Disease Risk from Human-Environment Interactions: Environment and Development Economics for Joint Conservation-Health Policy

Emergence of COVID-19 joins a collection of evidence that local and global health are influenced by human interactions with the natural environment. Frameworks that simultaneously model decisions to interact with natural systems and environmental mechanisms of zoonotic disease spread allow for identification of policy levers to mitigate disease risk and promote conservation. Here, we highlight opportunities to broaden existing conservation economics frameworks that represent human behavior to include disease transmission in order to inform conservation-disease risk policy. Using examples from wildlife markets and forest extraction, we call for environment, resource, and development economists to develop and analyze empirically-grounded models of people's decisions about interacting with the environment, with particular attention to LMIC settings and ecological-epidemiological risk factors. Integrating the decisions that drive human-environment interactions with ecological and epidemiological research in an interdisciplinary approach to understanding pathogen transmission will inform policy needed to improve both conservation and disease spread outcomes.