A lot of the global land-use changes, unsustainable for the environment, are creating “hotspots”, areas where conditions are ripe for the transmission of coronaviruses from wild animals to humans.

This is what emerges from an international study  published on Nature Food, realized by a team composed by two researchers of DICA – Nikolas Galli and professor Maria Cristina Rulli of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (Politecnico di Milano) – with Paolo D’ Orico of the University of California at Berkeley and David Hayman of Massey University. The results of a year of work (which began during the lockdown of 2020), highlight how a change in land use, unsustainable from an environmental point of view, can trigger the spillover infection of new coronaviruses.

For additional information, read the complete article here.