Response to “Small islands, complex realities: Advancing One Health in the Philippines”

We thank Descalso and colleagues (2026) for their engagement with our paper and welcome the opportunity to discuss further the scope and intent of our argument (Koenig et al. 2026). Although we appreciate the points raised, we regard several of the letter’s propositions to rest on a misreading of our framework, and argue that its central case study falls outside the analytical category our paper addresses. Our paper is explicitly framed around Small Island Developing States (SIDS), a category formally defined by the United Nations since 1994 and characterized by small land area, small population size, limited economic diversification, low-lying coastal exposure, and pronounced socioecological vulnerability. Although the Philippines often aligns itself geopolitically with SIDS, it does not actually belong to this category. With a land area of approximately 300,000 km² and a population of around 115 million people, the Philippines is a large, middle-income archipelagic nation with governance structures, economic complexity, and ecological diversity that differ fundamentally from the SIDS context. Applying a critique grounded in the Philippine case to a SIDS-specific framework, therefore, conflates analytically distinct island categories leading to an incommensurate comparison—that is, a category or epistemic error. This is not a trivial distinction: the tractability of SIDS as natural laboratories for One Health research derives precisely from their small scale, ecological distinctiveness, and the particular socioecological dynamics, including colonial legacies of plantation agriculture, land dispossession, and concentrated resource ownership that we examine in our paper by drawing from the extant SIDS literature.