Impact of Plantation Induced Forest Degradation on the Outbreak of Emerging Infectious Diseases—Wayanad District, Kerala, India

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) have increased recently due to forest degradation. This research is an attempt to understand the direct and indirect impact of forest degradation on infectious disease outbreaks in a specific context of the Wayanad district in Kerala, India. The study was done in two parts. In the first part, land use and land cover change of the Wayanad district was analyzed for the period of 1950 to 2018. The result of the analysis shows that a significant amount of forest has been converted into agricultural and forest plantations over the time. The second part involves understanding the impact of plantations on the outbreak of EIDs. We have employed GIS tools, remote sensing data, extensive field work and disease data to discover the relationship between the LULCC and disease outbreak. It was found that cases of EIDs were high in those gram panchayats where forests were encroached by plantations. ABSTRACT: The world has been facing a pandemic owing to COVID-19. We have also seen the geographic expansion and outbreaks of other emerging infectious diseases (EID) in recent years. This paper investigates the direct and indirect effects of land use land cover change (LULCC) on EID outbreaks in the context of Wayanad District of Kerala, India. Wayanad is in the vulnerable tropical forested region, and it is named as one of the four environmental change hotspots. The focus of this project is mainly three EIDs prevalent in this region: Kyasanur forest disease (KFD), Dengue and Leptospirosis. Our results, based on topographical map, remote sensing and extensive field work, show that the natural forest in Wayanad was replaced with agriculture and forest plantation during 1950–2018. This paper further suggests that encroachment of forest by forest plantation causes the human–animal conflict resulting in the outbreak of KFD cases. Our analysis reveals that a high number of Dengue cases is found in the forested regions of the district and over the adjacent human-made agriculture plantation areas. High and medium number of Leptospirosis cases contain a high portion of land area devoted to paddy cultivation and agricultural plantation. In summary, the results clearly show the linkage between the outbreak of above mentioned EIDs and LULCC in the context of Wayanad district, Kerala. We also discuss in detail the causal pathway involving human–environmental dynamics through which plantation leads to the outbreak of KFD. Replacing forests with plantations poses an alarming threat of disease outbreak in the community.