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Review
. 2021 Jan:146:106272.
doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2020.106272. Epub 2020 Nov 19.

The COVID-19 pandemic and global environmental change: Emerging research needs

Robert Barouki  1 , Manolis Kogevinas  2 , Karine Audouze  3 , Kristine Belesova  4 , Ake Bergman  5 , Linda Birnbaum  6 , Sandra Boekhold  7 , Sebastien Denys  8 , Celine Desseille  3 , Elina Drakvik  5 , Howard Frumkin  9 , Jeanne Garric  10 , Delphine Destoumieux-Garzon  11 , Andrew Haines  4 , Anke Huss  12 , Genon Jensen  13 , Spyros Karakitsios  14 , Jana Klanova  15 , Iida-Maria Koskela  16 , Francine Laden  17 , Francelyne Marano  18 , Eva Franziska Matthies-Wiesler  19 , George Morris  20 , Julia Nowacki  21 , Riikka Paloniemi  16 , Neil Pearce  11 , Annette Peters  19 , Aino Rekola  16 , Denis Sarigiannis  14 , Katerina Šebková  15 , Remy Slama  22 , Brigit Staatsen  6 , Cathryn Tonne  2 , Roel Vermeulen  12 , Paolo Vineis  23 ; HERA-COVID-19 working group. Electronic address: https://www.heraresearcheu.eu/
Affiliations
Review

The COVID-19 pandemic and global environmental change: Emerging research needs

Robert Barouki et al. Environ Int. 2021 Jan.

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 raised numerous questions on the interactions between the occurrence of new infections, the environment, climate and health. The European Union requested the H2020 HERA project which aims at setting priorities in research on environment, climate and health, to identify relevant research needs regarding Covid-19. The emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be related to urbanization, habitat destruction, live animal trade, intensive livestock farming and global travel. The contribution of climate and air pollution requires additional studies. Importantly, the severity of COVID-19 depends on the interactions between the viral infection, ageing and chronic diseases such as metabolic, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and obesity which are themselves influenced by environmental stressors. The mechanisms of these interactions deserve additional scrutiny. Both the pandemic and the social response to the disease have elicited an array of behavioural and societal changes that may remain long after the pandemic and that may have long term health effects including on mental health. Recovery plans are currently being discussed or implemented and the environmental and health impacts of those plans are not clearly foreseen. Clearly, COVID-19 will have a long-lasting impact on the environmental health field and will open new research perspectives and policy needs.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Chemicals; Climate; SARS-COV-2; Transformational change; Urbanization.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
COVID-19 and Environment, Climate and Health. The figure shows the different stages of the pandemic development and, at each stage, the environmental factors that either contribute to or are impacted by that particular stage. The HERA consortium has made proposals for multidisciplinary research to achieve transformational change supporting and merging different agendas such as zero pollution, climate change resilience and mitigation, farm to fork, circular economy, EU chemical strategy for sustainability. These proposals can be found at https://www.heraresearcheu.eu/
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