Southeast Asia’s Imperiled Biodiversity

2020 was supposed to be a landmark year for global climate and biodiversity. The United Nations Climate Talks, originally scheduled for November in Scotland, were set to be the most important since the historic 2015 conference that led to the Paris Agreement. Similarly, the Convention on Biological Diversity was set to meet in Kunming, China in October, with the aim of putting forward the next series of goals to replace the much maligned Aichi targets.

Southeast Asian nations were to play a key role in both meetings. The region has rapidly growing carbon emissions, led by countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, due to the expansion of coal-fired power generation and petroleum-based transportation. Moreover, deforestation and still-regular fires contribute to both climate change (due to land-based emissions) and biodiversity loss, as they reduce the habitat for numerous plant and animal species. While expecting developing markets to take action on their own was unlikely, there was hope that funding mechanisms like REDD+, aimed at incentivizing forest protection, and the Green Climate Fund could be expanded and help the region meet climate and biodiversity goals. Environmentalists increasingly fear that delay could be catastrophic.

“The unfortunate truth is that any delay in action… will mean those enduring the worst impacts of climate change now risk having to wait even longer for already overdue real solutions and finance they so desperately need and are owed,” says Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy at Corporate Accountability, an NGO based in the United States.

As it turned out, delay was inevitable, as 2020 was fated to be memorable for a very different reason. Both conferences were postponed due to a pandemic that itself has strong connections to environmental health, with many scientists connecting the pathogen’s emergence in Wuhan, China, to both wildlife trafficking and deforestation. But for Southeast Asia, instead of raising awareness of the need to better protect landscapes and crack down on wildlife trafficking, there are growing concerns that the pandemic and the resulting economic downtown could result in greater destruction, amid both development-focused stimulus across the region and also growing stress on nature due to increasingly impoverished rural communities.

The Environmental Importance of Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia encompasses one of the world’s three major biodiversity and tropical landscapes, along with the South American Amazon and African Congo regions. Six of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots are in the region, which contains an astounding 20 percent of the planet’s vertebrate and plant species. Compared to other hotspots, Southeast Asia is far more densely populated, with a population of over 800 million – more than the Amazon and Congo combined.

Add in the fact that nearly every country in the region is low or middle income, this means that, for years, the environment has often been sacrificed for economic growth. Corruption is a factor too, with the region scoring poorly on metrics like Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Factor everything together, and the record is bleak – even before the pandemic. In 2014, Indonesia overtook Brazil to become the world leader in deforestation, and the country’s 2015 fires were quite possibly the worst climate pollution event of the millennium. Cambodia has seen a dramatic rise in deforestation, with 2.2 million hectares being cut down between 2001-2018, with many pointing the finger at Chinese investment and timber smuggling. In Vietnam, poaching has become so pervasive that some national parks are essentially wildlife free, and the country has become a transit hub for wildlife products from endangered species including pangolins, rhinoceroses, elephants, and more, much of it destined for China.

Many in the region have argued that this was just the reality of development. Europe, for comparison, destroyed nearly all of its forests during its period of rapid growth in the 18th and 19th centuries. The United States, too, saw widespread destruction of landscapes across its eastern and central regions, and has only a paltry 7 percent old-growth forest cover remaining.

Tropical landscape loss, however, is more worrying than temperate forest loss for several reasons. Biodiversity is one such reason – Southeast Asia’s landscapes have far more plant and animal species than Europe or the United States, and as they are lost, the risk of species extinction rises. There’s also a climate angle, as tropical landscapes, especially peatlands, which Indonesia and Malaysia have in abundance, hold immense carbon stocks. When degraded or burnt, they release this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change. We can’t stop global climate change if Southeast Asia keeps destroying carbon-rich landscapes.

“It’s essential that huge rainforest countries implement policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Nils Hermann Ranum with Rainforest Foundation Norway, which has several active projects in Southeast Asia.

The pandemic has brought to light another concern. Put simply, there’s strong evidence that environmental degradation and wildlife trafficking both make the emergence of novel pathogens more likely – especially in the tropics.

“Several global studies that have been published showing the linkage between deforestation, forest degradation, human-wildlife conflict, and increased spreading of zoonotic diseases,” says Arief Wijaya, senior manager for climate, forests, and the oceans at the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, based in the capital Jakarta.

Many of the worst diseases in the world can be traced to zoonoses -- infections diseases caused by pathogens, like a virus, that make the jump from animals to humans -- including Ebola, AIDS, and SARS. While the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains a mystery, there is some early evidence that a Malayan pangolin may have been the vector, perhaps trafficked via Vietnam, through Kunming, and into Wuhan. It will likely be some time before we know the full details of the source, and how much of a role human development played in its emergence. Regardless, many scientists strongly believe – and even predicted before 2020 – that this could happen.

“There's significant evidence to show that deforestation, particularly with large agricultural commodities, is having a spillover effect of zoonotic diseases,” says Terry Sunderland, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Southeast Asian forests expert. “Whether it was a bat or a pangolin, it doesn't matter. The fact is… the spillover effects are magnified.”

An Economic, Not Environmental, Pandemic Focus

The pandemic’s clear link to the environment would, in an ideal situation, lead to global and regional governments considering how to reduce the risk of future zoonoses. Unfortunately, that is not yet the case. That’s partly due to the daily reality – many Southeast Asian nations are still dealing with active community spread. Countries that have the pandemic under control, meanwhile, are distracted by the growing economic impact

“At the moment, most Southeast Asian governments remain [focused] on pandemic containment plans,  the progress of which will largely determine the forthcoming recovery plans,” says Sonny Mumbunan, an environmental economist at WRI Indonesia. But already there are signs that the environment will take a back seat. Faced with growing unemployment, less demand for exports, and, for tourism-dependent regions, a near total collapse of inbound foreign visitors, governments will feel pressure to address their citizens’ daily concerns.

According to the Stockholm Environmental Institute, of the $350 billion in stimulus that has been injected into Southeast Asian economies, the overwhelming majority has been focused on protecting jobs and keeping businesses afloat. Business-as-usual policies, and politicians neglecting the role of the environment, could make the very factors that created the pandemic worse. There is also another concern – that all this spending now will make attempts to push greener bills in the future more difficult.

The pandemic “should not prevent Southeast Asia governments from beginning to reset their economies to transition into low carbon pathway even at this stage, one that embraces both convergences of crisis, such as COVID-19 and forest fires, and opportunities, such as the integration of their social protection systems,” says Mumbunan.

The situation in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest country by population, the biggest economy, and also the country with the most tropical forests and peatlands, is especially worrying. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s government has used the pandemic as an excuse to pass a massive omnibus bill, framed as a “job creation bill” that rewrote huge swaths of the country’s legal code – amending 79 laws in total.

According to Jokowi, the bill was necessary to spur foreign investment and development by reducing logistical costs. There are concerns, though, that the law could have detrimental impacts on the environment, increase corruption, erode the rights of workers, and lead to greater human rights violations, including land grabs, against rural and indigenous peoples. This is partly why, since the law was passed, Indonesia has seen widespread protests against the legislation. There have even been concerns raised by international development agencies and global financial institutions.

It is not all doom and gloom, however. Vietnam – perhaps not coincidentally, the country that has led Southeast Asia in dealing with the pandemic – made headlines when it announced it would ban imports of all wild animals and crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. While some environmentalists expressed concern about how these moves would be implemented, or the possibility of lax enforcement, it seems to have had some impact, as arrests for wildlife crimes have risen this year. There is hope that other Southeast Asia countries will follow.

“Other Asian governments must follow by closing their high-risk wildlife markets and ending this trade once and for all to save lives and help prevent a repeat of the social and economic disruption we are experiencing around the globe today,” said Christy Williams, regional director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Asia Pacific program, in a press statement.

A “Southeast Asia” Virus?

Could the next Wuhan be Surabaya, Bangkok, Yangon, or Kota Kinabalu? It’s possible. Scientists are able to model which regions of the world are potential high-risk zones for novel pathogen emergence, factoring in conditions including population density, biodiversity, human-wildlife conflict, the existence of wild animal markets, and more. A 2017 study published in journal Nature Communications identified moderate to high-risk zones in nearly every country in Southeast Asia, making it a focal point for surveillance and other measures to reduce the risk of the next pandemic.

A green stimulus – spending that prioritized climate friendly development – could, in Southeast Asia, include efforts to protect biodiversity, which could also address the zoonotic threat, too.

“Reforestation and land rehabilitation, if successful, could potentially reduce the possibility of [a] future pandemic,” says Arief.

The barrier is, again, the economy versus environment argument, which presumes a trade-off between protection and development. Yet, as the pandemic shows, this is a false argument. There’s strong reason to believe that, had we done a better job of managing biodiversity, and eliminated the trade in exotic and endangered animals in Asia, we could have prevented the pandemic, and its massive economic costs.

“As a society, we're reactive, we're not proactive. So we don't react until something bad happens,” says Sunderland. “Maybe this pandemic is a way of giving us a kick in the pants and forcing us to think about how we can avoid these things in the future and have better environmental stewardship. We can have a thriving economy with environmental protection.”

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Council on Pandemic Prevention estimated that there are more than 600,000 unknown viruses in nature, and that impacts are 100 times the cost of prevention. Despite this, Sunderland doesn’t see many Southeast Asia governments listening to environmental advocates and scientists.

“Getting traction with policymakers is really problematic,” says Sunderland. “The black and white attitude of many policymakers and politicians is problematic.”

The exception, so far, is Vietnam, in more ways than one. The country that best responded to the pandemic with a science-driven approach also limited the economic damage. Vietnam is likely to have the strongest GDP growth in the region this year.

But the most long-lasting impact might be its moves to deal with the environmental origins of the COVID-19 pathogen. If the Vietnamese can get their Southeast Asian neighbors to follow along, that could be the way toward a future where environment, human health, and biodiversity are valued, even while promoting economic growth. For now, though, the region is likely to remain a leader in forest loss and wildlife trafficking, and perhaps, if things don’t change, Southeast Asian countries will have their own pandemic virus too.