IPBES Report on Biodiversity and Pandemics

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent intergovernmental body established by States to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development. It was established in Panama City, on 21 April 2012 by 94 Governments.  It is not a United Nations body.  However, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) provides secretariat services to IPBES. 

In late October 2020, IPBES released a report on “Biodiversity and Pandemics” that emerged from a Workshop held to review the scientific evidence on the origin, emergence and impact of COVID-19 and other pandemics, as well as on options for controlling and preventing pandemics.

The workshop brought together 22 experts from all regions of the world, to discuss:

1) how pandemics emerge from the microbial diversity found in nature; 

2) the role of land use change and climate change in driving pandemics; 

3) the role of wildlife trade in driving pandemics; 

4) learning from nature to better control pandemics; and

5) preventing pandemics based on a “one health” approach.

The key messages of the report were:

1. Pandemics emerge from the microbial diversity found in nature.

• The majority (70%) of emerging diseases (e.g. Ebola, Zika, Nipah encephalitis), and almost all known pandemics (e.g. influenza, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19), are zoonoses – i.e. are caused by microbes of animal origin. These microbes ‘spill over’ due to contact among wildlife, livestock, and people.
• An estimated 1.7 million currently undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts. Of these, 540,000-850,000 could have the ability to infect humans.

• The most important reservoirs of pathogens with pandemic potential are mammals (in particular bats, rodents, primates) and some birds (in particular water birds), as well as livestock (e.g. pigs, camels, poultry).

2. Human ecological disruption, and unsustainable consumption drive pandemic risk.

3. Reducing anthropogenic global environmental change may reduce pandemic risk

4. Land-use change, agricultural expansion, and urbanization cause more than 30% of emerging disease events

5. The trade and consumption of wildlife is a globally important risk for future pandemics

6. Current pandemic preparedness strategies aim to control diseases after they emerge. These strategies often rely on, and can affect, biodiversity.

7. Escape from the Pandemic Era requires policy options that foster transformative change towards preventing pandemics.

The current pandemic preparedness strategy involves responding to a pandemic after it has emerged. Yet, the research reviewed in this report identifies substantial knowledge that provides a pathway to predicting and preventing pandemics. This includes work that predicts geographic origins of future pandemics, identifies key reservoir hosts and the pathogens most likely to emerge, and demonstrates how environmental and socioeconomic changes correlate with disease emergence. Pilot projects, often at large scale, have demonstrated that this knowledge can be used to effectively target viral discovery, surveillance and outbreak investigation. The major impact on public health of COVID-19, of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, influenza, SARS and of many other emerging diseases underlines the critical need for policies that will promote pandemic prevention, based on this growing knowledge.

To achieve this, the following policy options have been identified:

• Launching a high-level intergovernmental council on pandemic prevention, that would provide for cooperation among governments and work at the crossroads of the three Rio conventions
• Policies to reduce the role of land-use change in pandemic emergence.
• Policies to reduce pandemic emergence related to the wildlife trade:
• Closing critical knowledge gaps

Conclusion

This report is published at a critical juncture in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, at which its long-term societal and economic impacts are being recognized. People in all sectors of society are beginning to look for solutions that move beyond business-as-usual To do this will require transformative change, using the evidence from science to re-assess the relationship

between people and nature, and to reduce global environmental changes that are caused by unsustainable consumption, and which drive biodiversity loss, climate change and pandemic emergence. The policy options laid out in this report represent such a change. They lay out a movement towards preventing pandemics that is transformative: our current approach is to try to detect new diseases early, contain them, and then develop vaccines and therapeutics to control them. Clearly, in the face of COVID-19, with more than one million human deaths, and huge economic impacts, this reactive approach is inadequate.

This report embraces the need for transformative change and uses scientific evidence to identify policy options to prevent pandemics. Many of these may seem costly, difficult to execute, and their impact uncertain. However, economic analysis suggests their costs will be trivial in comparison to the trillions of dollars of impact due to COVID-19, let alone the rising tide of future diseases. The scientific evidence reviewed here, and the societal and economic impacts of COVID-19 provide a powerful incentive to adopt these policy options and create the transformative change needed to prevent future pandemics. This will provide benefits to health, biodiversity conservation, our economies, and sustainable development. Above all, it will provide a vision of our future in which we have escaped the current ‘Pandemic Era’.