Over the next 50 years, humans will move further into wildlife habitats across more than half the land on Earth, scientists have found, threatening biodiversity and increasing the chance of future pandemics.
People have already transformed or occupied between 70% and 75% of the world’s soil. Research published in Science Advances Wednesday found that the overlap between human and wildlife populations is expected to increase across 57% of Earth’s land by 2070, driven by human population growth.
“You have places like forests where there are virtually no people, where we will start to see more human presence and activity, and interactions with wildlife,” said Neil Carterthe principal investigator of the study and an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan in the US.
“Humans are increasing their pressure and negative impact on … species, which is something we’ve seen for many years. This is part of the cause of the biodiversity loss crisis we are in,” he said.
As people and animals share increasingly crowded landscapes, the greater overlap could lead to greater potential for disease transmission, loss of biodiversity, animals killed by humans and wildlife eating livestock and crops, the researchers said.
Biodiversity loss is the front manager from outbreaks of infectious diseases. About 75% of emerging diseases in humans are zoonotic, meaning they can be transmitted from animals to humans, and many diseases of concern to global health authorities – including Covid-19, mpox, bird flu and swine flu – probably originated in wildlife. Understanding where humans and wildlife will overlap is key to preventing “the acceleration of viral spillover from wildlife,” said Kim Gruetzmacher, a wildlife conservation veterinarian and researcher who was not involved in the study. .
“The vast majority – up to 75% – of emerging infectious diseases (which can lead to epidemics and pandemics) originate from non-human animals, the majority of which originate in wildlife,” Gruetzmacher said. “It is not the wildlife itself that poses a risk, but our behavior and specific contact with it.”
To predict future overlap between humans and wildlife, researchers at the University of Michigan compared estimates of where humans are likely to inhabit land with the spatial ranges of more than 22,000 species.
The expansion of human-animal overlap will be most concentrated in regions where human population density is already high, such as India and China, they found. Agricultural and forest areas in Africa and South America will also experience significant increases in overlap.
However, in some regions the human-wildlife overlap would decrease, including over 20% of the land in Europe.
The research could guide policymakers “to avoid human-wildlife conflicts and focus more on conserving species richness,” said Deqiang Ma, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Global Change. Biology.
Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology, who was not involved in the study, said it gives a “broad picture of what is happening and what might change”, but more research is needed on “what kinds of species and how are we going to interact, and what kind of repercussions does that have”.
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