The COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound social, political, economic, and environmental challenges to the world. The virus may have emerged from wildlife reservoirs linked to environmental disruption, was transmitted to humans via the wildlife trade, and its spread was facilitated by economic globalization. The pandemic arrived at a time when wildfires, high temperatures, floods, and storms amplified human suffering. These challenges call for a powerful response to COVID-19 that addresses social and economic development, climate change, and biodiversity together, offering an opportunity to bring transformational change to the structure and functioning of the global economy. This biodefense can include a “One Health” approach in all relevant sectors; a greener approach to agriculture that minimizes greenhouse gas emissions and leads to healthier diets; sustainable forms of energy; more effective international environmental agreements; post-COVID development that is equitable and sustainable; and nature-compatible international trade. Restoring and enhancing protected areas as part of devoting 50% of the planet’s land to environmentally sound management that conserves biodiversity would also support adaptation to climate change and limit human contact with zoonotic pathogens. The essential links between human health and well-being, biodiversity, and climate change could inspire a new generation of innovators to provide green solutions to enable humans to live in a healthy balance with nature leading to a long-term resilient future.

In the mid-fourteenth century the bubonic plague was carried by the flea-borne bacterium Yersinia pestis on great gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) that were flourishing in the grasslands of Central Asia during a high productivity rainy climatic period (Kausrud et al. 2010). The epidemic was spread by traders and black rats (Rattus rattus) along the Silk Road west to Europe and east to China. In the west, the Black Death killed over a third of the European population; in the east, over 25 million Chinese were fatally infected (Kohn 2007). What happened next: the end of feudalism in Europe, economic and social changes as scarce labor became more valuable, and a new flowering of European art and science that led to the Renaissance (Herlihy 1997); and China transitioned from the Mongol-controlled Yuan Dynasty to the Han-controlled Ming Dynasty, known for its expanded trade, new plants from abroad (potatoes, maize, and chili peppers), writing, porcelain, and innovative approaches to government (Swanson 2017; Smith and von Glahn 2020). The recovery from a disastrous pandemic inspired new social, cultural, and political arrangements that soon led to Eurasian countries dominating the entire world (Campbell 2016).

In late 2019 the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 disease it causes in humans emerged from Wuhan, China, and attacked a world made vulnerable by globalization of trade and travel, social inequities, effects of climate change, resource over-exploitation, unsustainable production and consumption, biodiversity loss, and governance poorly prepared to respond. A year later, at least 50 million people were infected by the pandemic, over a million had died, and the global economy was devastated.

In both pandemics, the pathogen was hardly the only problem. Rather, it was a catalyst that helped to focus attention on the political, social, economic, and environmental problems that were making the mid-fourteenth century and perhaps the early twenty-first century times when change was overdue. And times of rapid change present opportunities for innovative approaches to rebuild societies in a more sustainable direction that can enhance resilience to the changing conditions. In the Middle Ages, Europe, the Middle East, and China moved toward more prosperous and innovative directions as impacts from the bubonic plague faded. Can the modern world respond likewise to COVID-19?

While not as disruptive or virulent as the bubonic plague pandemic, COVID-19 has generated draconian control measures that have dramatically affected many sectors of modern economies, including industries, airlines, farming, fisheries, sports, social events, education, and tourism, among others. The restrictions were effective in reducing transmission of the virus (Hsiang et al. 2020), but high unemployment, social disruption, and bankruptcies have been common side effects. The World Bank expects that at least 120 million people will be pushed toward deeper poverty, the global economy will shrink by over 5%, and global trade will decline up to 32% in 2020. Some national economies are falling even more, with second quarter GDP dropping 25.2% in India, 20.4% in the UK, 17.1% in Mexico, and 16.4% in South Africa (OECD 2020). The resulting global economic contraction could even be called “a pandemic depression” because the recession has spread more widely than at any time since the 1929–1933 Great Depression (Reinhart and Reinhart 2020).

The economic shocks that have accompanied COVID-19 indicate that some of the fundamentals of the global economy may not be sustainable on environmental, social, and economic grounds. Economic growth based on increasing consumption of natural resources has already had profound negative impacts on the global environment and biodiversity; global GDP grew from US$ 3.4 × 10¹² in 1970 to over US$ 142 × 10¹² in 2019, an increase in economic activity of 40 times at the same time that wild species populations were declining by 68% (Tienhaara 2010; WWF 2020). The World Economic Forum, a leading international business body, contends that business as usual has no future because over half of global GDP is potentially threatened by the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. But a greener form of development could generate 400 million jobs and US$ 8 × 10¹² in business value annually by 2030 (WEF 2020).

The world is unlikely to be returning to anything resembling its pre-pandemic resource-extracting prosperity any time soon, if ever. Domestic turbulence is to be expected when high unemployment leads to a recession that will last for many months or even years, and the unprecedented debt burden at both household and government levels continues to create public tensions that may lead to inequitable forms of justice (Fukuyama 2020). How will the world respond?

This review will provide a perspective on the environmental conditions that prevailed when the new coronavirus arrived, highlight how COVID-19 has affected the environment, present some of the links between emerging infectious diseases and the environment, and conclude by drawing from lessons learned to suggest some policies to bring nature back into the mainstream of helping human societies adapt to emerging challenges. It will show that building environmental resilience is the key to a sustainable future, calling for social, economic, and environmental innovation.

While the human health and economic impacts of the pandemic appropriately are receiving the most urgent attention (Morens and Fauci 2020), the complex environmental issues of biodiversity loss and climate change are at the very heart of the pandemic and affect responses to it. Emerging infectious diseases (EID) are driven by growing human populations increasingly disrupting natural ecosystems, globalization that can send an EID around the world even before its symptoms become apparent, and changing climates that are affecting drivers such as increasing demand for animal protein, unsustainable agricultural intensification, and destructive harvest of natural resources (UNEP/ILRI 2020).

Emerging infectious diseases always have environmental dimensions

COVID-19 was no surprise because new EIDs were clearly expected (Quammen 2012). A database on 335 EIDs starting in 1941 showed that they have been increasing significantly and have often been linked to environmental factors. Zoonoses, diseases originating in animals that can be passed to humans, were found to be 60.3% of EIDs; 71.8% of these originated in wildlife and 29.2% were from domestic species (Jones et al. 2008). Notable examples include the remarkably fatal Ebola hemorrhagic fever that emerged in West Africa in 1976 and had numerous outbreaks with mortality rates of up to 43%. A study of 40 Ebola outbreaks after 2004 found that they were significantly linked to the recent clearing of mature forest that led to more frequent contact between humans and infected animals (Olivero et al. 2017).

A major contributor to the 1997–1998 outbreak of the Nipah virus in Malaysia was the clearing of species-rich tropical rainforests to make room for commercial farming of vast expanses of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) that replaced the tropical forest habitat of Malaysia’s 17 species of fruit bats (Family Pteropodidae). The bats then turned to domestic fruit orchards planted near factory farms where domestic pigs fed on fallen fruit contaminated with excreta from the bats and became infected with Nipah virus which they then passed on to pig farmers who suffered a devastating 40% mortality rate (Cheng et al. 2018).

The conclusion is clear: when mature old-growth forests are cleared to create farms (as in West Africa), plantations (as in Malaysia), or pastures (as in Brazil), wild species move into new habitats and come into contact with species they do not normally encounter, which may then spread infectious diseases (Wolfe et al. 2005; Rohr et al. 2020). Some EIDs have much higher mortality rates than that of COVID-19 (currently averaging 3–4%, with much variation among countries), another good reason to treat future EID threats seriously, seek to stop their spread as soon as they emerge, and be prepared to respond effectively if they start to spread.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a time of significant biodiversity loss

Biological diversity (biodiversity for short) is the variability among living organisms and the ecological complexes of which they are part, including diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems (CBD 1992). Biodiversity generates substantial economic benefits, especially through supporting ecosystem services (Ninan 2009; Kumar 2010), and diverse species at multiple trophic levels are required to deliver the full benefits of ecosystems (Soliveres et al. 2016). This variability of nature supports human health (Rohr et al. 2020), with about 75% of the new drugs to fight bacterial infections, viruses, and parasites developed since 1981 coming from natural products (WHO and SCBD 2015). More generally, biodiversity in natural ecosystems has helped to keep contagious pathogens from becoming pandemics through nature’s systems of checks and balances (Everard et al. 2020).

Biodiversity supports the fulfillment of all of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Sachs et al. 2019), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed a Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 with an ambitious set of 20 targets (known as the Aichi Targets after the city in Japan where the plan was agreed) (SCBD 2010) (www.cbd.int/gbo). By 2020, six of the Aichi targets had been partially achieved and all of them had led to at least some conservation action by government agencies (SCBD 2020). While conservation has saved some Endangered species from extinction, at least temporarily (Bolam et al. 2020), nature today is still declining at a rate unprecedented in human history and species extinction is accelerating. The direct anthropogenic drivers of nature’s decline are well known: changes in land and sea use that leads to habitat loss; direct exploitation of species of plants and animals; climate change that drives ecosystem changes and extreme climatic events; pollution of soils, fresh and salt waters, and the atmosphere; and the spread of alien invasive species (IPBES 2019).

These drivers are closely linked to human health. More than 500 000 species lack sufficient habitat to ensure their survival (IPBES 2019), and habitat loss also creates the edge effects that have been implicated in promoting more human–wildlife contacts that can lead to the spread of zoonotic diseases. Some 30% of global species threats are due to international trade (Lenzen et al. 2012), with a wide variety of commodities being sent from tropical developing countries to industrial and individual consumers in North America, the European Union, China, Japan, and elsewhere, and setting the stage for pandemics.

The loss of biodiversity over the past century has been so grave that many biologists contend that the planet is now approaching “the Sixth Extinction”, coming 65 million years after the Fifth Extinction saw the disappearance of the dinosaurs following a devastating shower of meteorites that left a clearly visible layer in the geological record (Ceballos et al. 2020). In short, growing numbers of humans are consuming more of nature’s resources, using new technologies that facilitate resource exploitation, reaching into new “untouched” areas, taking advantage of the globalized spread of resource consumption, avoiding payment of the environmental costs, and posing threats to a healthy environment.

Ecosystem degradation is driving COVID-19 and other pandemics

In terms of scale, ecosystems are the largest components of biodiversity, and pandemics can emerge from many of them. Here, the focus will be on two major types of ecosystems that are especially relevant to COVID-19: forests, because they support most biodiversity and are home to the wild species that carry the most zoonoses; and domesticated lands (farms and pastures) that are replacing many forests and provide a stage for contagious interactions between wild animals, domestic animals, and people.

Forests provide habitats for 80% of amphibians, 75 percent of birds, and 68% of mammals (FAO and UNEP 2020). Tropical forests alone contain about 60% of the planet’s plant species. But forests are still being cleared at a rate of 100 000 km² per year, with old-growth tropical forests targeted for agricultural expansion (especially oil palm, maize, and soya beans, and cattle ranching). From 1990 to 2020, the global forest area decreased by 1.78 million km² (FAO 2020). Small wonder that about 8000 of the world’s estimated 60 000 tree species are considered globally Threatened and 1400 are Critically Endangered (IUCN 2020). This degradation of tropical forests is reducing their ability to deliver their former abundance of ecosystem services (Gibson et al. 2011).

The conversion of forest ecosystems from natural to human-dominated is often driven by fragmentation through transportation and other linear infrastructure, especially railroads, highways, canals, and fences that cut natural ecosystems into smaller parcels at a time when connectivity of natural landscapes is widely recognized as an important conservation objective (Hanski 2011; Fahrig 2017). Fragmentation reduces species richness in the remaining patches by up to 75%, alters nutrient cycles (Haddad et al. 2017), and brings people into closer contact with species that are hosts of potentially zoonotic pathogens like COVID-19.

Already, more than a third of the land and almost 75% of freshwater resources are being devoted to production of crops and supporting livestock, but 23% of the agricultural land has been so degraded that its productivity is declining and soil is being eroded far faster than it is being enriched (IPBES 2019). Agriculture is also the major polluter of land and water, as well as the source of about a quarter of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; livestock production alone generates 18% of greenhouse gases (O’Mara 2011).

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