THE WORLD ON a KNIFE-EDGE

THE WORLD ON a

EDGE

‘The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment. Changes in the way we use land; the expansion and intensification of agriculture; and unsustainable trade, production and consumption disrupt nature and increase contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people. This is the path to pandemics.’390

Dr Peter Daszak, Chair of the IPBES workshop on the links between degradation of nature and increasing pandemic risks, 29 October 2020

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9 June 2020, Alto Rio Nego Indigenous Land, Amazonas: Greenpeace Brazil supporting provision of protective equipment to a primary health care unit. © Christian Braga / Greenpeace

26 September 2020: South American Coati (Nasua nasua) rescued from fire in the Pantanal in Brazil © Diego Baravelli / Greenpeace

In late October 2020, the Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) issued a report warning that ‘Future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy and kill more people than Covid-19 unless there is … a seismic shift in approach from reaction to prevention.’391 Critically, the report’s authors found that pandemic risk is fuelled by the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change – the actions of humankind, as our ever-increasing consumption encourages more and more ecosystem conversion and habitat destruction. Due to its links to deforestation and habitat degradation, industrial meat production contributes to the increased risk of zoonoses – diseases such as Covid-19 that are originally found in non-human animals but jump the species barrier and begin to infect humans.392 Dealing with the ultimate economic fallout of climate change, ecosystem collapse and pandemics will prove incalculably more expensive than acting now to mitigate these risks.

Urgent action to transform the global food system is critical to address these multiple challenges. In November 2020, Science published a report finding that even if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels were halted immediately, rising emissions from global food production alone might take the global temperature rise this century over the 1.5° and 2ºC targets set by the Paris Agreement.393 Meeting either target, the report’s authors cautioned, would require rapid, ‘extensive and unprecedented’ changes to the global food system, including adopting plant-rich diets, cutting food waste and increasing yield, for instance through agro-ecological production practices.394

The window for action is short. Earlier in 2020, scientists reported that the Amazon is approaching a climatic tipping point beyond which much of its vegetation would change, perhaps irreversibly, from rainforest to savannah.395 Such a transformation could wipe out a significant part of the world’s biodiversity,396 as well as releasing huge amounts of stored carbon and reducing rainfall across a continent that is already suffering from severe droughts397 as a result of climate change and regional disruption of rainfall patterns due to Amazon deforestation.398 2019 saw an unprecedented number of fires in Brazil, more than half of them in the Amazon399 – but that is not the region’s only vulnerable ecosystem. 2020 was yet another disastrous year for South America’s forests and other ecosystems, as fires raged in the Amazon (Bolivia and Brazil),400 the Cerrado (Brazil),401 the Gran Chaco (primarily Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay),402 the Pantanal (Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay)403 and the Paraná Delta (Argentina).404 It is widely recognised that most of the blazes did not originate naturally, but were caused by the actions of humans – including intentional burning for the purposes of clearance or land management by the ever-expanding beef and soya sectors. In the case of Brazil, the flames of the fires lit by farmers have been fanned by the government’s systematic undermining of federal institutions intended to protect the environment.405

The bitter reality is that 2020 may prove to have been the point of no return for numerous critical ecosystems. According to Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, when viewed from the standpoint of biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services such as climate regulation, maintenance of air and water quality and soil fertility, pollination and erosion control, in one in five countries worldwide terrestrial ecosystems in at least 30% of the country are in a fragile state – posing the risk that further degradation may accelerate their decline or even lead to abrupt ecosystem collapse.406

With the fate of the natural world as we know it now balancing on a knife-edge, this hard reality must underpin the decisions governments, corporations and financiers take in their relations with the agricultural commodity sector. This is especially the case in high-risk regions such as Brazil and other Mercosur countries, particularly in the context of trade negotiations.