Environmental Drivers of Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Rapidly Urbanizing Regions

Abstract

The increasing rate of urbanization has been noted as a context for the emergence of newly recognized zoonotic diseases, but the specific impacts of the urban growth on the development of the disease spillover potential are not sufficiently understood. This research provides an original, fully simulation-based, spatially defined evaluation of the risk of zoonotic spillover given the simultaneous influence of urban, ecological, climate, and atmospheric factors. Through a geospatial and environmental modeling integration, the analysis determines the risk potential of urbanization and habitat fragmentation, and how they reconfigure the interfaces between the human and non-human environments, and the role of climate variability and atmospheric pollution as secondary risk factor amplifiers. Spatial surfaces of spillover potential created by the simulator demonstrate the consistent presence of peri-urban regions with high- risk potential, and fragmentation and highly humanized interfaces with scattered reservoir species. The inter-modeling of coupled stressor interactions indicates that climate and atmospheric pollution effects are the greatest when they are overlaid on fragmented ecosystems, which results in an increased and disproportionate spillover potential. Furthermore, analysis of the attributed risk factors demonstrates that interaction effects surpass the individual explanatory potential of the risk factors, indicating that the emergence of spillover is an integrated outcome of complex systems rather than an additive result. The findings outline the mechanisms and spatial contributors to the emergence of zoonotic diseases in the urbanizing peri-urban ecosystems and the necessity of integrated and holistic land planning, ecological system integrity, and quality of the environment to manage the risk of spillover potential.