Conserving Global Health

Over the last few decades, the relationship between biodiversity loss and the spillover of zoonotic disease has been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. From the development of the “cut hunter” theory of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s and 2000s, to the flurry of articles during the COVID-19 pandemic that the destruction of nature is a major driver of infectious diseases, conservation has increasingly been framed as a prophylactic against the emergence of the next pandemic. Recent record temperatures, ecological disasters, ongoing extinctions, deforestation, and accelerating pandemics have brought ever-greater urgency to protecting the environment on health grounds. More than 190 countries have committed to conserving 30% of the earth’s “terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine areas” by the year 2030, while calls for the monetization of “biodiversity credits” as a neoliberal conservation finance mechanism akin to “carbon credits” have proliferated.