Future pandemics will happen more often, kill more people and wreak even worse damage to the global economy than Covid-19 without a fundamental shift in how humans treat nature, the United Nations' biodiversity panel said Thursday.??
The world is in an ¡°era of pandemics¡± and unless the destruction of the natural world is halted they will emerge more often, according to a report from world's leading scientists.?Warning that there are up to 8,50,000 viruses which, like the novel coronavirus, exist in animals and may be able to infect people, the panel known as?Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services?(IPBES) said pandemics represented an "existential threat" to humanity.??
Authors of the special report on biodiversity and pandemics said that habitat destruction and insatiable consumption made animal-borne diseases far more likely to make the jump to people in future.??
¡°The science is not in dispute at all about this. Deforestation is a prime driver of pandemics,¡± says Lee Hannah, a climate scientist for Conservation International who specializes in the effects of forest loss. Hannah peer-reviewed the report, which was compiled at a late July virtual workshop by the IPBES.
"There is no great mystery about the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic ¡ª or any modern pandemic," said Peter Daszak, president of the Ecohealth Alliance and chair of the IPBES workshop that drafted the report.
He said, "The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk though their impacts on our agriculture."?The panel said that Covid-19 was the sixth pandemic since the influenza outbreak of 1918 ¡ªall of which had been "entirely driven by human activities".?
The report¡¯s recommendations take what it describes as a preventative approach to stemming the spread of diseases that commonly emerge from animals.?
So-called zoonotic diseases¡ªwhich include COVID-19, HIV, and influenza, and the Ebola, Zika, and Nipah viruses¡ªemerge from microbes living in wildlife that can infect humans. Bats, birds, primates, and rodents are common transmission sources.?
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been traced to a wet market in Wuhan, China that may have been the source of the original outbreak of COVID-19 in humans.?
Scientists estimate that there are 1.7 million undiscovered viruses lurking in mammals and birds, half of which may have the ability to infect people. It¡¯s no coincidence, say the report¡¯s authors, that pandemics are growing in number as human activities place more stress on the environment and bring people into increasingly closer contact with wildlife.?
As recently as November 2019, scientists were sounding the alarm that increasing deforestation was creating more favorable conditions for disease outbreaks. While habitat loss writ large presents a threat, Hannah calls specific attention to forests, which have a high density of biodiversity and therefore present more opportunities for disease carriers. He notes as an example deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, where forests are often cut to make way for cattle to graze. Cattle can also act as intermediaries between infected wildlife and people who work closely with livestock.Destroying wildlife habitat will also drive animals into new territories, the report says, forcing animals, including bats and birds, to find homes in urban environments in greater numbers.