COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Information and Discussions on General Conservation Issues
Post Reply
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Lisbeth »

Annie DuPre-Reynolds, Manager, EWT Wildlife in Trade Programme
AnnieD@ewt.org.za


The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has brought to the forefront new challenges and, therefore, opportunities in our lifetime. While we often feel invincible with our advanced technology, it is times like these that remind us we are powerless against nature. Millions of people around the world, working from home and watching the news, are stuck inside and feel disconnected from their environment. But the reality is the opposite – our impact on this planet over the past generations has a direct connection to the spread of this disease.

Deforestation and habitat reduction have driven wild animals out of their natural homes and into areas of human habitation. Continued demand for wildlife products means people encroach further into protected areas to extract wildlife and natural resources. The illegal wildlife trade, which is driven by human consumption, sees people (especially the poor and vulnerable at the lowest level of this supply chain) risking their health and safety to make a living.

As we expose ourselves to animals and plants in the wild and bring wildlife into urban areas as part of the wildlife trade, we increase the ways zoonotic diseases can hop from animals to humans. In our crowded world, viruses with high mutation rates can (relatively) quickly switch hosts in new ecosystems. In particular, the unregulated nature of illegal wildlife trade provides easy opportunities for pathogens to spread.

In 2012, journalist Jim Robbins wrote a prophetic piece in the New York Times. Disease, he observed, “is largely an environmental issue. Sixty per cent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic – they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.”

Was the decision by the United Nations to call 2020 a “super year for nature and biodiversity” also prophetic? Perhaps amongst the devastation caused by COVID-19, we will find the time and energy to consider our impact on this planet and its biodiversity. While the pandemic has delayed important international meetings on the environment and biodiversity, an increased focus on public-awareness and campaigning could bring positive impacts overall.

In February, COVID-19 drove the Chinese government to take drastic measures to stem illegal markets and ban wildlife consumption. Yes, there are loopholes that will continue to negatively impact wildlife. No, this was not a simple solution to the problems posed by illegal and unregulated wildlife trade. What remains to be seen is if consumer behaviour will change as a result of these regulations and if the pressure will reduce on some of the world’s most threatened and protected species.

Beyond the many lessons we will learn about public health and safety, we must keep in mind the impact we have on our environment. This too shall pass – and one day soon we will look back on COVID-19 as part of history. Will our attitude towards wildlife have changed? Will we have learned our lesson, and slowed exploitation of our planet’s biodiversity? Let us not take this lesson for granted and use this time to re-evaluate our actions on this planet and make sustainable choices now.

https://www.ewt.org.za/sp-mar-2020-covi ... diversity/


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Lisbeth »

Coronavirus: three misconceptions about how animals transmit diseases debunked

April 16, 2020 |Olivier Restif, Alborada Lecturer in Epidemiology, University of Cambridge

As global COVID-19 cases top two million, it’s humbling to remember that it all started when one person got infected by one wild animal. We may never find out precisely where or when it occurred, nor the animal which was responsible. But we do know that these “spillover events” are the starting points of many outbreaks, from influenza to HIV and from SARS to COVID-19.

Zoonotic diseases are caused by pathogens that originate in other animal species. Some diseases, such as rabies, cause sporadic outbreaks, often self-contained but deadly and traumatizing for the communities they infect. Others manage to spread worldwide and become pandemic, circulating in the global population. Some are repeat offenders that re-emerge from animal hosts in a mutated form every few decades – think influenza, plague and cholera.

Many others are now part of our burdens of endemic diseases, such as measles, mumps or HIV. The coronavirus causing COVID-19 is closely related to those that caused the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) pandemic in 2003. Despite speculation, it’s too early to tell whether COVID-19 will disappear within a year or stay with us permanently like the flu.

Image
The novel coronavirus has been linked to wild animals carrying a coronavirus and sold in a Wuhan wet market for food. EPA-EFE/ALEX PLAVEVSKI

Either way, we can expect new strains of coronavirus to spill over from wildlife in the future. Countless pathogens jump across animal species on a daily basis – most of the time with no visible effect. But increasingly, these pathogens are taking advantage of the new opportunities that humans have created as they reshape the natural environment. In this fraught atmosphere, it’s natural for misconceptions to circulate, so here’s what we know about how new diseases jump from animals to people.

1. Bush meat and wet markets

It’s often assumed that close contact with wild animals is necessary for zoonotic outbreaks like Ebola or COVID-19 to occur. Activities like hunting, butchering and trading wild animal meat for human consumption carry a high risk of exposure to pathogens, but we don’t know how often they actually cause diseases. Bats are popular game in several African and Asian countries, where some species weigh over 300g and roost in their thousands in trees. As a result, bat hunters are at particular risk of infection, although there is little evidence to suggest hunters themselves may have been the source of past Ebola outbreaks.

In some countries, live animals destined for human consumption are traditionally sold in wet markets, potentially bringing zoonotic viruses from the forest into towns. But footage of exotic wild animals, sometimes endangered, sold live on overcrowded market stalls, misrepresent a niche trade as mainstream activity.

Surveys in China and Vietnam have shown that wild meat is mainly eaten in restaurants, mostly from wild pigs, goats, deer and birds, all of which are commonly farmed – not unlike what happens in Europe. As for bats, which are sold in their tens of thousands in Ghana, they are already dead, eviscerated and smoked by the time they reach market stalls, hence posing a very low risk of infection to consumers.

2. Vectors

More common routes of spillover do not require direct contact with animals at all. Many emerging diseases are transmitted by biting insects that act as vectors between animal host species. For example, Lyme disease, caused by bacteria found in wild mammals and transmitted to humans by ticks, has been increasing in North America and Europe in the last 30 years. Although this increase is often thought to be driven by deer hunting, studies suggest that the growing abundance of small mammals may be spreading the disease as their natural predators decline.

Image
Ticks can transmit the bacteria that causes Lyme disease when they bite humans. KPixMining/Shutterstock

Other pathogens are excreted in the urine or faeces of their animal host, contaminating drinking water or crops for humans and farm animals. This has been seen in Bangladesh, where bats drink from and urinate into vessels collecting palm sap, causing outbreaks of Nipah virus in local communities.

3. Domestic animals

Although wild animals transmit zoonotic viruses, people are much more frequently in contact with domestic animals, creating ample opportunities for disease spillover. Poultry can spread bird flu, and there have been sporadic (and often deadly) outbreaks of H5N1 or H7N9 strains in the last 20 years, leading to mass culls in farms.

Although less lethal, bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter, commonly found in farm animals, cause thousands of cases of food poisoning in the UK alone. Even normally harmless bacteria may acquire antibiotic resistance genes in farms that use lots of antibiotics. Outside Europe, antibiotics are often added to animal feed as growth promoters, potentially helping to incubate multidrug-resistant bacteria in livestock.

How to prevent zoonotic disease outbreaks

There are no simple solutions to prevent zoonotic outbreaks, but researchers in our Bat-One-Health consortium are studying how to reinforce three particular lines of defence.

Preserving ecosystems and restoring natural habitats can ensure animals don’t need to forage near where humans live. Risky behaviours that expose people to pathogens can be reduced – not by imposing harmful bans on wild meat – but through community engagement that’s respectful of different livelihoods and cultural practices. Most importantly, governments must invest in public health and surveillance where they are needed most.

Understanding how new viruses make the jump from animals to humans can help lower the risk of future pandemics, but it will mean dispelling misconceptions about where most transmission occurs and avoiding knee jerk reactions.


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Lisbeth »

In urgent need of an environmental ethic

BY IAN MICHLER - 23RD APRIL 2020 - DAILY MAVERICK

If anything has become patently clear from the Covid-19 pandemic it is that we need to change the way we think and live. Current paradigms are failing us.

While we know humans function best in a state of consistency, this must not be confused with what is now widely referred to as a “return to normality”. Pre-pandemic normal is not an option.

Spreading rapidly across the globe, this pandemic has exposed the flaws and inefficiencies in nearly all forms of the modern economic system.

It has also laid bare the harsh inequalities of our societies, extremes and divides that have built up over decades through political and economic systems that have expressly sought to benefit those with the power and wealth. And it has called into question the extent of populist leadership and the poor responses in many countries around the world.

In short, current paradigms are failing us.

Yet, amid the current clamour to explain the ongoing tragedy, there has been a small sliver of hope: the natural world seems to have been the one component to have squeezed some benefit out of the global lockdown. Wild species are being seen in areas where they were long thought to have disappeared, fewer wild animals are dying from road kills, heavily polluted water systems are beginning to shimmer with life, trophy hunting species are being spared the bullet, and with far fewer fossil fuels being burned, carbon emission levels are falling, allowing polluted skies above cities to open and clear for the first time in decades.

Documenting these joys comes with a harsh lesson though, one that has to date gone unheeded despite numerous earlier warnings. In only a matter of weeks, it has taken a global crisis to offer respite for the environment, something our politicians and their surrogates have been unable to do through decades of wrangling over public policy, climate mitigation and environmental protection measures.

And while the re-emergence of natural life is worth celebrating, we also need to view the process with perspective. Not all wilderness regions will benefit; with the precipitous decline of ecotourism in Africa and Asia, for example, poaching levels in protected areas are likely to rise. And the positive aspects to the natural world we are seeing are merely short-term trends, glimmers of hope as to what could be, which must not be confused with long-term change.

The change we need will only come from deep introspection, visionary leadership, and legislative action on a multidisciplinary basis. Opened by the pandemic, this window has exposed our failings but also provided us with a vital snapshot of information and data on how rapidly and readily the environment heals. It is a timely reminder and opportunity for the global community to reform our systems, but with the restoration of environmental integrity as the priority. The immediate economic and social losses from this pandemic will be devastating and felt widely across the world, but if we do not engineer a fundamental restructuring of the way we live, future consequences are likely to be even worse.

And, given what we know regarding the state of our planet, there will be no point unless the world puts a vibrant environment at the very core of this change. Without intact planetary boundaries and fully functioning ecosystems with healthy biodiversity levels, every other sphere of humanity will come under increasing threat, if not be driven to catastrophe.

For well over a century, we have had an abusive relationship with the environment, a reality we can no longer deny or wish away with platitudes of greenwashing. Instead, an entirely new environmental ethic is needed, one that embraces the concept of intrinsic value with an ecological understanding of the planet and our existence within it, not above or outside of it.

This ethic must also confront the blatant contradiction of our time. Driven by an addiction to convenience in our lifestyles and ravenous consumption patterns, current paradigms demand unlimited economic growth and increasing wealth, yet we exist on a planet with physical boundaries and finite natural resources.

And with resource use, the extraction of materials such as biomass, fossil fuels and minerals, set to double by 2050, the way we currently live is by any stretch of imagination and ingenuity utterly unsustainable. This truth is best revealed through the words of economist Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993): “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” Boulding’s work was influential in the mid-1900s.

The eternal optimists, often found embedded in the ecomodernist and sustainability platforms, will point to the significant advances that have been made over the past century. In general, medical and engineering breakthroughs, food quality, communication and transport systems and banking are just some of the many spheres that have all significantly extended lifespans or enhanced our levels of convenience immeasurably. Few can deny this, but in any holistic analysis these benefits are also deeply intertwined with the challenges we face. And part of our evolving analysis embraces the understanding that progress is now more about a different paradigm to improve levels of human well-being for all citizens without destroying the environment than it is about achieving simple Gross Domestic Product growth targets.

If anyone is still in doubt as to the massive challenge we face, look no further than the recent behaviour and type of leadership displayed by Donald Trump in the USA. After withdrawing his country from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, he subsequently set about gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. And now, as the US is recording consecutively higher daily death tolls from the virus, he is proposing to open access to 2.3 million acres of Federal Wildlife refuge to hunters. This will allow a range of animal and bird species to be shot on public wilderness land. He also went about claiming the moon for US companies by signing an executive order of government encouraging them to start mining its resources.

Changing our environmental ethic is not a luxury or even an option to be ridiculed by reactionaries like Trump; it is an imperative to avoid the collapse of our societies. DM

Ian Michler is a safari company owner and environmental journalist. He is enrolled at the Sustainability Institute, Stellenbosch University.


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Lisbeth »

Neoliberalism and sustainable use are cut from the same paradigm

By Ian Michler• 26 May 2020

Image
To protect the world from zoonotic diseases, CITES needs to be amended, refocused or superseded by other international protocols, says its former head, John Scanlon

Where neoliberalism subjugates the natural world and people to the commercial whims of markets and globalisation, sustainable use has ensured the international commercialisation of biodiversity, and determined that price and trade be the arbiter of what value each species holds.

One of many narratives since the outbreak of Covid-19, particularly among a sector within the status quo, tells us this pandemic has been an unforeseen crisis, a surprise, one that has caught the political and business community from the blind side.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This misinformation is an attempt by those with vested interests in the current systems to hide the shortcomings, failures and poor leadership, which in turn becomes a self-serving rationale for why fundamental change is not required.

Indeed, countless people and agencies have been paying attention, and they have issued stern warnings, some for many years.

In this regard, I want to draw attention to three notable contributions. One is a report that should have shocked the world into action, another an immensely insightful opinion piece that reflects on this report, and the third, a recent commentary on what the authors believe to be a pandemic of equal proportions to that of the virus itself. And when viewed together, they speak to a deafness that has existed from many within the political, business and environmental communities.

This unwillingness to hear is a strategic denial that ignores the links between current production and consumption paradigms, and environmental collapse, which includes the spread of zoonotic pandemics. They have also silenced the calls for far-reaching structural change.

In May 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released the first-ever inter-governmental global assessment on the health of biodiversity and ecosystems. The most comprehensive report of its kind ever, the contents were alarming. In summary, approximately one million species are now threatened with extinction, all ecosystems are deteriorating at unprecedented rates due to unsustainable human activity and, according to the 145 expert scientists and countless researchers involved, the current global response to the declines and destruction has been “insufficient”.

So insufficient that they refer to the situation as an “ominous picture” and called for “transformative changes” to restore and protect the natural world.

While the data was shocking, it was not unexpected. The more telling aspects were the fact that the authors of a mainstream scientific body, so often constrained by academic protocol, felt compelled to speak out, reinforcing that transformative change meant “a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values”.

These are strong words, and they were taken even further when the authors went on to assert that the “opposition from vested interests can be overcome for the broader public good”. By recognising the power of vested interests, those individuals and sectors of society that oppose any change, highlight what may well turn out to be the most significant challenge we face.

The second contribution comes from Andrew Nikiforuk, an award-winning Canadian journalist and author. In response to the bleak news contained in the IPBES report, he published a perceptive piece asking: “Who, or What, Will Stop the Battle against Biodiversity?”

Nikiforuk goes further than calling the wider environmental and conservation effort as “insufficient”; in his assessment, our agencies, and the paradigms we follow, have simply failed us and the planet. In making this claim, Nikiforuk reminds us of the sentiments expressed by Austrian philosopher, Ivan Illich who pointed out that if environmentalism cannot force behaviour and paradigm change, then all of us involved are merely accountants to the carnage. Illich expressed this view in 1969, 50 years before the IPBES panel spoke out.

Nikiforuk also draws our attention to another prophetic sentiment of Illich; “the more we viewed nature as a disposable commodity or a convenient resource, the less we would worry about its degradation.” This comment encapsulates exactly where we are today in our development and relationship with the environment: unfettered growth at the expense of ecological sustainability.

And the third contribution picks up on this unstable relationship by relating our current disorder to neoliberalism, the ideology that in various manifestations, has been the driving paradigm over the last few decades. Reliant on free markets, deregulation and less government, the globalisation of capital, trade and labour, all factors that handsomely reward the so-called entrepreneurs that have free reign, Abhilasha Srivastava and Aseem Hasnain believe this to be the true pandemic we face.

Their thoughts are summed up in the notion that economic activity has become the primary consideration for all human endeavour. “This outbreak has shown how contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal ideology stands in direct opposition to nature and human life itself.” Or, the flip side of the same coin may well read; the natural world and people now exist merely as servants to the pursuit of growth, profits and other benefits to be gained from economic activity.

These three strands come together as a damning assessment. Highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, they speak clearly to the urgent need for change to our entire approach, “a system-wide reorganisation” in the words of the IPBES panel, to avoid future pandemics, another mass extinction and unstable societies.

And nowhere is this more applicable than in South Africa. With poverty, inequality and employment indicators prior to the current lockdown showing the majority of people being worse off today than in 1994, neoliberalism has brought its misery to this country as well.

But what about its conservation equivalent, the doctrine of sustainable use, particularly the way it is applied in southern Africa? As ideologies go, they are actually part and parcel of the same paradigm.

Where neoliberalism subjugates the natural world and people to the commercial whims of markets and globalisation, sustainable use has ensured the international commercialisation of biodiversity, and determined that price and trade be the arbiter of what value each species holds. And neither seems to understand the cultural and social complexity of our living systems, or the notions of ecological and ethical sustainability.

In addition, both gained real traction during the 1980s, a bygone era, one so different to conditions the world finds itself in today, which may have something to do with why they also suffer from the same fallacies: that somehow, through their application, “trickle-down” benefits will accrue to all.

In the case of neoliberalism, calls for deep tax cuts for the wealthy and business community along with lifting of trading restrictions are justified on the grounds that these immediate benefits to the elites will somehow trickle down to all citizens sometime in the longer term.

Sustainable use has a far narrower reach, but here in southern Africa, it relies on using the same sort of justification: If governments hand private land-owners control over wildlife through trade and markets, their commercial activities will somehow over time benefit conservation, the species being exploited, and take care of the state’s socio-economic obligations to rural development.

And both make claims to achievements that are increasingly challenged globally. With neoliberalism, adherents claim more people have been dragged out of extreme poverty than ever before. While that can be represented as a statistic, opponents question the general wellbeing of the people in this new stratum and ask at what cost to cultural, community and environmental considerations. Have they been taken out of poverty, or have they merely been added to those already subjugated to the treadmill of dependence, cultural alienation and inequality?

In a similar vein, the sustainable use lobby goes on about the high volumes of wildlife found on private lands in South Africa as a benefit, but this too is a mere statistic that masks the detail; under what conditions and for what purposes have they bred all these animals? Most involved are farmers and businessmen breeding wild species under agricultural conditions. And they are doing so through human selection for characteristics defined by the highest prices paid for body parts; in other words, they are domesticating a range of Africa’s most iconic species. This is pure exploitation of these species, has nothing to do with biodiversity conservation and is certainly no panacea to the development of rural communities.

If we are truly going to heed the deep concerns expressed by the IPBES panel, as well as achieve equitable and sustainable societies within a healthy environment, then both neoliberalism and sustainable use need to be replaced as they appear in complete contradiction to these aims and objectives.

And this brings us back to the vested interests and the forces against change. The pandemic may well take care of neoliberalism, but it will take longer to rid sustainable use, one of neoliberalism’s more insidious tentacles, from policy-making. There is an entire group out there, environmental consultants, researchers, resource economists and more that have staked their body of work on the doctrine. They are part and parcel of the vested interest, unlikely at this stage of their careers to offer up that a lifetime of support may no longer be in the best interests of the environment. DM

Ian Michler is a safari company owner and environmental journalist. He is also enrolled at the Sustainability Institute, Stellenbosch University.


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
Klipspringer
Global Moderator
Posts: 5862
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:34 pm
Country: Germany
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Klipspringer »

A lot of blahblah these days about the connection of biodiversty/conservation and a virus but this piece is totally true:
the sustainable use lobby goes on about the high volumes of wildlife found on private lands in South Africa as a benefit
There is an entire group out there, environmental consultants, researchers, resource economists and more that have staked their body of work on the doctrine. They are part and parcel of the vested interest
Conservation of biodiversity and sustainable use are as a parcel more detrimental than useful for nature.


User avatar
Richprins
Committee Member
Posts: 75838
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 3:52 pm
Location: NELSPRUIT
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Richprins »

Yes, BOTH sides have vested interests and rely on those interests for funding/income! :twisted:


Please check Needs Attention pre-booking: https://africawild-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=596
User avatar
Lisbeth
Site Admin
Posts: 67237
Joined: Sat May 19, 2012 12:31 pm
Country: Switzerland
Location: Lugano
Contact:

Re: COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: A TIME TO REFLECT ON OUR IMPACT ON BIODIVERSITY

Post by Lisbeth »

The expression "Sustainable use" has a different meaning depending on the different interests of the different groups O**


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
Post Reply

Return to “Other Conservation Issues”