By creating new habitats for bats, climate change may have played a role in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic. This is according to a study by the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, which was published on Friday 5 February in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
“Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV- 2”, state the authors of the study.
While the exact origin of Covid-19 still remains unknown, one frequently advanced theory is that bats from South-East Asia are believed to have transmitted the virus to humans.
On the basis of natural habitat requirements of bats, the authors of the study have therefore estimated the geographical distributions of populations of different types of bats according to global climatic conditions at the beginning of the 20th century and today.
Their results indicate that over the last century, there have been large shifts in vegetation types in Yunnan Province (southern China) and neighbouring regions of Myanmar and Laos due to changes in climatic conditions, meaning that 40 species of bats have thus expanded the conditions favourable to their presence in these regions.
However, given that each bat species carries, on average, 2.7 coronaviruses, around 100 of these different viruses could potentially be circulating in this area, which is considered the most likely geographical origin of the ancestors of bat-transmitted SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.
Nevertheless, Robert Meyer, the study’s lead author, clarified by explaining that “our paper is a long way away from saying the pandemic would not have happened without climate change”, when speaking to AFP.
See the study: http://bit.ly/36Ks7fT (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)