What role does conservation play in preventing pandemics?

New infectious diseases emerging at a faster rate than ever before. As natural environments degrade, they are more likely to harbor infectious diseases and transmit pathogens.

Increasingly, emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic: 60% are shared between wildlife and humans. Today, the frequency of epidemics is increasing, driven by surging populations, environmental change, wildlife trafficking, and globalized trade and travel.

Planetary Health Impacts all of us

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Invasive Species & Wildlife Trade

The invasion of foreign species (pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs) into novel habitats can spread infectious disease. Such introductions may happen due to increasing globalization of industry, trade, and tourism; through the pet trade (as what happened with the U.S. outbreak of Monkeypox), through legal or illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife products; or through habitat changes that facilitate invasions by alien plants or animals. As SARS-COV-2 has shown us, wildlife trade is especially prone to spillover, as the capture, handling, slaughter, and ingestion of wildlife can lead to the transfer of a pathogen from wildlife to humans.

Environmental Degradation

The destruction and degradation of natural habitats facilitates the emergence of infectious diseases by increasing the opportunities for disease spread and spillover. Reduced species diversity increases the relative commonness of those species that incubate, carry, and help spread a pathogen, increasing disease prevalence. Further, predators are the first to disappear after habitat degradation; the lack of a "regulatory" agent leads to an increase in pathogens, increasing opportunities for transmission. Deforestation and degradation of habitats may also facilitate the spread of infectious disease by increasing habitat that favors disease vectors, such as mosquitos (rice paddies around forest edges), or edge habitat that favors invasions by invasive species.

Climate Change

Climate change expands the range and impact of pathogens, facilitating the spread of emerging infectious diseases. Warmer temperatures enable pathogens and their vectors to survive and sometimes thrive in habitats previously outside of their tolerance range. It also serves to change weather patterns (like storms or rainfall) that lead to more standing water, and increase the population of mosquitos or other vectors. Vectors may also be active for longer periods of time during the day (e.g., mosquitos may have more opportunities to transmit a disease because they have more times to bite). Tropical diseases such as malaria, cholera, yellow fever, now reach previously unexposed human populations in South America, Central Africa, and Asia due to the spread of their vectors to new regions.

Preventing future pandemics

COVID-19 is not the only pathogen to threaten humanity, nor will it be the last. Scores of infectious diseases threaten humankind: both familiar ones like influenza and colds, malaria and tuberculosis, but also less familiar ones, arising from emerging viruses and bacterial infections including Ebola, H5N1 avian flu, Zika, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. These pathogens affect our species both directly and indirectly. They impact the biodiversity around us, including the animals and plants we depend on for survival.

As we respond to the continuing COVID-19 outbreak, it is even more important to think about how we prevent future pandemics. Indeed, COVID-19 presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to create a world where we anticipate, plan for, and mitigate pandemics before they happen. We can address this disease by building the capacity and infrastructure needed to prevent future outbreaks.

We must take a comprehensive, evolutionary and ecological approach to understanding where the next outbreaks may occur and focus on biosurveillance to identify and anticipate outbreaks. This approach requires us to develop the tools to detect these pathogens early and understand the factors that facilitate their emergence.

4 tools to preventing the next pandemic

Diagnostics for WHO’s 20 Neglected Tropical Diseases
Diagnostics for illegal wildlife trade and trafficking
Diagnostics for agricultural pests and pathogens to ensure product safety and veracity
Diagnostics for early detection of emerging pathogens

In all of these applications, the crucial missing piece is our ability to detect the pathogens accurately and quickly - in the field. Such diagnostics tools could be transformative to addressing additional major challenges of global health, food systems, conservation, and climate change.

Rapid identification of novel viruses and the presence of pathogens will enhance biosecurity in markets and farming systems, reduce public health risk, increase food security, and assist in the conservation of hunted species.

new Solutions

The NABIT

The NABIT (Nucleic Acid Barcode Identification Tool) places the power of a genetics lab in anyone’s hand. The NABIT is a low-cost, field-ready, easy-to-use, portable device to detect or identify the DNA & RNA of pathogens, wildlife, or food health, anywhere in the world, without specialized training or equipment. The NABIT will empower a huge array of people – customs agents, border officers, medical professionals, fisheries inspectors, scientists, conservationists, consumers, even everyday citizens – to confirm a species identity without a lab or expertise.

The Sentinel

The Sentinel is an AI toolkit that makes conservation tools smarter. It upgrades monitoring tools — like trail cameras and acoustic recorders — with revolutionary and intuitive AI technology. Through this system, we can turn millions of monitoring devices into active tools that directly address some of the underlying drivers of extinction including preventing the spread of invasive species and wildlife trafficking. This breakthrough platform empowers conservationists to rapidly respond to wildlife-related threats efficiently by processing environmental data in real-time as it’s collected.

By making diagnostic tools accessible to all – anywhere, at any time, by anyone – we can get ahead of the challenges that face us from emerging pathogens and their threat to human health, agriculture, and biodiversity.

Take action

Sign our petition and tell President Biden about the enormous opportunity to cool the planet, prevent pandemics, and improve global health security by instituting a National Biodiversity Strategy.

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