Author: Prof. Saroj Kanta Barik

In 2015, much before the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, Professor Sir Andy Haines, Chair of the Lancet-Rockefeller Foundation Commission on Planetary Health, underscored the importance of environmental conservation in human health, while writing the preface for the WHO, CBD and UNEP report, titled Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health: A State of Knowledge Review. He had cautioned: “The last 50 years have seen unprecedented improvements in human health, as measured by most conventional metrics. This human flourishing has, however, been at the cost of extensive degradation to the Earth’s ecological and biogeochemical systems. The impacts of transformations to these systems; including…