A little over a year ago the word pandemic was, for most people, associated with disaster movies and history books. Despite repeated warnings about the very real risk of occurrence from infectious disease experts, it felt remote and distant, not something for most people to worry about day to day. Needless to say, that experience has now been transformed almost everywhere. As we move into 2021 and vaccine roll out scales up, many will be hoping that we can put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us. However, even if we manage a speedy recovery, we need to know if COVID was an unavoidable low probability risk—a once in a century event—or if it is an expression of an underlying trend that requires more self-reflection and capacity for change.
In late July, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) held a transdisciplinary expert panel workshop to undertake a rapid assessment of the scientific evidence on the origin, emergence, and impact of COVID-19, as well as potential control and prevention options. That work programme culminated in a report published in late October, the findings of which were clear and concerning.
Firstly, pandemic frequency was found to be on the rise, driven by increasing incidence of emerging disease events, with more than five new diseases emerging in people every year, each with potential to grow to pandemic proportions. Most of these emerging diseases and practically all pandemics including influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, are caused by microbes in animals which “spill over” after repeated contact between wildlife, livestock, and people. Combined with highly interconnected globalised economies and rapid transport, this makes pandemics a rapidly growing risk.
Not only is pandemic risk on the rise, but COVID-19 has taught us that our societies are highly vulnerable. The cost in lives and livelihoods and wider economic damages have been astronomical (economic costs are estimated to be many trillions of USD). It is therefore clear that current reactive strategies which centre on rapid containment and control following disease emergence are insufficient to fight future pandemics. Rather we need to tackle the drivers of disease spill over. The evidence on this too is clear. Increasing disease emergence results from ecological disruption particularly land-use change, often related to agricultural expansion and intensification, as well as wildlife trade and consumption. Climate change and shifting species distributions pose an additional risk. As the report summarises “Without preventative strategies, pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, kill more people, and affect the global economy with more devastating impact than ever before.”
Fortunately, the report doesn't stop there and goes on to lay out a series of evidence-based policy options to inform pandemic prevention strategies. They fall broadly under five categories, Enabling mechanisms, including launching a high-level intergovernmental council on pandemic prevention, policies to address the role of land-use change, policies related to wildlife trade, closing critical knowledge gaps, and fostering society-wide engagement in pandemic risk reduction.
The report is clear that what is required is not a simple series of technical fixes. Escaping the “Pandemic Era” will require transformative changes and no less than a fundamental reassessment of our relationship with nature. In particular we must curb unsustainable consumption which underlies global environmental changes that in turn drives biodiversity loss, climate change, and pandemic emergence.
The authors note that many of the proposals may seem costly, difficult and containing significant uncertainty. However, that perspective only holds by comparison to a fanciful counterfactual case in which pandemic risk and associated costs are not rising. The social and economic cost of COVID-19 has revealed that prevention strategies are potentially very cost effective by comparison to coping with a pandemic. The changes needed, while large, are aligned with wider requirements to benefit health, inequality and the Sustainable Development Goals more broadly.
If most people were under the impression that ecological disruption was regrettable but didn't affect them directly, then 2020 must surely have been a wake-up call. COVID-19 wasn't just a rare event, but a symptom of ecological disruption. With pandemic disease, wildfire, extreme heat, intensified storms, and floods, 2020 has not been short of evidence of the need to rebalance our relationship with nature.
© 2021 Frans Lanting, Mint Images/Science Photo Library