covid19 | ConservationBytes.com

Fancy a pangolin infected with coronavirus? Apparently, many people do

30 12 2021

The logic of money contradicts the logic of species conservation and human health. As illegal trade has driven pangolins to near extinction, their hunting and market value has kept increasing ― even when we have known that they act as coronavirus reservoirs in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

_{Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) in a monsoon forest (Sumba Island, Indonesia). With adult weights up to 10 kg and body lengths around half a metre, these animals are mostly solitary and nocturnal, feed on ants and termites, and love tree climbing using bark hollows to shelter and give birth to singletons. The species occurs across mainland and islands of South East Asia, and became ‘Endangered’ in 2008 and ‘Critically Endangered’ in 2014, following a 80% decline in the last 20 years due to hunting and poaching. It has been the most heavily trafficked Asian species, and the IUCN’s assessment states: “… the incentives for harvesting and illegally trading in the species are universally high based on the high financial value of pangolin parts and derivatives”. Captive breeding is unlikely to deter wild collection because (among other reasons) farming costs are high (more so on a large scale) and, even if the species could be traded legally, wild versus farmed pangolin products and individuals are difficult to distinguish (23). Photo courtesy of Michael Pitts}

Urbanites are attracted to exotic species, materials, and places. Our purchasing power seems to give us the right to buy any ‘object’ that we can pay for, no matter how exotic the object might be. In such a capitalist rationale, it is no surprise that > 150 thousand illegal cargos with wild animals and plants have been confiscated in 149 countries over the last two decades, moving some 6000 species from one place of the planet to another (1).

Social networks show people interacting with all kinds of fauna, creating the illusion that any animal can become a pet (2). And there’s a multi-$billion market of wildlife for a diverse array of uses including collecting, food, ornamentation, leisure, clothing and medicine (3-5). The paradox is that the rarer a species is, the higher its market value runs and the more lucrative selling it turns out to be, leading to more exploitation and rocketing extinction risk (6).

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Tags: CITES, COVID, COVID-19, covid19, endangered, illegal wildlife trade, pangolin, SARS-COV-2, wildlife, Wildlife trade
Categories : Africa, Asia, biodiversity, China, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, disease, economics, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, harvest, Malaysia, mammal, poaching, poverty, South East Asia, threatened species, tropical

Double standards: climate change vs. COVID-19

3 08 2020

Both anthropogenic climate change and the coronavirus pandemic entail serious health risks. Why then do climatologists lack the public credibility and political repercussions that doctors have? Preventing the aggravation of the climate emergency is possible if we react to it in the same way we are reacting to the pandemic, essentially, following the advice of the scientific community.

We have as much uncertainty regarding the coronavirus COVID-19 that causes acute respiratory failure (SARS-CoV-2) as we do about human-made greenhouse gases causing climate change.

Both problems are currently costing (and will cost) trillions to national economies. But the main difference between the two when it comes to public perception is not economic but temporal. The virus has changed our lives in days to months whereas climate change is taking years to decades to do so. This short-termism about how we respond to the pace of an emergency has been sculped in our genes by evolution (1) and contaminates politics.

Early this year, after deriding the onset of the pandemic, many climate change-denialist leaders (the obvious picks are Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson [note that Johnson modified his public views on climate change when becoming UK foreign secretary in 2016]) had to swallow their own words and honour their political profession when human corpses started to pile up in their hospitals. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: climate change, climate scientists, climatologists, corono virus, COVID-19, covid19, denialism, doctors, Economics, environment, Global warming, science
Categories : anthropocene, climate change, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, sustainability

Never let a good crisis go to waste

11 05 2020

pandemic

First published in the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere Blog on 5 May 2020.

by Professor Dan Blumstein (University of California at Los Angeles), Professor Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University), and Corey Bradshaw (Flinders University)

—

Winston Churchill’s words have never been more important than today as we experience the society- and life-changing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The extent and severity of the disease is a result of ignoring decades of warnings by scientists about the general deterioration of humanity’s epidemiological environment, and specific warnings about confining live, wild animals in markets. The situation was made even more lethal by ignoring the warnings from epidemiologists and disease ecologists once it became clear that an imminent pandemic most likely arose from this practice. Many countries, including the United States, are still ignoring those warnings and the required actions to lessen the impact.

Accordingly, we should ask ourselves, “what else are we missing?” What other huge problems are hiding in plain sight where science could guide policy to avoid catastrophic future failures? For instance, there are two principal health threats that must be addressed immediately, and we must strike while the iron is hot.

The overuse of antibiotics in agriculture will cause widespread deaths from formerly treatable bacterial diseases because of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in microbes. The evolution of resistance is well-known, predictable, and obvious — not in retrospect, but now. By feeding antibiotics to otherwise healthy livestock, animals can be housed in higher densities and they grow faster. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: agriculture, biodiversity loss, climate change, COVID-19, covid19, disease, Extinctions, Global warming, human disease, pandemic, reset, sars-cov2, wet markets
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, disease, environmental policy, exploitation, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, livestock, logging

Projecting global deaths from covid19

18 03 2020

covid

I know that it’s not the best way to project expected deaths from a pandemic disease, but being something of a demographer, I just couldn’t help myself.

I therefore took the liberty of punching in some basic probabilities into our world population model to see how many people could potentially die from covid19. But this is not an epidemiological model, so I’m probably vastly over-estimating the total death rates.

Nonetheless, the results were revealing.

I first took the expected mortality by age class based on the Chinese data so far. I then assumed a worst-case scenario of a 60% infection rate (i.e., 3 out of 5 of us will eventually catch the virus). I assumed these values across the entire globe (not taking into account greater or lesser susceptibility or probability of death among countries or regions).

I also considered two more scenarios: (i) double the mortality rate (in each age class), and (ii) the disease outbreak lasting two years instead of just one.

The graph below shows the four different outcomes based on these scenarios relative to the baseline (no covid): Read the rest of this entry »