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

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

Increase in global measures of mobility and GDP. The increase in measures of mobility during the Anthropocene has been staggering, with growth percentages of up to 5600% (Table 1) . Many more impressive local and regional examples exist, see, e.g., (Wilson, 1995; Wilson, 1997) . For further analyses below, we only used the World Bank data on flight passengers and air freight; therefore, we detail them here. Since the 1970s, the total global number of flight passengers ( Fig. 1A ) and air freight have increased exponentially (Fig. 1B) . The total number of flight passengers increased from around 330 million in 1970 to more than 4 billion in 2017, representing a > 1200% . 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 It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 7 increase. The total amount of air freight increased from around 15660 million MT/km in 1970 to 220707 million MT/km in 2017, representing a > 1300% increase. Global GDP per capita (in current USA dollars) also increased exponentially from 805 dollars in 1970 to 10777 dollars in 2017, representing a > 1200% increase (Fig. 1C) .