Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on biodiversity conservation in the Israeli occupied West Bank, Palestine

Abstract

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 which is far worse than anything we humans dealt with since the 1917-1918 flu caused massive human suffering but presumably led to less human impact on the environment (Corlett et al., 2020: 3; March et al., 2021: 2; Pinder et al., 2020: 1061; Sharma et al., 2020: 1; Saadat et al., 2020: 5). In fact, this is one of the largest involuntary human confinement in history with massive repercussions for biodiversity (Bates et al., 2020: 4). The initial published data point to a mixed effect on environmental conservation. These recent studies were not focused on developing countries like Palestine. Herein we look at COVID-19 impact in Palestine (the geographic area which is now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories). Another question to address is whether we are locally and globally learning from this pandemic to alter our destructive behavior that has been ongoing since the industrial revolution and that lead to climate change and massive destruction of biodiversity. Have we for example learned anything from the fact that high pollution rates makes the population more vulnerable to pandemics (Zheng et al., 2020: 1) or that pandemics seem to arise more frequently due to human impact on the environment resulting in contact with wildlife and zoonotic diseases like COVID-19 (Everard et al., 2020: 9; Khetan, 2020: 1; Shreedhar & Mourato, 2020: 963). In some parts of the world, there were unexpected environmental impacts of the pandemic of COVID-19. For example, satellite imagery shows an increase in the Amazon forest fires after lockdown (Amador-Jiménez et al., 2020: 1081). Other environmental challenges imposed by COVID-19 include the large-scale production of face masks (Fadare & Okoffo, 2020: 2) and the disruption of plastic reduction efforts (Silva et al., 2020: 5). Another example is that increase in visitation to public parks and green spaces was noted to increase in some areas and decrease in others with differing effects on wildlife in those areas (Rutz et al., 2020: 4). The consensus of the earlier studies show that pandemics and lockdowns have more complex relation to environmental conservation and that more data are needed especially with regard to charting post-pandemic societal responses. This