The Guardian

October 28, 2021
Nearly two years after the first reported case of Covid-19, the world is still facing the repercussions. At the same time, the extent of our planetary emergency – of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and inequality – has become evident. As we rebuild our societies and economies, we are faced with a unique opportunity to build a nature-positive future that we must not let slip away. It is time for all of us to chart a planetary response to our planetary crisis – a response that puts nature at the centre.

Our shared global experience with Covid-19 has underlined the interconnectedness of our different systems. The science is clear: climate, biodiversity and human health are fully interdependent. Yet, within discussions around post-Covid recovery, nature is not yet recognised enough as an essential piece in the puzzle of a resilient future for all.

Read More

SciTechDaily

May 8, 2021
A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management.

Lead author Felicia Keesing is a professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She explains, “There’s a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But this turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn’t a threat to us, it’s actually protecting us from the species most likely to make us sick.”

Read More

New Scientist

March 3, 2021
Released from quarantine in a hotel in Wuhan, China, this January, Peter Daszak made for the wildlife market linked to the first cases of a mystery pneumonia in the closing days of 2019. Back then, the Huanan seafood market was a jostling scrum of stalls selling not just seafood, but all manner of domestic and exotic wild animals, the living cheek by jowl with the dead.

It is now an empty shell, closed since the first cluster of cases of what morphed into the covid-19 pandemic. Daszak, a zoologist, visited earlier this year as a member of the World Health Organization-backed team sent to investigate the origins of the virus causing that illness, SARS-CoV-2, and assess what role the now-infamous market might have played.

No one yet knows, and hypotheses will take years to test. But it is clear that the Huanan outbreak was just a symptom of a sickness, not a cause of it. For two decades, evidence has been building of the link between how we encroach on, degrade and exploit the natural world and the risk of “zoonoses” – animal diseases that spill over into humans.

Read More

Forest Peoples Programme

February 18, 2021
In their quest to bolster economies battered by the pandemic, governments in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Peru have set aside social and environmental safeguards in favor of destructive development projects that are harming Indigenous communities and the forests they care for, according to a report released today by Forest Peoples Programme.

Open-pit mines, industrial agriculture plantations, infrastructure mega-schemes and hydropower complexes are among the projects fueling a rise in human rights abuses and deforestation in five countries that contain the majority of the world’s tropical forests.

Read More

IFAD

February 2, 2021
Indigenous Peoples have suffered disproportionately from the economic impacts of COVID-19, yet they hold essential knowledge for rebuilding a more sustainable and resilient post-pandemic world, free of poverty and hunger, said Gilbert F. Houngbo, President of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), at the opening of the Fifth global meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum today.  

“COVID-19 has devastated the lives of millions of people across the globe. But this dreadful plague also drives us to find ways to live more harmoniously with nature,” said Houngbo. “We know that the only way to achieve this is by joining forces with Indigenous Peoples - who are stewards both of nature and of a vast reservoir of traditional knowledge around the world.”

Read More

Mongabay - OpEd

January 25, 2021
The year of 2020 was envisioned as a potential turning point for global conservation efforts. Major events such as the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the IUCN World Conservation Congress were expected to raise biodiversity conservation to the top of the global agenda. These and other major events aimed to foster greater links between biodiversity, climate, and development goals. New conservation initiatives and ambitions such as a ‘global deal for nature’ were being advanced to try and increase conservation impact and investment.

Now, the world is a very different place as we head into the new year. Over the past nine months COVID-19 has created an unprecedented social, economic, and public health crisis on a global scale. The pandemic’s impacts have been augmented by additional political and social crises encompassing fundamental issues such as race, democracy, and inequality. The events of the past year take place within the wider context of the biodiversity and climate crises, of which conservationists are all too aware. We are living and working in a period of crises layered within crises.

But such extraordinary circumstances also create new, unique opportunities, often in unexpected ways, for systemic change. As societies respond and adapt, opportunities emerge for changing how conservation is conceptualized, practiced, and funded. The conservation field now has a unique opportunity to accelerate efforts to build a stronger, more dynamic, more resilient field – one that can truly face up to the challenges of the present global ecological crisis.

Read More

Brookings

January 25, 2021
The global public health and economic devastation caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak dramatically reinforces the urgent imperative to minimize the chances of another zoonotic pandemic. Reducing the likelihood of another viral spillover sweeping the world requires a fundamental change in how we interact with nature. It requires minimizing human interface with wild animals and wild spaces; eliminating transmission points where the likelihood of viral spillover to humans is high, such as unhygienic commercial markets in wild animal meat and live animals; better monitoring of the legal trade in wildlife; diligently suppressing illegal and unsustainable trade in wildlife; and conserving natural habitats. Conserving natural habitats in turn requires profound changes in human food production and human encroachment on remaining natural habitats. Decisionmaking about pandemic prevention and nature conservation must be elevated to the highest levels of governments on a permanent basis. Such changes will not be easy or cheap, but they are necessary.

Read More

Smithsonian Magazine

December 31, 2020
Since 1970, 4,392 mammals, amphibians, birds, fish and reptile species’ population sizes declined by 68 percent, according to a World Wildlife Fund report released this year. Animals living in Latin America and the Caribbean took the biggest hit; their population sizes decreased by 94 percent. Habitat destruction is cited as the leading cause of these massive losses. The United Nations’ Global Biodiversity Outlook report produced similarly grim results. The document took inventory of 196 countries committed to recovering biodiversity as determined by the 2010 Aichi Biodiversity Targets. As dictated by the Aichi agreement’s ten-year plan, countries were to achieve certain recovery milestones like preventing the spread of invasive species and conserving protected areas. Most of the goals were not achieved or only partially met.

Read More

Thomson Reuters Foundation

November 30, 2020

[…] As the world faces increasingly frequent and severe shocks - from the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme weather linked to climate change - it will need to re-evaluate its priorities, from a focus on efficiency to the value of interconnectedness, he said.

That might extend as far as fundamentally rethinking how key planetary life-support systems - such as the fast-disappearing Amazon rainforest - are governed as a global resource, said Rockstrom, an earth scientist and leading thinker on resilience.

“If the Amazon rainforest crashes, we will lose jobs in Germany,” he said.

“It will create so much havoc in the climate system” as temperature increases accelerate and rainfall shifts, he warned.

“When something unacceptable happens in one corner of the planet, it sends invoices across the whole world,” he added.

Read More

Our Daily Planet

October 30, 2020
Yesterday leaders from 190 countries were supposed to have met in Kunming, China for final negotiations on a biodiversity treaty designed to address the world’s urgent extinction and biodiversity crises. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has made attendance of the UN Biodiversity Conference impossible.

However, a panel of experts from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (an independent intergovernmental body open to all member countries of the UN) released a report that links zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 to “unsustainable exploitation of the environment,” including the wildlife trade and land-use change.

Read More

Independent

October 30, 2020
The world must tackle the biodiversity and climate crises to stand a chance of preventing future pandemics, the world's leading experts on nature are warning.

That includes setting up an international body of leaders to minimise risks, the scientists say.

Where there is a clear link to high pandemic risk, taxes on meat consumption and production should be considered, and incentives should be provided to switch away from high-risk industries such as fur farming, they suggest.

Read More

Mongabay

October 30, 2020
Avoiding the loss of human life and the economic fallout caused by future pandemics will require a seismic change in our approach to the causes of the emergence of disease-causing viruses, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES.

Peter Daszak, who chaired the July 2020 workshop that produced the report, noted that we’ve identified only about 2,000 of the 1.7 million viruses that exist in birds and mammals. Scientists estimate that between 540,000 and 850,000 of these could infect humans.

Read More

National Geographic

October 29, 2020
Absent major policy changes and billions of dollars invested in protecting land and wildlife, the world may see another major pandemic like COVID-19, an international group of scientists warned today.

Conserving biodiversity can preserve human lives, according to their new report, which reviews the latest research on how the decline of habitat and wildlife leaves humans exposed to new, emerging diseases.

Read More

Campaign For Nature

October 29, 2020

Today, leaders from 190 countries were scheduled to gather in Kunming, China for final negotiations on a biodiversity treaty designed to address the world’s urgent extinction crises. Instead, these leaders are at home, battling the spread of a zoonotic disease that likely emerged from deforestation and the destruction of natural habitats. 

A timely new report by The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) asserts that preventing future pandemics before they emerge requires targeted action to address the underlying causes of pandemics--which  are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change.  Among the solutions the report lays out is the conservation of critical areas for biodiversity,  the financing of this protection,  and the design of a green economic recovery from COVID-19--which offers “an insurance against future outbreaks.”

Read More

The Street Journal

September 5, 2020
Conservationists have warned that environmental destruction, such as deforestation and the exploitation of wild animals, could lead to increasing numbers of pandemics. 

A UN summit on biodiversity, being held in New York in September, will be told by biologists there is evidence of a strong link between loss of biodiversity and deadly new diseases, such as Covid-19.

Scientists will warn world leaders that the rapid rate of deforestation and the uncontrolled expansion of farming is providing a ‘perfect storm’ for diseases to pass from wildlife to humans, The Guardian reported.

Read More