David Attenborough’s warning: are humans responsible for pandemics? | Extinction: The Facts - BBC

[Music] the unprecedented impact we're having on the planet is not only putting the ecosystems we rely on at risk [Music] scientists believe that our destructive relationship with nature is actually putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases we've seen an increasing rate of pandemic emergence we found swine flu sars ebola and we've actually looked back over every emerging disease and said where did it originate on the planet and what are the things going on there that could have caused it and we found we're behind every single pandemic and its human impact on the environment that drives emerging diseases animals have lots of different viruses that circulate inside their bodies just like we do and so one of the most obvious ways that we're making it more likely that a virus would jump is that we're having lots of contacts with animals [Music] the wildlife trade is at unprecedented levels we have huge markets with tens of thousands of live animals shedding their viruses through feces and urine being killed in front of you these are incredible places for viruses to spread and we're connected to that trade through things like the fashion industry we've seen this huge increase in the use of fur trims for winter jackets and that means hundreds of thousands of animals are bred in fur farms you have large densities of animals put in a situation with a lot of people to make things worse those animals are very stressed and we know that animals that are stressed shed viruses at higher rates [Music] we are encroaching further and further every day into wildlife habitat 31 of all emerging diseases have originated through the process of landi's change forests around the world where there's a lot of biodiversity have thousands of viruses that we've never come into contact with yet the minute we build a road in there we start getting exposed the first people into those logging camps go out and hunt bushmeat and pick up the viruses that's how hiv emerged then we bring our livestock in viruses move from wildlife into livestock into people at every step of the process we're bringing people closer in contact with wildlife and their viruses it's easy to imagine that we're so far away from these diseases origins that it's nothing to do with us but we drive it actually our consumption of beef drives this our consumption of poultry and the products that are used in poultry drives this we've been saying for 20 plus years that this exploitation of our environment is driving pandemics but what we didn't think was it was going to happen so quickly and so devastatingly [Music] it was figured out quickly that it was a coronavirus those are known to reside in various kinds of animals and so people started looking for the animal from which that coronavirus would have jumped into people we found the closest relative to the virus in bats in rural south china in yunnan province it's really well known for its biodiversity of plants and of animals including bats and they live in these incredibly complex colonies one part of the colony is a nursery where all the kids live and the parents fly out every night to get food but yunnan has been under incredible change for the past few decades high-speed rail links have gone in there roads have been built into remote areas and so we think kobe 19 maybe you've started there and either somebody got infected and traveled to wohan themselves or sent animals that they were shipping into wildlife trade into those wet markets and then the virus exploded from there it's my view that it's our relationship with nature and the way we interact with it that drove the emergence of covid we've been changing biodiversity in really critical ways that made this more likely to happen if we continue on our current pathway then what we've experienced this year might not be a one-off event we estimate there are going to be five new emerging diseases affecting people every year we cannot live with that and the rate at which they're increasing and crashing our economies if we have one of these every decade we cannot persist with that level [Music] you