Caption: Human-induced climate change and pollution have touched nearly every wild and uninhabited region of Earth.
By Meryl Phair ‘21
Environmental Editor
Throughout history, human development has steadily encroached further into the wild hinterlands of our natural world. Excluding Antarctica, more than 77 percent of land and 87 percent of the world’s oceans have currently experienced modification from human activity. With the global reach of climate change and pollution, nearly every corner of the Earth has in some way felt the impact of human life. Even preserved land, such as national parks and wilderness areas, contain air and water touched by pollution. This invasion into our global wilderness spaces has not only generated significant environmental damage but has also produced critical threats to human health. The degradation of our natural environment has increased the risk of global pandemics, and COVID-19 has been exceptionally demonstrative of the interconnectivity of public health to our current relationship with wilderness.
This past summer, in the midst of lockdowns and quarantine, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services held a virtual workshop on biodiversity and pandemics from July 27 to July 31. The workshop brought together a team of 22 global experts and resulted in a report that reviewed the scientific evidence on COVID-19, hoping to provide information about the prevention of future pandemics.
The report noted that COVID-19 is at least the sixth major global pandemic since the influenza pandemic of 1918, including Ebola and Zika viruses and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, all of which originated from microbes carried by animals and spread to humans. These infections occur when humans come in direct contact with wildlife, which explains the probability of COVID-19 originating from a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Infections caught from other creatures are known as zoonotic diseases. Since 1918, there have been roughly two new zoonotic diseases discovered each year. Around 1.7 million viruses are estimated to exist in mammal and avian hosts, with 631,000 to 827,000 potentially transmittable to humans. Not only do pandemics pose a massive existential threat to humanity when they occur, but the likelihood of pandemics occurring is increasing.
While pandemics originate from microbes carried by animals, they are driven by human activity. The same human activity that has produced detrimental environmental changes, leading to global biodiversity loss and climate change, has also been linked to pandemics.
The increase in global pandemics has been linked directly to climate change, as global warming begins to drive animals and parasites into new habitats that then spread viruses and infections into unprotected ecosystems. Due to human expansion and changing habitats in our warming world, wild animals also have less space to roam around freely. Over the course of the last two centuries, birds, mammals and amphibians have lost an estimated 18 percent of their natural habitats, a report from the University of Cambridge found. These ecosystem changes are significant and impact feeding, reproduction and migration patterns.
The trading, farming and consumption of wildlife, in particular, pose extraordinary risks for future pandemics, as they lead to biodiversity loss and produce emerging diseases. Wildlife trade, which includes animals traded as pets as well as wildlife-derived products for food, medicine and fur, along with other products, mobilizes a quarter of all Earth’s wild terrestrial vertebrate species. The movement of wildlife around the world is highly disruptive to ecosystems, but the sector continues to exist because it creates jobs and produces massive revenues. In 2016, wildlife farming in China employed 14 million people and subsequently generated $77 billion.
Pandemics will not stop without an improved awareness of the wilderness and significant action taken to improve the conservation of wildlands and spaces. Ecosystem restoration and rewilding have been identified as key to mass extinction and reducing carbon emissions. A report published in the science journal Nature in 2020 led by an international team of Brazilian researchers identified that restoring 15 percent of converted lands could avoid 60 percent of expected extinctions and sequester an estimated 465 billion tons of CO2, equivalent to 30 percent of the total amount of CO2 which has increased in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution through coal, oil and gas combustion. Rewilding would take the form of converting farmland, crop fields and land used for livestock back to natural forests, grasslands, shrublands, wetlands and desert ecosystems.
Current human activities driven by the economic and capitalist underpinnings of our modern world order are posing an existential threat to public health, as the risks of global pandemics are increasing. Along with taking the necessary steps to create physical changes to our land, there needs to be a significant shift in understanding the interconnectivity and balance our world requires to flourish, as human and planetary health are intrinsically linked.