The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

(1) Most likely, at least in the short-term, economic and political decision-makers will return to 'business-as-usual' which means increasing mobility rates even further. After all, various projections predict more immense increases of mobility within the next few decades. For example, international tourist arrivals worldwide are expected to increase by 3.3% a year between 2010 and 2030 to reach 1.8 billion by 2030 (UNWTO, 2020) from the 1.4 billion recorded in 2018 (Table 1) In addition to the environmental and social costs and risks of this scenario (e.g., increasing landuse change, greenhouse gas emissions, resource use and waste production, etc.), including the risk of widespread ecosystem collapse (see Introduction), we can now add the cost of an increasing infectious disease risk. While our study only focused on human infectious diseases, this cost related to increased mobility is also increasing for animal and plant disease outbreaks as well as alien species introductions (e.g., Anderson et al., 2004; Fisher et al., 2012; Bélanger and Pilling, 2019; Sardain et al., 2019) . While outbreaks of animal and plant diseases may be amenable to a cost-. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.049866 doi: bioRxiv preprint 13 benefit analysis (Tildesley et al., 2019) , the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has clearly shown that simple cost-benefit analyses cannot be applied when the lives of millions of people are at stake (note that another emerging infectious disease, the global HIV pandemic, has claimed 32 million lives so far). Given that another pandemic becomes more likely with increasing rates of emergence and increasing global mobility, a 'business-as-usual' scenario is automatically associated with further epidemics and pandemics, possibly killing further millions of humans and devastating local and regional economies or even the global economy.