Scientists join forces across the world to unveil COVID-19 Lessons for the Environment and Conservation

By Richard B. Primack

“From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”  

-Henry David Thoreau in his Journal.

In the past months, the few human visitors to city parks and streets were sometimes surprised by unexpected animal visitors, such as penguins and mountain lions. These animals were changing their behavior in response to lower levels human activity and noise.

The concurrent confinement of 4.6 billion people under the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown can be viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance, a “Global Human Confinement Experiment”,  to explore the impact of people on animals and the environment. People are also calling this period “the Anthropause” when people became less active.

Changes to human activity and mobility will have diverse direct and indirect impacts on biodiversity. 

From Bates et al. 2020.

To investigate the conservation and ecological impacts of the lockdown and its gradual relaxation, two marine biologists Amanda E. Bates from Memorial University (Canada) and Carlos M. Duarte from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and I decided to form a new international research network called PAN-Environment. Already over one hundred institutions and global monitoring programs and hundreds of scientists have already joined PAN-Environment.  

The logo of PAN-Environment

The results of PAN-Environment will provide a glimpse into a future where air pollution, noise, and other human disturbances are dramatically reduced and show what can be gained from the type of large-scale change in human society that will be needed to address the looming problem of global climate change.

In two recent articles, one led by our colleague Christian Rutz and one led by Amanda, we present a road map to deliver environmental insights emerging from the pandemic lockdown and its gradual relaxation.

Bates, A.E., Primack, R.B., Moraga, P., Duarte, C.M. 2020. COVID-19 Pandemic and associated lockdown as a “Global human confinement experiment” to investigate biodiversity conservation. Biological Conservation 248. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108665 

Rutz, C., Bates, A.E.,Duarte, C.M. …Primack, R.B.  et al. 2020. COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1237-z