Around the world, governments are using the economic collapse that’s come with the pandemic as an excuse to rip up environmental protections and crack down on concerned citizens.
In England, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are proposing to shred planning laws that protect green spaces – after openDemocracy revealed they have received £11 million from property developers in recent years. In India, forty new coalfields in some of the country’s most ecologically sensitive forests are to be opened up for commercial mining. In Brazil, the government has used the pandemic as cover for a huge surge in executive acts, dismantling laws protecting the country’s rich forests and wildlife.
Meanwhile, a new study has found that diseases carried by wild animals and deadly to humans – like the novel coronavirus – thrive when nature is destroyed.
