David Nogués-Bravo at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid. / A. Tabernero. /CNIO
“We need to be aware that climate change poses risks to human health”
“We are invading and destroying animal habitats, and in doing so we expose ourselves to their viruses"
“By 2050, the climate in Madrid will resemble that of Marrakesh today, and London will resemble that of Barcelona”
“The most serious crisis of all – more than covid, more than economic recession, and even more than climate change – is that of biodiversity loss”
“The loss of biodiversity will cost trillions of euros”
““In ecology, we have learned over the past 15 years to speak the language of politicians and businesses"
David Nogués-Bravo studies nature today and in the past, to predict what it will be like in 50 or 100 years. As a macroecologist who investigates the large-scale distribution of species, he says that by knowing how plants and animals used to be and where they were, we can anticipate their response to the current environmental crisis.
At the IV Seminar on Philosophy and Science held at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), organised in conjunction with Fundación Banco Sabadell and dedicated to analysing the great threats to society in the long term, Nogués-Bravo emphasised the loss of biodiversity, which is accelerating at an unbridled pace: “We are losing species between one thousand and ten thousand times faster than the natural rate of extinction,” he says. He puts up a slide showing four waves in a row, each one devouring the previous one: Covid-19, the smallest wave, is superseded by economic recession and climate change; the last wave, the tsunami, is labelled: “collapse of biodiversity”.
Question. You investigate nature’s past to anticipate its future, how do you do that?
Answer. Our research attempts to predict what nature will look like in the future, using everything from genetic data to satellite images and mathematical models. We want to understand where, how, and when we can expect negative impacts for nature and for ourselves. For example, what species we will lose, when and where on the planet, and what it will entail for our society. We have to remember that clean air, water, and soil are provided to us by the natural world; these are services we will not have if our ecosystems stop working.
Q. How does the environmental crisis affect human health?
A. In many ways, from the return of diseases that we no longer had in Europe to the contamination of the food we eat. In Denmark, malaria began to disappear more than 150 years ago. But now, with warmer temperatures in Europe, we are seeing that the mosquitoes that carry this disease and others, such as dengue, are beginning to have stable populations. So there may be malaria once again in Europe. A few years ago, the first case of autochthonous dengue occurred in Europe, in Barcelona. The carrier mosquito now survives the European winter.
Q. How can we prepare for these new situations?
A. Using available data and models, we can predict what new threats to human health or food safety are potentially possible. For starters, we can warn leaders that, in 50 years, in Europe, tropical diseases are likely to reach Europe.
Q. Could preventive policies be put in place right now?
A. If you know what could happen, how and where, you can prepare yourself. But we need to be aware that climate change involves risks to human health . If we predict, for example, that in the Ebro Delta there are likely to be mosquitoes with malaria in 30 years’ time, our health system would have to monitor and be prepared for some kind of action. Mathematical models now give us the ability to predict impacts, both on health and food safety, and this helps governments and businesses to be prepared.
Q. You are participating in a meeting at CNIO about long-term vision. Do leaders take advantage of the knowledge about the future that science provides?
A. The European Union finances projects of this kind because strategically it is important to know what is going to happen. For example, if there is going to be a plague of insects that will kill crops. We make predictions over 20 or 50 years, and there are times that not all the knowledge we generate ends up being used. But in the past 15 years in ecology, we have learned to speak the language of politicians and businesses, which is very important. We point out that the environmental crisis carries a cost, in economic terms, in lives, in strategic possibilities for a country.
Q. Have ecologists learned to convey their message in a way that engages governments and businesses?
A. Exactly. It is not just a question of protecting the butterfly or the lynx, but we know that the loss of biodiversity will cost billions of euros. And that is what politicians understand. It is about putting economic and strategic value on ecological resources. There may be a lot of medicines to discover in plants or fungi, which can generate wealth for a country and cure diseases in the future. But those plants could well disappear before we find them and study them.
Q. What is the greatest health risk of this advancing environmental crisis?
A. One is the change in land uses. Deforestation or planting crops where grasslands once were. Every time we alter the environment, the animals and plants in it move, adapt or die. Species shift their habitat according to ours, so some that have never been in contact with each other are now. This allows new viruses to make the leap between species. With climate change, everything is warming up, and we are stirring up this soup of viruses on a global scale
Q. Is Covid-19 an example?
A. Yes. It wasn’t made in a laboratory, it might have come from a pangolin, from a bat… We don’t know, but we do know that animals carry a lot of viruses. And we’re invading their jungles, their habitats. By doing so, we are exposed to those viruses being passed onto our species. This is possibly one of the main consequences of our impact on nature.
Q. Is the message that we should not alter nature?
A. We cannot modify or destroy nature to the extent that we expose ourselves to very negative effects. We are just another species in the system. Nature operates like a computer system where there is a primary server that makes other machines work. There are species that are like those servers. If a company’s server goes down one day, all its computers stop working. The same can happen with nature. There are species that, if they disappear, the system could collapse.
Q. What would be an example of a “server” species?
A. Some birds or insects pollinate a large number of plant types; if those birds disappear, this wouldn’t be the same as other species that pollinate a single species. That is what we are beginning to understand: Nature is like a network, and there are species that are key. We don’t yet know which ones, but we do know that the decline is not linear. It may be that the system breaks down because the species that act as the server disappear.
Nogués-Bravo finishes the interview by illustrating the impact of the environmental crisis with a personal experience:
“During my doctoral thesis, I studied global change in Lesotho, in Africa, where infant mortality was a major problem. The reason was that in the mountains, where the majority of the population lived, with climate change storms had intensified, soil erosion increased, and cows, the main source of livelihood for families, were left without pasture. The first impact of the food crisis was on the health of children”.