Biodiversity in Times of COVID-19 and its Relationship with the Socio-Economic and Health Context: A Look from the Digital Media

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a pause in people's activities and a socio-economic crisis worldwide due to confinement. This situation is an unprecedented opportunity to understand how these changes may impact biodiversity and its conservation, as well as to study human-nature interaction. Biodiversity plays an essential role in conservation and economic activities, and in countries with greater inequality and low gross domestic product (GDP), biodiversity could have a low priority. Moreover, how biodiversity is prioritized in a society impacts how the citizens view it, and digital news tends to shape biodiversity narratives. The aim of this work was to determine the main trends in biodiversity-related news categories during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries with terrestrial and marine hotspots and relate them to the socioeconomic and public health context of each country. For this, we searched for news on biodiversity and Covid-19 in the first 6 months of the pandemic and related them to GDP, Gini-index, deaths, and infections by Covid-19. Results showed that conservation, public policies, and use of natural resources stood out as the main news categories across countries, with a positive narrative and mostly related to terrestrial rather than marine environments. On the other hand, the socio-economic and public health characteristics of each country had an influence on which aspect of the biodiversity was reflected in the media. For example, countries with greater inequality were associated with tourism news, additionally, countries with low GDP, high cases, and deaths by Covid-19 were associated with news about cultural diversity. In contrast, countries with high GDP and low inequality were associated with news about zoonosis, research and development, public policies, and alien and invasive species.

COVID-19 and its impact on biodiversity in coffee farms in the Andean landscape

“…The exact dates and speci c measures are not well established, but generally, lockdowns in Colombia were introduced in March 2020 in response to the increasing number of COVID-19 cases (Prada et al 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic generated positive and negative consequences on biodiversity and may impact its conservation (Corlett et al 2020;Akinsorotan et al 2021;Montenegro-Hoyos et al 2022). Some studies signi cantly analyzed the socioeconomic impact on coffee agroecosystems (Manenti et al 2020;Harvey et al 2021; Rhiney et al 2021).…”