Infectious disease outbreaks correlated to deforestation, forest conversion

This study offers a first global look at how changes in forest cover potentially contribute to vector-borne diseases — such as those carried by mosquitos and ticks–as well as zoonotic diseases, like Covid-19, which jumped from an animal species into humans. The expansion of palm oil plantations, in particular, corresponded to significant rises in vector-borne disease infections.

“We do not yet know the precise ecological mechanisms at play, but we hypothesise that plantations, such as oil palm, develop at the expense of natural wooded areas, and reforestation is a mainly monospecific forest made at the expense of grasslands,” said lead author Dr Serge Morand, who has joint positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France and Kasetsart University in Thailand. “Both land-use changes are…