Janice Yoo - Jeju
Smog-free skies and videos of goats and lions strutting across the road lead us to believe that the pandemic has aided to conserve nature. In Wuhan province, the starting place of COVID-19, a group of 14 elephants broke into a village whilst humans carried out social distancing. Also, videos and photographs of horned goats roaming the street in Llandudno, Wales, have gone viral across the internet. In Italy, as the country proceeded its lockdown, dolphins, and swans were seen swimming in Venice. This is all due to the reduction of human activities that restrict wild animals to reach streets and urban areas. Therefore, for some species, lockdown may indeed be positive news. However, for many other wild animals, that could not be further from the truth.
Lockdown in a country means many things; in the cities of wealthy countries, it means less traffic on the roads and less pollution, which provides wildlife space to thrive. On the other hand, this does not apply to poor countries. Inversely, in rural areas of less developed countries, a number of people are unemployed and forced to support themselves through poaching. In countries at South-east Asia such as Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines, people who has lost their jobs are forced to migrate from urban to rural areas. In addition, as those countries rely on tourism heavily, the effect of the pandemic and lack of tourists have also significantly affected people. Therefore, for the ones who are put in extreme conditions, their lives depend on poaching, logging or other activities that degrade the environment.
Furthermore, in many parts of Africa like Kenya as well as Cambodia, there have been a lot of reports regarding the increase of bushmeat poaching. In Africa’s rural areas, people are facing challenges in finding their next meal which leads to an increase of poaching. As the majority of people in rural areas of Africa rely on their one-day work pay, they cannot survive if they cannot go to work. For example, a person who is a taxi driver and earns money to buy his family meal every day, this is impossible due to the lockdown. Hence, there is no such solution other than poaching wildlife, for the people in rural parts of less developed countries.
Thus, continuing to trade and consume wild animals through poaching should be restricted in countries. One of the solutions that experts came up with was to monitor poaching or illegal logging in the ecosystem using drones with thermal imaging technology. However, technology on its own cannot prevent the harmful effects of the environment due to poaching, especially at this period where people are jobless and starving. The short term negative impacts can be reduced by immediate interventions that include distribution of food in rural areas, cash transfers, and support from non-governmental organizations like the WHO. For the long term impact, it is crucial to widening the paths of income, so that countries do not merely rely on tourism for their survival.
In conclusion, the pandemic reinforces the fact that environmental and social impacts are not mutually exclusive. In other words, the outbreak of the pandemic has social impacts such as unemployment and lack of food supply, that led to the degradation of our environment. Despite the pandemic, we should not let human activities to maltreat our environment and nature. Tackling poaching and selling wild animals for food has to be part of a global effort. Global cooperation is the only way to save the environment.
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