Climate Change, Agrarian Transformation, and the Origins of COVID-19

Speaker: Dr Li Zhang, University of California-Irvine
The emergence of novel infectious diseases has increased significantly in recent decades, and this is a consequence of climate change and the eco-modernist paradigm of development worldwide. Agrarian transformations are the key nexus of this process.
This lecture will discuss the origins of COVID-19 and other novel coronavirus diseases (SARS and MERS), focusing on the connections between climate change and the transformation of development paradigms in China in recent decades. It will argue that the eco-modernist paradigm seeks to address the growing risk of pandemics by strengthening a technocratic regime of biosecurity. However, this paradigm also expands the human-animal interface in ways that increase the risk of zoonosis (the “spill over” of novel infectious diseases from animals to humans) and the risk that local outbreaks can become global pandemics: particularly the scaling-up and industrialization of agriculture and livestock production (including the captive breeding of wildlife), and the intensification of mining, eco-tourism, e-commerce, and infrastructure construction in biodiversity hotspots, driven by poverty-alleviation and rural development, commodification and privatization of healthcare, combined with the agglomeration of susceptible populations in centralized hospitals and metropolitan areas.
In contrast to this paradigm, this lecture promotes agroecology as the central pillar of a development paradigm that can be more sustainable, resilient and adaptable to climate change, more just and democratic, and better able to prevent zoonosis and reduce the risk of future pandemics.
This event is part of the Oxford Department of International Development's Climate Change and the Challenges of Development series.