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

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

(3) The most sustainable scenario is, however, to decrease or even reverse global mobility rates of humans and other carriers and vectors, especially if it is part and parcel of a much larger movement towards global sustainability by reducing humanity's environmental footprint and replacing unsustainable economic growth with sustainable economic degrowth (Schneider et al., 2010; Daly and Farley, 2011; Alexander, 2012; Czech, 2013; Galaz, 2014; Cosme et al., 2017; Weiss and Cattaneo, 2017; Chiengkul, 2018; Sandberg et al., 2019; Schmid, 2019) . Such a general, comprehensive and global slowdown of mobility of both uninfected and infected people and vectors would be opposed for many reasons and by many interest groups, mainly based on economic arguments based around the need for continuous economic growth which has so far almost always been positively linked with increased mobility (e.g., Arvin et al., 2015; Hakim and Merkert, 2016; UNWTO, 2017; Saidi et al., 2018; Nasreen et al., 2020) . It is to some extent possible to decouple mobility from economic growth (Loo and Banister, 2016; Lane, 2019) , but even if such a decoupling was achieved, it would not sufficiently reduce mobility to significantly decrease infectious disease risks. As the modelling results cited above and the experience with the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic clearly show, only a huge reduction in mobility and contact rates is sufficient to achieve a slowdown or halt of a highly contagious disease outbreak which is already under way.