Prevent pandemics and halt climate change? Strengthen land rights for Indigenous peoples

Elsevier, The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 6, May 2022
Authors: 
Hernandez J., Meisner J., Bardosh K., Rabinowitz P.

There is a frenetic push to understand and address ecosystem change and biodiversity loss as drivers of pandemic virus emergence. But despite the growth of one health and planetary health concepts over the last few decades, we continue to see a minimisation of structural forces (including settler colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation) in the framing of our current ecological and climate crises and their connections to multispecies health. In particular, analyses of land tenure and land rights are barely mentioned, despite the fact that land is of vast economical and sociocultural significance and is the stage upon which human–animal–environment–pathogen interactions are played out.