If, in the past, access to information could be an excuse for strategic choices, which led to significant environmental damage, access to information today no longer allows us this excuse.
The COVID-19 crisis has shown us the importance of the principle of anticipation, suppose we want to avoid a new pandemic similar to that of Covid-19. In that case, it is essential that the financing methods of research and development are part of a holistic and intersectoral approach, integrated with sustainable development objectives, and closely linked to the fight against climate change. Better coordination between international donors, increased flexibility in funding methods and awareness of the advantages of preventing disease risks versus treating them as a reaction is essential.
The crisis is behind us. The question then arises: what have we learned from this crisis? Who have we known of a virus of (controversies) the origin of animal origin which, in a few days, came to stop the whole world, kill thousands of people and inflict fear?
On May 31, 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a tally of more than 767 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, including at least 6.9 million reported deaths. Globally through 2024, this pandemic would have caused a cumulative production loss of $13.8 trillion. It will probably take several more years to cross-check the balance sheets and know the quantified consequences of the crisis. "Seize the present; you will depend less on the future". This motto of Seneca that we want to hang in the pantheon of our memory remains too often a forgotten word.
It is not new that the cost of prevention is at least 1000 less than the cost of crisis management. And this is about the health system, but quite storable to environmental subjects, public health, economy, finance, management, and capital management.
Epidemics are the hidden face of global warming. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the dangers of increasingly extensive interference between human activities and nature, which promotes the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. But the risk of epidemics can also come from another disastrous consequence of human activities. For example, climate change causes the displacement of mosquitoes carrying malaria or dengue fever and the beginning of the thawing of the permafrost, where more or less old microbes are frozen.
These permanently frozen soils, which cover a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere, in Russia, Canada, or Alaska, are already a climate time bomb, but not only. With the thaw, microorganisms that can survive in a frozen space for a very long time are released into the water particles, organic matter or microorganisms that have been isolated for hundreds or thousands of years. Science has proven that some of these microorganisms can be awakened. "When you put a seed in the ground that has been frozen for thousands of years, nothing happens. When you warm the ground, the seed will be able to germinate. It's the same with a virus," explains AFP Professor Jean-Michel Claverie.
The Mediterranean Microbiology Institute team has successfully reactivated Siberian viruses dating back at least 30,000 years. This is just one example among thousands of others that require our attention.
It's no secret: Changes in how we use land, the expansion and intensification of agriculture, and unsustainable trade, production and consumption are disrupting nature and increasing contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and humans. It is a path that leads straight to pandemics. In reality, intensive farming is a real-time bomb.
The studies are severe: 827,000 viruses can infect humans. Fortunately, not everyone will succeed, but the risk is imminent. According to statistics, three of four new infectious diseases come from the animal world. The latest case of Covid-19. Proof that, over time, we have shaped the world to favour the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans.
To anticipate the obvious and reduce the damage, it is, therefore, necessary, vital and urgent to finance these risk prevention strategies. They are the guarantors of several aspects: early detection of signs of emergence with rapid response through surveillance and community prevention. The actors on the front line of risks are thus committed and equipped. This proactive approach facilitates immediate interventions and reduces the risk of uncontrollable outbreaks; protection of public health: preventive measures in a "one health" approach focus on combating the threats of diseases at the human-animal-environment interface; protection of animal health, which must not be dissociated from human health.
Animals can be reservoirs and/or vectors of disease transmission. Prevention makes it possible to identify and deal with risks, preventing the fallout on human populations or their economic consequences, as in the area of livestock farming, preservation of the environment, biodiversity and an effective fight against climate change: by investing in prevention measures that promote environmental conservation and sustainable practices, we reduce the factors of appearance and spread of diseases (bushmeat consumption, deforestation, destruction of natural habitats, displacement of wild animal populations, pollution, etc.), which are also factors of climate change; global health security. The "One Health" approach improves collaboration and coordination between human and animal health and environmental actors. It maximizes the impact of actions and the use of resources. It is a foundation of global health security.
For this to be effective, a transatlantic approach is imperative. Countries worldwide will have to put in place coherent strategies to reduce these risks in the awareness that the problem is already there: our lifestyles, consumption patterns, and travel patterns.
The success of prevention strategies translates into the reduction or absence of adverse events, which has long made it difficult to assess their effectiveness concretely. This is the paradox of prevention. Funding needs to be more robust, and its mechanisms are unsuited to a holistic approach. The institutional functioning in silos and the fragmentation of the financing with funds allocated to a single purpose do not favour a coordinated approach.
The "investment in prevention" approach must be rethought or reassessed. The subject will have to be added to the political agenda and gain an important place in the agreement on pandemics currently being negotiated; financial instruments are allocated to support joint actions to prevent zoonoses and combat global warming; these financial instruments are consistent with and within the framework of the objectives for sustainable development; governments and donors allocate significant funding to prevention; concrete methods and indicators now make it possible to measure the impact of preventive health actions; donors put in place cross-sector financing mechanisms suitable for the implementation of the One Health approach; the financing methods are made flexible and agile to support intersectoral projects adapted to national and local contexts and identified by a co-construction process in line with the needs and constraints of the actors. All this is a remedy considering that policies of economic change are not carried out; we still have to invest in repairing and anticipating the consequential damage of the environmental impact.
The Summit that is taking place at this moment must take its subjects into account, with a view to the risk of survival and world economic balance.
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