Environmental Impact due to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging the world’s economic and health systems and exemplifies the degree of global interdependencies and need of preparedness for global health threats. Much of the focus is now on the response to the pandemic and the development of treatments and vaccines. Health threats due to human impacts on Earth may appear to be of less immediate concern: climate change, pollution, urbanisation and unsustainable consumption that have led to major environmental disturbances and biodiversity loss. It may be tempting to develop solutions to the pandemic independently of these threats, such as relying on disposable materials, reducing public transport use, and subsidizing heavily polluting industries. Such responses might yield short-term health and economic benefits but would forfeit needed long-term improvements in human health and sustainability. In fact, neither climate change nor other environmental stressors and their impacts on human and ecosystems health have receded. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis highlights the links between environmental changes and emergence of infectious diseases and warns us of the urgent need to prevent such pandemics, as their control has proven to be highly challenging in a globalized world. The pandemic has revealed the need to consider environmental health systematically, also in the face of an acute, infectious pandemic. It is unveiling knowledge gaps in several fields and research orientations that go beyond COVID-19: 1) the ecological origin of diseases; 2) the interaction between environmental health stressors and infectious diseases; 3) an integrated assessment of societal impacts of the disease, the global response and the recovery plans. There is a need to identify and implement policies that will bring short-term and long-term benefits to health and sustainability. What we are learning on the research needs concerning this pandemic may also be true for other environmental changes such as climate change and biodiversity, and their impact on human health.

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Media Contact:   

Alina Grace            

Journal Manager

Asian Journal of Biomedical & Pharmaceutical Sciences

Email: jbiopharm@scholarlypub.com