This article in France24 draws a link between habitat loss, climate change, and zoonotic diseases.

“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP…

As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.

Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.

France24

I don’t quite get the logic of the first sentence – how do animals “naturally regulate viruses”? I can see the logic that some animals would limit the spread of viruses they are infected with based on their behavior. If they start moving around more, whether because their habitats are becoming smaller and more fragmented, because their ranges are shifting as the climate changes (although this seems like a much slower process to me), they will potentially interact more with other wild animals, with domestic animals, and with humans.

So solutions could be to protect natural habitats and keep cities from sprawling into them, shift more to vegetarian diets for people and/or keep livestock indoors (maybe not so great for the livestock).