Narrow Results

Malaysia is recognized as one of the mega biodiversity countries of the world. However, Malaysia’s biodiversity hotspot experiencing a more pronounce biodiversity loss. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to explore the link between climate change, socio-economic factors and biodiversity loss in Malaysia from 1990 to 2016, with a special focus on different climate change indicators namely rainfall, temperature and carbon dioxide (CO${}_2)$ emissions. Using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach, this study provides evidence on long-run relation between each of the indicators of climate change and biodiversity loss. The core threats to biodiversity are growing demand for agricultural land, rapid population, elevated temperature, higher CO₂ emissions and rainfall reduction. Interestingly, the biodiversity loss-income nexus is also supportive of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis; with biodiversity threats increasing with income, beyond a certain level of income, a rise in income reduces the loss of biodiversity. The findings are essential for future studies with a special consideration to reduce the losses of biodiversity.

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation, including burning of fossil fuels, increasing human population density, and replacement of natural with human dominated ecosystems. Because business as usual is unsustainable on all three fronts, transformative responses are needed. We review the literature on risk management interventions, implications for COVID-19, for climate change risk and for equity associated with biodiversity, water and WaSH, health systems, food systems, urbanization and governance. This paper details the considerable evidence base of observed synergies between actions to reduce pandemic and climate change risks while enhancing social justice and biodiversity conservation. It also highlights constraints imposed by governance that can impede deployment of synergistic solutions. In contrast to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governance systems have procrastinated on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss as these are interconnected chronic crises. It is now time to address all three to avoid a multiplication of future crises across health, food, water, nature, and climate systems.

While we experience the most significant zoonotic pandemic in 100 years, we would do well to consider how we arrived at this historic moment and how we will prevent the next pandemic. In this commentary, we explore the human drivers of emerging infectious diseases and contend that a One Health approach—in which multiple disciplines work together to ensure the health of environments, humans, and non-human animals—is imperative to get through this pandemic and to prevent future ones.