actors and populations.

Turning evidence into action

For Anne, research should ultimately lead somewhere. Producing evidence is important, but its real value comes from the ability to translate findings into health policies, decisions and concrete interventions that respond to community needs. This means ensuring that research produces useful and timely results while taking into account local knowledge, experiences and specificities. It also requires researchers to work beyond traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

As Anne puts it:

“We need to collaborate across communities, professions and countries, and make the most of diverse expertise.” 

One Pacific, many realities

After a relatively recent arrival in the region, one aspect of the Pacific has particularly struck Anne: the combination of shared challenges and remarkable diversity. Pacific communities face many common health and climate-related risks, but each country and territory also brings its own history, experiences and local context. Rather than seeing these differences as barriers to regional cooperation, Anne sees them as an opportunity. By comparing experiences, sharing knowledge and understanding what works in different contexts, Pacific countries and territories can learn from one another and strengthen their collective capacity to respond to health challenges.

Connecting New Caledonia with regional expertise

Anne's experience also illustrates the role that research networks can play in turning regional similarities into new collaborations. Through AFRAN, she has developed connections with Australian researchers working on acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease—conditions that represent important health challenges in both New Caledonia and Indigenous Australian populations. AFRAN events have enabled her to meet researchers, discover ongoing projects and strengthen connections between New Caledonia and the wider Australian and Pacific research community. These connections create opportunities not only to share scientific expertise, but also to compare experiences and explore how approaches developed in one context might inform research and action elsewhere. As AFRAN celebrates its first ten years, Anne's story reflects an important dimension of what regional collaboration can achieve: bringing together different disciplines, communities and countries around shared challenges while recognising the specific knowledge and realities of each place. In a region where health, climate, environment and society are increasingly interconnected, those connections may prove more important than ever.

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