The World Daily
WWF urges for protection of forests during pandemic

A river and a deforested plot of the Amazon in Brazil. Forests covered about half the Earth’s land area 8,000 years ago but only 30 per cent is now forested. Photo:Reuters

 

By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | JANUARY 13th 2021

 

On Wednesday, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) released a report that revealed how over the past 13 years, the world has lost enough tropical forest to rival the entire state of California. As such, they had called for an urgent renewal of environmental conservation efforts to be included in the pandemic recovery plans.

According to a report released by the WWF on Wednesday, the prevention of another outbreak of disease such as the present strains of COVID-19 can be made more preventable through the revitalised efforts to help protect the forests that we’ve been losing. The report draws a direct correlation between the loss of rainforests/environments, to the economically crippling spread of disease.

“Humanity's broken relationship with nature comes at a cost,” the report wrote. The cost that the report speaks of is detailed to be a potential strain of new zoonotic diseases, which essentially refers to diseases that are passed on from animals to humans (such as COVID-19) and “are emerging at an alarming rate.”

“Where you have greater deforestation and land-use change, you have the risk of new diseases being more likely,” said Fran Raymond Price, the global forest practice lead at WWF International to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He added that over the past year of struggles against COVID-19, the correlations between deforestation and human health have become all the clearer to scientists and humanity in general.

“It’s the way we produce and consume food that is at the heart of the challenge we face,” Price added, specifically talking about the industry of spreading deforestation for the sake of beef production, soy and palm oil in particular.

 

What the report found was that deforestation was occurring at the fastest rates in the Amazon rainforest, over in Brazil. The rates of Amazonian deforestation have become significantly worse since the inauguration of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is an infamous industrialist who’s put the expansion of agriculture and development at the forefront of his campaign – going so far as to allegedly pardon illegal loggers with the turnings of a blind eye.

Using the top quality, confirmed data accumulated over the course of the past two decades, the report had also studied 24 different deforestation hotspots all found in the continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa. What they had found was that well over 43 million hectares (106 million acres) of forest had been entirely removed from these hotspots between the years of 2004-2017.

“With this devastating pandemic, we also have the opportunity to build back better and really look at our relationship with nature and start to heal that relationship,” Price stated.

This report was a long time coming, with the WWF having Tweeted back in June of 2020 that “COVID19 is the greatest health, economic and social crisis in a century. How we respond to it will shape the future for people & planet. The risk of another disease jumping from animals to people in the future is higher than ever.”

The main concern comes from an increase in demand for food worldwide, particularly for meat – a standard crisis amidst a growing population. As such, the barrier between industry and wildlife is thinning, as the trade and consumption of high-risk wildlife species becomes increasingly widespread, thus exposing more and more people to animal pathogens – such as what had occurred with COVID-19.

Scientists speculate that deforestation will only grow to be a greater issue, and thus the risk of exposing humanity to various pathogens will increase too. “We need to transform our relationship with forests,” Price added. “We’re at a point where we’re collectively doing some soul-searching… and the time has come.”

 

By Patryk Krych | © The World Daily 2021

 

 

Categories:
Environment
Tags:
WWFCOVID-19Trees and ForestsWildfiresScience