11 October 2021
Professor David Hayman made a global impact in 2020 with his contributions to the report on biodiversity and pandemics by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
David Hayman is an epidemiologist and Principal Investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini who uses multidisciplinary approaches to address how infectious diseases are maintained within their hosts and how the process of emergence occurs.
Dave has spent a long time working on emerging infectious diseases and bats, making him a natural candidate for Aotearoa New Zealand to put forward when the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) put out a call for nominations for an expert panel to produce a report on the interactions between biodiversity and human drivers of disease emergence.
The report on escaping the ‘era of pandemics’ was produced at pace during a week-long virtual workshop to review the scientific evidence on the origin, emergence and impact of COVID-19 and other pandemics, as well as on options for controlling and preventing pandemics.
Dave now sits on the One Health High Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), a high-level expert panel that gives advice across four international agencies: the World Health Organization, the World Organization for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the United Nations Environmental Programme.
He says that the IPBES report has been influential across these agencies, and is often referred to. “We are a high level expert panel that provides expertise and advice to these major global organisations about how they can work better together,” he says. “And I think the IPBES report has actually influenced that.”
The IPBES report has been an important step in these four agencies coming to terms with the complexity and interrelatedness of disease and the environment, and they are recognising the need to address these issues in a transdisciplinary way.
“There’s a lot of things from Te Pūnaha Matatini and working in Aotearoa New Zealand that influenced my contributions to the report. There’s lots I’ve Iearned from Te Pūnaha Matatini about style of working and things like respect for Māori and Indigenous knowledge.”
Dave describes himself as both a pessimist and an optimist as we face a future of increasing pandemics and the effects of climate change.
“It can seem all bad,” he says. “But on the plus side a lot of the drivers for climate change, biodiversity crises and extinction crises are the same as the things that are driving disease emergence. So we can potentially have win, win solutions.”
“We can look at things like reducing industrial-scale trafficking of wildlife or agricultural encroachment into rainforest, both of which are bad for the environment and may also be bad for human health.”
“You can potentially reduce one risk and improve things in another way.”
Dave concludes that tackling these issues will require quite big societal changes, but “what COVID-19 did show is that you can do large-scale stuff. You can shut down whole countries. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it showed us the scale and pace at which societies can change and adapt.”