Over the past year the world has witnessed an alarming succession of environmental disasters. Millions of hectares of forests have been incinerated in Amazonia and Australia. Floods have submerged whole cities like Venice and its historic and cultural heritage. An ever-increasing number of cetaceans, turtles and birds are dying in agony due to the ingestion of plastic. And most recently, the global Covid-19 pandemic reminds us that messing with our planet can have consequences that are deadly.
The past 60 years have been characterised by the increasingly frequent emergence of new ‘zoonoses,’ which are infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans - as is most likely to have been the case with the coronavirus. The majority of these zoonoses (more than 150) were transmitted by wild animals, including Ebola (1976 in western Africa), HIV (identified in 1981 in the USA), SARS (2003 in China), and most recently Covid-19.
This may partly be due to climate change, which alters temperature and rainfall patterns in ways that favour disease carriers like mosquitoes. Melting glaciers may also release viruses that have been buried for thousands of years. But the rise in new zoonoses is primarily caused by the ways in which we are pushing into, and extracting resources from, the few remaining pristine ecosystems left on the planet.
