FRIDAY, February 5, 2021 (HealthDay News) – It’s a link few have considered, but a new study shows that climate change may have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rising temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions have fueled the growth of bat-friendly forest habitat in southern China’s Yunnan Province and neighboring areas, making the region a hotspot for bat-borne coronavirus, the researchers said. Genetic data suggests that the new coronavirus may have appeared in this region.
Coronaviruses are common in bats, and it is believed that SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – may have originated from bats and then jumped into humans.
In the area analyzed in the study, increases in temperature, sunlight, and atmospheric carbon dioxide – all of which affect the growth of plants and trees – due to climate change have caused the natural habitat to change from tropical bushland to tropical savannah and deciduous forest.
It is now a welcoming environment for many bat species, most of which live in forests, and another 40 bat species, which are home to 100 more species of bat-borne coronavirus, moved to Yunnan Province in the past century. This emerges from the study published on February 5 in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
“Climate change over the past century has made the habitat in southern China’s Yunnan Province suitable for more bat species,” said the study’s lead author, Robert Beyer, a researcher at Cambridge University’s Zoological Institute in the UK.
“Understanding how the global distribution of bat species has changed as a result of climate change can be an important step in reconstructing the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak,” added Beyer, who is a research fellow at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany.
In the last century, climate change in central Africa and some areas of Central and South America has led to an increase in bat species, the researchers said in a press release from the university.
According to Andrea Coica, study co-author from the Cambridge Zoological Department, “the COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous social and economic damage. Governments must seize the opportunity to reduce health risks from infectious diseases by taking decisive action take to curb climate change. “”
The researchers also said it was crucial to limit the expansion of urban areas, farmland, and hunting areas to natural areas to reduce contact between humans and disease-causing animals.
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The World Health Organization is more concerned with climate change and health.
Source: University of Cambridge, press release, February 5, 2021
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