As reported on October 29, 2020, a report drafted by the UN penal, namely, ‘Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)’ states that future pandemics will happen more often, kill more people, and wreak even worse damage to the global economy than Covid-19 without a fundamental shift in how humans treat nature. According to IPBES, there exist up to 8,50,000 viruses in animals, which may infect people like coronavirus did.
As per the report due to habitat destruction and insatiable consumption animal-borne diseases far more likely to jump to people in future. Human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk. Covid-19 is the sixth pandemic since the outbreak of influenza in 1918, and is entirely driven by human activities, including unsustainable exploitation of the environment through deforestation, agricultural expansion, wildlife trade, and consumption. The report says that 70 per cent of emerging diseases—such as Ebola, Zika, and HIV/AIDS—are zoonotic in origin, which means that they circulate in animals before jumping to humans. Around five new diseases break out among humans every single year, any one of which becomes a pandemic.
The penal said in its periodic assessment on the state of nature last year, it was found that more than three-quarters of land on Earth had already been severely degraded by human activity. One-third of land surface and three-quarters of fresh water is currently taken up by farming. Man has used resources up to 80 per cent in the past thirty years. The penal has come up with a list of options that governments could take to lower the risk of repeat pandemics. Though the penal acknowledged the difficulty in counting the full economic cost of Covid-19, the assessment pointed to estimated costs as high as US$16 trillion as of July 2020.
As per the experts, the cost of preventing future pandemics is likely to be 100 times cheaper than responding to them. Though our approach has effectively stagnated, we still rely on attempts to contain and control diseases after they emerge, through vaccines and therapeutics.
The IPBES suggested a global and coordinated pandemic response, and suggested to prevent biodiversity loss within an international accord similar to the Paris agreement on climate change. Taxes or levies on meat consumption, livestock production, and other forms of ‘high pandemic-risk activities’ are some of the options for policymakers to reduce the possible re-run of the Covid-19.
The IPBES also suggested better regulation of international wildlife trade and empowering indigenous communities to better preserve wild habitats. This pandemic has underlined the protection and restoration of our globally important and shared environmental ‘life-support’ systems.
Courtesy: newindianexpress.com