Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Libby Peake, head of resource policy here at Green Alliance by day and armchair epidemiologist by night,

because, like most people, I have owned a degree in global health

over the recent months from the University of WhatsApp. I'm delighted to be joined today, though,

by someone who is genuinely an expert in this area. He has multiple degrees from legitimate

universities and is indeed employed as an associate professor at Emory University's Department

of Environmental Sciences

in Atlanta, Georgia.

Spillover is a process that relates to climate change.

It's that spillover and climate change and deforestation, all of these things are linked

in a very complex way.

I'll be speaking today to disease ecologist Dr. Thomas Gillespie, whose research explores

the emergence of new pathogens and the relationships to human-induced environmental change.

Thomas, thank you for joining us.

I'm happy to be here, Libby, thanks.

There have been a lot of comparisons made between climate change and the coronavirus pandemic over the past month or so, notably that climate change is like coronavirus in slow motion, with commentators noting amongst other similarities that addressing both effectively requires significant international cooperation, high levels of state intervention in ways that seemed impossible before, and considerable

changes to people's behaviours. I think it's probably worth pointing out that these analogies

only go so far, and that responding to climate change will look very different to this COVID-19

lockdown that we're experiencing in most parts of the world, in that it will involve

neither locking ourselves in our

homes nor shutting down the economies. But I still think that comparisons are really illuminating.

So the first thing I want to focus on today is the fact that there's another striking resemblance,

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