African Arguments

April 6, 2020
The rapid rise of disease caused by a new coronavirus seems to have caught much of the world by surprise. It shouldn’t have. An upsurge in the emergence of new infectious diseases started at least 30 years before this virus appeared. Some of these diseases have been transmitted from wild animals to humans, and the spread of COVID-19 appears to have originated in a market selling dead and living wildlife, including some endangered species. Research also shows that many of the most serious outbreaks – including Ebola, and the Zika and Nipah viruses – have been linked to biodiversity loss, and to deforestation in particular.

Both of us governed nations in West Africa through the Ebola crisis of 2014-2016. We served at the helm of the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries hit hardest by that crisis which sickened more than 28,600 people and killed more than 11,300. The epidemic also cost our region an estimated $53 billion. Our health systems and economies are still recovering.

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C-Span

April 4, 2020
Matt Lee-Ashley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, discussed how threats to global biodiversity have potentially contributed to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Euronews

April 1, 2020

Scientists estimate that roughly one million land and marine species may become extinct in the foreseeable future. Many within decades.

What are the main reasons for the decline of underwater ecosystems?

Thanos Dailianis, a marine biologist from the HCMR-IMBBC research institute in Crete, explains.

“Marine ecosystems are threatened both locally and globally. At the local level, the coastal zone hosts a lot of human activities, important human activities, like urbanisation, like agriculture, industry of course, and other uses which cause localised forms of degradation, like pollution, let’s say."

"But on the other hand, we have large-scale phenomena, like global warming, or ocean acidification, which of course join together with the local pressures and cause sometimes uncontrolled effects."

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Mongabay

April 1, 2020

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) pandemic, believed to have been triggered by the transmission of the virus from animals to humans, has brought into sharp focus zoonotic diseases that are spread by animals forced to move out of their natural habitats that are increasingly being destroyed, say experts.

Destruction of forests for growing crops, urban expansion and building road networks and a parallel intensification of wildlife trade has resulted in ecological conditions and movement of wild animals, which are reservoirs of some viruses or bacteria, towards human settlements. This, in turn, results in the emergence of new pathogens, they say.

The COVID-19 pandemic “is likely a global effect of natural habitat destruction combined with the effects of globalisation,” says Maria Cristina Rulli, professor at the department of civil and environmental engineering at Politecnico di Milano, who has worked extensively on the links between Ebola virus disease outbreaks and forest destruction in Africa.

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New Strait Times - OpEd

March 25, 2020
As the global Covid-19 crisis dramatically underlines, the fate and wellbeing of people relies on the health of the planet. Planetary health is a term referring to human health “and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”.

The novel coronavirus looks increasingly like an expression of our failure to understand this link, as demonstrated by our disruption of ecosystems. It was in 1980 that non-governmental organisation (NGO) Friends of the Earth first articulated the need to enlarge the World Health Organisation’s definition of health, asserting that “personal health involves planetary health”. 

The next decade, the late Norwegian physician Per Fugelli warned: “The patient Earth is sick. Global environmental disruptions can have serious consequences on human health. It’s time for doctors to give a world diagnosis and advice on treatment.”

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The Independent

March 20, 2020
The novel coronavirus will not be the last pandemic to wreak havoc on humanity if we continue to ignore links between infectious diseases and destruction of the natural world, environmental experts have warned.

Dr Enric Sala, marine ecologist and part of National Geographic’s Campaign For Nature, told The Independent: “I’m absolutely sure that there are going to be more diseases like this in future if we continue with our practices of destroying the natural world, deforestation and capturing wild animals as pets or for food and medicine.”

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BBC

March 18, 2020
As humans continue to rapidly expand the scope of their domination of nature – bulldozing and burning down forests and other natural areas, wiping out species, and breaking down ecosystem functions – a growing number of influential scientists and conservationists think that protecting half of the planet in some form is going to be key to keeping it habitable.

The idea first received public attention in 2016 when E.O. Wilson, the legendary 90-year-old conservation biologist, published the idea in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. “We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along,” he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

Once thought of as aspirational, many are now taking these ideas seriously, not only as a firewall to protect biodiversity, but also to mitigate continued climate warming.

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The Guardian

March 18, 2020
As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.

Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

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The Narwhal - OpEd

March 17, 2020
There are moments in life that are etched into our collective consciousness forever. When the planes struck the World Trade Center. When Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. When the world ground to a halt to help slow the spread of COVID-19. 

It’s during moments like these that we often shift how we think about the world — and about our place in it. 

It’s easy to feel invincible in a modern society in which we live longer than ever before, never have to see where our food comes from and can point a phone at the sky and have it tell us what constellation we’re looking at. 

And yet, despite all of the technological advancements of the last century, we are still rendered powerless to nature — to hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes and, yes, viruses. 

The story of COVID-19 is, at its core, a story of humanity’s ever-encroaching relationship with all other living things on this planet. 

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ensia

March 17, 2020
As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the novel coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.

Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

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Dialogo Chino

March 16, 2020

This year’s packed agenda of negotiations on climate change, biodiversity and the global ocean was supposed to address the fortunes of a living world in a critical condition. But the coronavirus pandemic is forcing drastic changes to the schedule.

The Covid-19 virus, which has infected more than 170,000 people, has hit hardest China and European countries, where several key meetings for achieving new environmental commitments have already been cancelled or postponed. More are in doubt.

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Covering Climate Now

March 13, 2020
The same forest destruction that accelerates climate change can also encourage the emergence of diseases such as the coronavirus, Indigenous Peoples’ leaders said March 13 in New York, as they criticized Cargill and other multinational companies for replacing forests with soy, palm and cattle plantations.

“The coronavirus is now telling the world what we have been saying for thousands of years—that if we do not help protect biodiversity and nature, then we will face this and worse future threats,” said Levi Sucre Romero, a BriBri indigenous person from Costa Rica who is the Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests.

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World Economic Forum News

March 9, 2020
The frequency of disease outbreaks has been increasing steadily. Between 1980 and 2013 there were 12,012 recorded outbreaks, comprising 44 million individual cases and affecting every country in the world. A number of trends have contributed to this rise, including high levels of global travel, trade and connectivity, and high-density living - but the links to climate change and biodiversity are the most striking.

Deforestation has increased steadily over the past two decades and is linked to 31% of outbreaks such as Ebola, and the Zika and Nipah viruses. Deforestation drives wild animals out of their natural habitats and closer to human populations, creating a greater opportunity for zoonotic diseases - that is, diseases that spread from animals to humans. More broadly, climate change has altered and accelerated the transmission patterns of infectious diseases such as Zika, malaria and dengue fever, and has caused human displacement. Movements of large groups to new locations, often under poor conditions, increases displaced populations’ vulnerability to biological threats such as measles, malaria, diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections.

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The Hill - OpEd

March 7, 2020
The COVID-19 coronavirus has killed thousands of people around the world, including 14 in the U.S., and its origin in animals and global spread should remind us how inextricably linked we are with other life on Earth. We share the same planet and breathe the same air, and we also exchange microbes including germs. Now, with our burgeoning human population and global economy, we face new threats from a wider distribution of diseases like this new strain of coronavirus.

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Thomas Reuters Foundation News

March 6, 2020
In Europe, almost a quarter of wild species are at risk of dying out and many ecosystems are too degraded to sustain their social and economic benefits

Like a pandemic, the loss of plant and animal species is almost impossible to contain. But we already have all the information and evidence we need to stop it.

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