To stop new viruses jumping across to humans, we must protect and restore bat habitat. Here's why

By Alison Peel, Senior Research Fellow in Wildlife Disease Ecology, Griffith University
Peggy Eby, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Centre for Ecosystem Science, UNSW Sydney
Raina Plowright, Professor, Cornell University

Bats have lived with coronaviruses for millennia. Details are still hazy about how one of these viruses evolved into SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID in humans. Did it go directly from bats to humans or via another animal species? When? And why? If we can’t answer these questions for this now-infamous virus, we have little hope of preventing the next pandemic.

Some bat species are hosts for other viruses lethal to humans, from rabies to Nipah…

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