While human well-being depends on the health of our ecosystems, there are also countless aspects of the natural world that pose serious threats to people.
Every year, over 700,000 people die from diseases transmitted by animals, snakebites kill up to 500,000 people, and crop loss from pests carries an estimated cost of around US$220 billion.
Because of that, global policymakers can struggle to reconcile human health priorities and economic interests with efforts to conserve all aspects of nature. The result is sometimes that actions designed to reduce risks posed, such as wildlife culls and over-dependence on pesticides, can undermine wider conservation goals.
To address this tension, a new study has called for biodiversity researchers and policymakers to learn from progress made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in climate risk management. Using that as a basis, it advocates for human harms from nature to be framed as avoidable risks that arise from the intersection of ecosystem hazards with human exposure and vulnerability.
Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the study was written by an international team from the University of Plymouth (UK), The Foundation for Biodiversity Research (France), University College London (UK), University of Washington (US), United Nations University (Germany), University of Bonn (Germany), Adelaide University (Australia), and the University of Galway (Ireland).
That team comprises leading experts in biodiversity policy, zoonotic diseases, human-wildlife coexistence, and risk management policy. The framework they have proposed aims to support a more systematic approach to managing hazardous species, enabling researchers and policymakers to better assess the sustainability trade-offs of risk management interventions.
Dr Matthew Faith led the study while working towards his PhD at the University of Plymouth and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Foundation for Biodiversity Research in Montpellier, France.
