Deforestation and land use change are a product of our agricultural expansion, urbanization, and continuing dependence on intensive crop production for our economic growth.
This process has enormous economic and welfare benefit to our communities and our nations. However, the process has continued to expand without accounting for hidden costs. These include the depletion of critical services that nature provides for us – pollination, desalination, flood prevention, fish nurseries, and disease prevention.
Some of these ‘ecosystem services’ have been recognized for decades, and their value to people has been calculated. However, the importance of biodiversity conservation in preventing disease threats is relatively newly-recognized.
Nature.Health.Global's Work on Land Use Change
Building on a substantial scientific literature published by the people behind Nature.Health.Global., we will continue to analyze the economic costs of the health impacts of land use change, raise awareness of their impacts, and support strategies to carefully restore wilderness in a way that is safe for human health. In particular, we will work with rewilding programs to assess any potential health risks for people, wildlife or other species that share the environment.
Land-use change, agricultural expansion and urbanization cause more than 30% of emerging disease events reported since 1960. Destruction of natural habitat and encroachment of our communities, and our livestock into biodiverse habitats provides new pathways for pathogens to spill over and increase transmission rates.
For example, in the Northeastern USA, Lyme disease has emerged as a substantial threat to public health in areas that were formerly deforested, with apex predators removed, then allowed to restore. Human expansion into these altered ecosystems brings people, deer, white-footed mice, and the Lyme disease bacterium they harbor, into contact, with serious outcomes. This example, and published analyses of emerging disease hotspots, demonstrate that efforts to restore forest, and rewild depleted ecosystems, run the risk of promoting disease emergence.
Around the world, land use change in highly biodiverse regions drives the risk of previously unknown pathogens emerging in livestock, domesticated species, and people. With hundreds of thousands of as-yet-undescribed viruses alone present in wildlife in these regions, rapid development of tropical and subtropical forested areas presents a unique and serious risk for pandemics.
