Opinion: Sustainable Development Must Account for Pandemic Risk
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Author(s): Moreno Di Marco, Michelle Baker, Peter Daszak, Paul De Barro, Evan Eskew, Cecile Godde, Tom Harwood, Mario Herrero, Andrew Hoskins, Erica Johnson, William Karesh, Catherine Machalaba, Javier Navarro Garcia, Dean Paini, Rebecca Pirzl, Mark Smith, Carlos Za
Date: 2020
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Public Health, Renewable Resources
The United Nations (UN) launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to address an ongoing crisis: human pressure leading to unprecedented environmental degradation, climatic change, social inequality, and other negative planet-wide consequences. This crisis stems from a dramatic increase in human appropriation of natural resources to keep pace with rapid population growth, dietary shifts toward higher consumption of animal products, and higher demand for energy. There is an increased recognition that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are linked to one another, and priorities such as food production, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation cannot be considered in isolation. Hence, understanding those dynamics is central to achieving the vision of the UN 2030 Agenda.
But environmental change also has direct human health outcomes via infectious disease emergence, and this link is not customarily integrated into planning for sustainable development. Currently, 65 countries are engaged in the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) and are finalizing a strategic plan for the next five years (the GHSA 2024 Roadmap) to better prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks in alignment with SDGs 2 and 3 on food security and human health. Without an integrated approach to mitigating the disease emergence consequences of environmental change, countries’ abilities to achieve SDGs and GHSA targets will be compromised.Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) such as Ebola, influenza, SARS, MERS, and, most recently, coronavirus (2019-nCoV) cause large-scale mortality and morbidity, disrupt trade and travel networks, and stimulate civil unrest. When local emergence leads to regional outbreaks or global pandemics, the economic impacts can be devastating: The SARS outbreak in 2003, the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and the West African Ebola outbreak in 2013–2016 each caused more than US $10 billion in economic damages. The current outbreak of a novel coronavirus, closely related to SARS, is once again keeping the world on its toes. At the time of this writing, around 6 weeks after the first case was discovered, the virus has been confirmed affecting over 40,000 people in 25 countries (>6,000 severe cases), having caused approximately 1,000 deaths. Both the disease and the fear of disease have had considerable economic and social impacts, with restrictions on international travel enforced by several countries, the quarantining of tens of millions of people, dramatic drops in tourism, and disruption of supply chains for food, medicines, and manufactured products. Estimates of the likely economic impact are already higher than US $150 billion.Although technologies to monitor EID risk are advancing rapidly, policies to deal with such risk are largely reactive, focusing on outbreak investigation and control and on development of vaccines and therapeutic drugs targeting known pathogens. Crucially, the processes that drive disease emergence risk interact with those necessary to achieve multiple societal goals. The current lack of focus on these interactions generates policy blind spots that must be addressed to ensure that sustainable development efforts are not counterproductive and do not compromise global health security.