Animals are being forced to relocate to new habitats, shaking up the network of mammalian viruses — and creating disease hotspots that could spark future pandemics. Click the link to read more about it.
last week. That’s because global warming is forcing animals to move to new habitats to find food and cooler temperatures. “That basically shuffles the deck within ecosystems in terms of which species are in contact with each other,” says Colin Carlson, a coauthor on the study and a global change biologist at Georgetown University.
Carlson and coauthor Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown, spent three years testing that theory. In 2019, the study authors began by analyzing data sets of viruses that can be spread between animal species. Then, they mapped out the habitats of more than 3,000 mammals, projecting how the geographic ranges of those animals would shift under different climate change scenarios.
Among the study’s worrying findings is that these hotspots of viral activity will often overlap with areas that have a high population density, like cities. “In the future, species disproportionately need to use the places that we already live,” Carlson says. “We’ve built the places we live in climatically stable areas. That means that all of this will be happening in our backyards.
The scientists initially predicted that most of these first encounters would occur later in the 21st century; they found that the majority of them will actually take place between 2011 and 2040. In other words, given that the world has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius , the opportunities for new species to meet and swap diseases have already been set in motion.
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