Combating a pandemic is 500 times more expensive than preventing one, research suggests

Boston University: Jeremy Schwab

Investing in wildlife monitoring and deforestation could prevent costly pandemics, scientists find

According to new research, the failure to protect tropical rain forests has cost trillions of dollars stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, which has wreaked economic havoc and caused historic levels of unemployment in the United States and around the world.

For decades, scientists and environmental activists have been trying to draw the world's attention to the many harms caused by the rapid destruction of tropical forests. One of these harms is the emergence of new diseases that are transmitted between wild animals and humans, either through direct contact or through contact with livestock that is then eaten by humans. The SARS-CoV-2 virus -- which has so far infected more than 15 million people worldwide -- appears to have been transmitted from bats to humans in China.

"Much of this traces back to our indifference about what has been occurring at the edges of tropical forests," says Les Kaufman, a Boston University professor of biology.

He recently brought together 18 experts from Princeton University, Duke University, Conservation International, and other institutions, to better understand the economic costs of reducing transmission of viruses like the novel coronavirus. Looking at existing research, they made a startling realization.

They discovered that significantly reducing transmission of new diseases from tropical forests would cost, globally, between $22.2 and $30.7 billion each year. In stark contrast, they found that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely end up costing between $8.1 and $15.8 trillion globally -- roughly 500 times as costly as what it would take to invest in proposed preventive measures. To estimate the total financial cost of COVID-19, researchers included both the lost gross domestic product and the economic and workforce cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. They published their findings in a policy brief in Science.

The researchers say disease transmission from wild animals to humans occurs frequently near the edges of tropical forests, where human incursions increase the likelihood of contact with animals. These incursions take the form of logging, cattle ranching, and other livestock businesses, and the exotic animal trade, among others. Tropical forests are often cut down in a patchwork or checkerboard pattern, increasing the amount of land that lies at the edges of the forest and thus increasing the risk for disease transmission between species that would normally live in different ecosystems.

To reduce disease transmission, Kaufman and his collaborators propose expanding wildlife trade monitoring programs, investing in efforts to end the wild meat trade in China, investing in policies to reduce deforestation by 40 percent, and fighting the transmission of disease from wild animals to livestock.

In China alone, wildlife farming (a government-monitored effort to sustainably hunt wild animals without overhunting them) is an approximately $20 billion industry, employing 15 million people, say Kaufman and his peers. In many China communities, the purchase of wildlife and bushmeat -- meat from wildlife species -- is a status symbol.

The researchers also propose to increase funding for creating an open source library of the unique genetic signatures of known viruses, which could help quickly pinpoint the source of emerging diseases and catch them more quickly, before they can spread.

Every year, two new viruses are estimated to transfer from animals to humans, the researchers say. Historically, these have included HIV, MERS, SARS-CoV-1, H1N1, and most recently, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Kaufman and his colleagues hope that their report will spur governments around the world, including the US government, to help fund these preventive measures.

There are some signs of hope, they say, including the February announcement by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress that wildlife consumption for food or related trade would be banned in China.

"The pandemic gives an incentive to do something addressing concerns that are immediate and threatening to individuals, and that's what moves people," says Kaufman. "There are many people who might object to the United States fronting money, but it's in our own best interest. Nothing seems more prudent than to give ourselves time to deal with this pandemic before the next one comes."

Coronavirus: Climate change 'bigger threat' than Covid-19

Steffan Messenger
BBC News

Poor air quality and climate change pose a bigger threat to people's health and the economy than coronavirus, NHS staff have warned.

BBC Wales has seen a letter sent on behalf of hundreds of healthcare workers to the Welsh Government.

It calls for environmental issues to be prioritised as part of a "healthy recovery" following the pandemic.

The Welsh Government said it was "committed" to a green recovery.

The letter calls for scientific advisors to be involved in developing economic policy in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Efforts to pedestrianise cities, encourage walking and cycling, and increasing how much energy is supplied by renewable sources should be sped up, it says, as well as businesses getting money to help cut energy consumption and waste.

Anaesthetic registrar at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, Dr Farzad Saadat, said: "What we're asking is that the government put clean air, clean energy and a cleaner environment at the centre of their policies for the future."

The Welsh Environmental Anaesthesia Network (WEAN), one of the organisations behind the letter, has worked with hospitals across Wales for the past 18 months to cut back on emissions of potent, planet-warming gases involved in treatment.

This has resulted in a cut of 130,000kg of CO2 per month "the same as flying to New York 130 times," said Dr Saadat, a WEAN member.

He added: "There's growing evidence, for instance, that air pollution makes us more susceptible to the disease and makes us more likely to have a bad outcome should we get it.

"There's convincing evidence too that diseases like Covid-19 are more likely to emerge as we destroy the natural world."

Member Yasmina Hamdaoui, a pharmacist, said pollution could lead to - and exacerbate - cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, with possible links also to dementia and diabetes, as well as weight gain in babies and lung development in children.

"We've seen during this period that we have the ability to make drastic changes to our way of life when we need to. We want to learn from these changes and not just return to old habits."

She said the letter was inspired by another sent to leaders of the G20 countries by more than 350 groups representing 40 million healthcare workers.

"This is our attempt to do something at a more local level, join forces as Welsh organisations and call on the Welsh Government to make a commitment too," she added.

Air quality in parts of Cardiff ranks among the worst in the UK when population is taken into account, and government data shows Wales has the highest levels of CO2 per capita emissions in the UK.

"Our record to date hasn't always been the best," Dr Saadat said.

"While I do think the Welsh Government have been active, the reality is we have to do better - we don't have a choice."

Mathew Norman, of Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation in Wales, backs the plan: "The cost of air pollution to our NHS is £1bn pounds a year - that's just in Wales.

"If we improve air quality, we're not just improving the nation's health and our environment we'll also be helping the NHS."

The circumstances surrounding coronavirus could provide an opportunity to "fast-forward" some of the changes required, he suggested.

"More of us are working from home, we've seen in Cardiff and elsewhere measures to transform the city centre, bringing in cycling infrastructure and pedestrianising whole streets. All of this will limit the amount of pollution we emit.

Tracy Cross, of Llanishen, Cardiff, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma and said every breath was like "breathing through straws".

She has noticed a "huge change" in air quality during lockdown.

"It used to make my chest feel really tight and restricted and I had to risk assess every time I wanted to go out. But during lockdown it's been fantastic - I've been able to get out a lot more into the garden with my children."

Ms Cross said it was important things did not revert to "normal" as there would be many people with lung conditions who have lost fitness while shielding at home and deteriorating air quality would lead to "a lot more people suffering".

A Welsh Government spokesperson said it was "committed to a green and socially just recovery, leading to a cleaner, healthier and more equal nation".

"This recovery will require working with partners across Wales," they said.

"Our Team Wales approach already includes work with Natural Resources Wales who have created a panel to advise on this recovery work, and through the Partnership Council for Wales we have jointly set an ambitious target to achieve a net-zero carbon public sector in Wales by 2030.

"Air pollution is the largest environmental threat to public health.

"We will be publishing our Clean Air Plan for Wales this August, which reflects how we will deliver our commitment to reducing emissions and delivering vital improvements for health and well-being, natural environment, ecosystems and biodiversity."

Coronavirus pandemic threatens climate monitoring, WMO warns

Chloé Farand

Data for weather forecasts and climate monitoring provided by in-flight sensors and manual observations have decreased significantly since the Covid-19 outbreak

The coronavirus pandemic risks reducing the amount and quality of weather observations and climate and atmospheric monitoring, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has warned.

The WMO’s Global Observing System provides critical data and observations on the state of the atmosphere, oceans and land surface which inform weather analyses, forecasts and warning signals around the world.

Large parts of the observing system, such as satellite components and ground-based networks, are partly or fully automated and are expected to continue to function for several weeks.

But if restrictions to contain Covid-19 continue for more than a few weeks, the lack of repairs, maintenance and deployments “will become of increasing concern,” the WMO said in a statement.

Manual parts of the observing system have already been significantly affected by the pandemic. Commercial planes, for example, provide in-flight measurements of ambient temperature and wind patterns – an important source of information for weather prediction and climate monitoring.

The data contributes to the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay programme (Amdar) which collects, processes and transmits the information to ground stations via satellite or radio links.

The collapse of air travel, particularly over Europe, has seen a “dramatic” decrease in the number of measurements, the WMO said.

(Source: Eumetnet via WMO)

Data from Eumetnet, a network of 31 European national meteorological services, shows the significant decline in observations provided by airlines such as EasyJet and Germanwings in the past month.

Lars Peter Riishojgaard, director of the Earth System Branch in WMO’s infrastructure department, said that as the decrease of aircraft weather observations is expected to continue, “we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts”.

WMO said European countries affiliated to the network are currently discussing ways to boost the short-term capabilities of other parts of their observing networks to partly mitigate the loss of aircraft observations.

In developing countries, the meteorological community still relies on surface-based weather observations that are compiled and processed manually. Over the last two weeks, WMO reported a “significant decrease” in the availability of manual observations.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas warned that although national meteorological and hydrological services currently continue to provide data and observations, “we are mindful of the increasing constraints on capacity and resources”.

“The impacts of climate change and growing amount of weather-related disasters continue,” he said.

“The Covid-19 pandemic poses an additional challenge, and may exacerbate multi-hazard risks at a single country level. Therefore it is essential that governments pay attention to their national early warning and weather observing capacities despite the coronavirus crisis.”

Elsewhere, the EU’s earth observation programme Copernicus is helping researchers and policy-makers monitor the atmosphere and air quality across Europe. The agency has launched  a web platform  to provide updated air quality information on a daily and weekly basis.

Bill Gates: How the coronavirus pandemic can help the world solve climate change

Microsoft founder Bill Gates Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Though the economic and social shutdowns due to COVID-19 in countries across the globe has meant a temporary reprieve from some of the most obvious environmental effects in places from China to Venice, Italy, the world’s nearly singular focus on the pandemic has meant less attention is being paid to climate change.

However, in the long run, efforts to get the coronavirus pandemic under control will facilitate the fight against climate change, according to Bill Gates. 

How?

“That idea of innovation and science and the world working together — that is totally common between these two problems, and so I don’t think this has to be a huge set back for climate,” Gates told TED’s Chris Anderson during a livestreamed conversation on March 24.

The cooperation Gates is observing globally in the science community is encouraging, he says.  

“In the science side and data sharing side, you see this great cooperation going on,” Gates told Anderson.

Gates, who stepped down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway on March 13 to devote more time to his philanthropic work, announced in February that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contribute up to $100 million to the global response to COVID-19.

Gates told Anderson he is “very much an optimist” when it comes to what scientists working together can do, including when it comes to the pandemic. 

″[T]he amount of innovation, the way we can connect up and work together. Yes, I’m super positive about that,” Gates told Anderson. “I love my work because I see progress on all these diseases all the time. Now we have to turn an focus on this…. but you know the message for me — although it’s very sober when we’re dealing with this epidemic — you know I’m very positive that this should draw us together. We will get out of this and then we will get ready for the next epidemic.”

However not everyone is so sure the global community will apply learnings from the COVID-19 response to climate change. 

“COVID-19 may deliver some short-term climate benefits by curbing energy use, or even longer-term benefits if economic stimulus is linked to climate goals — or if people get used to telecommuting and thus use less oil in the future,” said Jason Bordoff, a former U.S. National Security Council senior director and special assistant to President Barack Obama in an op-ed published in Foreign Policy on Friday. “Yet any climate benefits from the COVID-19 crisis are likely to be fleeting and negligible,” he said. 

Instead, the issues with keeping the pandemic under control indicate that solving climate change will be virtually impossible. “The pandemic is a reminder of just how wicked a problem climate change is because it requires collective action, public understanding and buy-in, and decarbonizing the energy mix while supporting economic growth and energy use around the world,” said Bordoff, who is now a professor and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

How Coronavirus Could Help Us Fight Climate Change: Lessons From The Pandemic

David Vetter

It is a truly global emergency. By March 30, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic had claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide, with about 750,000 confirmed cases across more than 170 countries.

The speed with which the virus has spread has taken most governments apparently by surprise: in less than three months, the outbreak has all but shut down economies worldwide, putting millions of people into isolation, emptying the streets and the skies. 

The first point is obvious: climate change and coronavirus share a similar magnitude, affecting every country on earth. With regard to the second, Levy notes that both crises affect different nations, and different communities, with varying degrees of severity.

In this rapidly emerging new reality, lessons are being learned. Coronavirus, constituting an emergency unprecedented in modern times, has much to teach us about how civilization should deal with global crises. And in the view of Brazilian economist and former chief financial officer of the World Bank Dr Joaquim Vieira Ferreira Levy, the immediate danger of coronavirus has a great deal in common with the threat of climate change.

“One: it’s global. Two: it affects different people in different ways. Three: it shows the importance of government,” Levy says.