Opinion: Sustainable development must account for pandemic risk

The United Nations (UN) launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to address an ongoing crisis: human pressure leading to unprecedented environmental degradation, climatic change, social inequality, and other negative planet-wide consequences. This crisis stems from a dramatic increase in human appropriation of natural resources to keep pace with rapid population growth, dietary shifts toward higher consumption of animal products, and higher demand for energy (1, 2). There is an increased recognition that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are linked to one another (3, 4), and priorities such as food production, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation cannot be considered in isolation (5⇓⇓–8). Hence, understanding those dynamics is central to achieving the vision of the UN 2030 Agenda. Infectious zoonotic diseases typically emerge as a result of complex interactions between humans and wild and/or domestic animals. Image credit: Pixabay/sasint. But environmental change also has direct human health outcomes via infectious disease emergence, and this link is not customarily integrated into planning for sustainable development. Currently, 65 countries are engaged in the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) and are finalizing a strategic plan for the next five years (the GHSA 2024 Roadmap) to better prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks in alignment with SDGs 2 and 3 on food security and human health. Without an integrated approach to mitigating the disease emergence consequences of environmental change, countries’ abilities to achieve SDGs and GHSA targets will be compromised. Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) such as Ebola, influenza, SARS, MERS, and, most recently, coronavirus (2019-nCoV) cause large-scale mortality and morbidity, disrupt trade and travel networks, and stimulate civil unrest (9). When local emergence leads to regional outbreaks or global pandemics, the economic impacts can be devastating: The SARS outbreak in 2003, the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: moreno.dimarco{at}uniroma1.it. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1