Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Center for Economic Policy Research, Paris, France.
Science. 2024 Sep 6;385(6713):eadg0344. doi: 10.1126/science.adg0344.
Biodiversity loss is accelerating, yet we know little about how these ecosystem disruptions affect human well-being. Ecologists have documented both the importance of bats as natural predators of insects as well as their population declines after the emergence of a wildlife disease, resulting in a potential decline in biological pest control. In this work, I study how species interactions can extend beyond an ecosystem and affect agriculture and human health. I find that farmers compensated for bat decline by increasing their insecticide use by 31.1%. The compensatory increase in insecticide use by farmers adversely affected health-human infant mortality increased by 7.9% in the counties that experienced bat die-offs. These findings provide empirical validation to previous theoretical predictions about how ecosystem disruptions can have meaningful social costs.
生物多样性的丧失正在加速，但我们对这些生态系统的破坏如何影响人类福祉知之甚少。生态学家已经记录了蝙蝠作为昆虫自然捕食者的重要性，以及它们在野生动物疾病出现后的种群减少，这可能导致生物防治害虫的能力下降。在这项工作中，我研究了物种相互作用如何超越生态系统并影响农业和人类健康。我发现，农民通过增加 31.1%的杀虫剂使用量来弥补蝙蝠数量的减少。农民增加杀虫剂使用量的补偿性增长对健康产生了不利影响——在经历蝙蝠死亡的县，人类婴儿死亡率上升了 7.9%。这些发现为以前关于生态系统破坏如何产生有意义的社会成本的理论预测提供了经验验证。
