David Finnoff

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that land use change, and the resulting decline in both the area and quality of natural habitats, contributes to an increased incidence of disease in humans. Despite calls to leverage conservation policy to address the burden of disease linked to ecosystem change, the potential benefits are unknown. Efficiently reducing the burden of infectious disease through land use policies and conservation initiatives is challenging because it requires balancing trade-offs that depend on ecological and socioeconomic factors. To assess some of these trade-offs, we developed a dynamic model of optimal land use when ecosystem change affects the overall incidence of infectious disease. We compared the net benefits and paths of optimal policy in which the increased cost of disease resulting from natural habitat loss is included in the optimization with a base case where it is ignored. We found that ignoring the linkage between habitat degradation and infectious disease incidence in the planner’s problem reduces the net benefits of land management, such as conservation efforts, and results in significantly higher rates of infection and health costs.

One cause of the high rate of COVID-19 cases in the USA is thought to be insufficient prior capital investment in national health programs to preemptively reduce the likelihood of an outbreak and in national capacity to reduce the severity of any outbreak that does occur. We analyze the choice of capital investments (e.g. testing capacity, stockpiles of PPE, and information sharing capacity) and find the economically efficient capital stock associated with mitigating pandemic risk should be dramatically expanded. Policymakers who fail to invest in public health forgo significant expected cost savings from being prepared.

Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) are exposed to increased environmental change and multiple human stressors. To anticipate future impacts of global change and to improve sustainable resource management, it is critical to understand how wild salmon populations respond to stressors associated with human‐caused changes such as climate warming and ocean acidification, as well as competition in the ocean, which is intensified by the large‐scale production and release of hatchery reared salmon. Pink salmon (O. gorbuscha) are a keystone species in the North Pacific Ocean and support highly valuable commercial fisheries. We investigated the joint effects of changes in ocean conditions and salmon abundances on the productivity of wild pink salmon. Our analysis focused on Prince William Sound in Alaska, because the region accounts for ~50% of the global production of hatchery pink salmon with local hatcheries releasing 600–700 million pink salmon fry annually. Using 60 years of data on wild pink salmon abundances, hatchery releases, and ecological conditions in the ocean, we find evidence that hatchery pink salmon releases negatively affect wild pink salmon productivity, likely through competition between wild and hatchery juveniles in nearshore marine habitats. We find no evidence for effects of ocean acidification on pink salmon productivity. However, a change in the leading mode of North Pacific climate in 1988–1989 weakened the temperature–productivity relationship and altered the strength of intraspecific density dependence. Therefore, our results suggest non‐stationary (i.e., time varying) and interactive effects of ocean climate and competition on pink salmon productivity. Our findings further highlight the need for salmon management to consider potential adverse effects of large‐scale hatchery production within the context of ocean change.