Conserving natural areas and promoting biodiversity are “efficient methods” to prevent future pandemics, a study has shown.
A group of 25 scientists from across the world led by Cornell University released a roadmap for reducing pathogen transmission from wildlife to humans and other animals, suggesting that implementing strategic conservation and restoration efforts will lead to spillover prevention, while also addressing key drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss.
“At present, most attention and funding is allocated to mitigation after a pathogen is already circulating in humans, prioritising outbreak detection and medical countermeasures such as vaccines and therapeutics,” the authors said.
“By contrast, primary pandemic prevention has received less attention in global conversations, policy guidance, and practice.”
“We advocate for integrating ecological approaches alongside biomedical approaches in a comprehensive and balanced pandemic prevention strategy.”
ECOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES
The strategy is informed by two 2022 papers on how bats can spread the Hendra virus to horses and people, a case study that, according to the scientists, fits all animals that potentially carry zoonotic diseases.
Those papers, published in the journals Nature and Ecology Letters, explained that when bats lose their natural habitats and winter food sources, their large populations splinter, and they migrate in small groups to agricultural and urban areas.
But when natural habitats provide sufficient food, the bats return to live in large groups in these habitats and stop spreading the virus.
In light of those findings, scientists concluded that intact ecosystems provide the “first line” of defence against new pandemics because they strengthen the first barriers to spillover – by minimising, for instance, human exposure to pathogens in nature and the infected species – and therefore reduce the likelihood that the conditions for spillover occur or align.
“There are trillions of microbes in nature, but we rarely actually get sick, because there are many, many barriers between us and new pathogens,” said Raina Plowright from Cornell University and first author of the paper.
But when land-use changes occur, those first barriers are eroded.
“We need to make sure there’s always an abundant supply of food available at all times of year, especially when animals are in stressful life history stages like reproduction and migration,” Plowright outlined.
As a first step towards implementing such ecological countermeasures, countries should establish an Intergovernmental Panel for Pandemics in a bid to develop clear and robust metrics, the authors said.
According to the study, numerous existing biodiversity assessment metrics could be shared with pandemic prevention metrics, including the Ecological Integrity Index, the Species Threat Abatement and Restoration (STAR) biodiversity index, and the SEED biocomplexity metric.
“These metrics should not only evaluate primary pandemic prevention efforts but also integrate them into existing biodiversity and climate change frameworks,” the scientists highlighted.
“The development of these metrics presents an opportunity to maximise the co-benefits of biodiversity preservation, climate change mitigation, and pandemic prevention.”
The authors also stressed the need to engage Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in designing and implementing policies, given they safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
“It is essential to recognise the vital role of IPLCs in this framework … It is not just a matter of cultural respect and justice, it is also a pragmatic strategy for designing and implementing appropriate, feasible, and practical ecological countermeasures … [by] incorporating their knowledge,” they said.
By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com
** Click here to sign up to our twice-weekly biodiversity newsletter **
