Global land rush concentrates potential zoonotic spillover risk in the tropics

Global land-use change alters human-environment interactions in ways that can generate sustainability risks, including pathogen spillovers across species. Here we integrate global data on large-scale land transactions and zoonotic reservoir species distributions to assess their relationship with potential zoonotic spillover risk. Using a spatially explicit approach, we identify administrative units with elevated zoonotic spillover risk based on hazard-exposure overlap, compare high-risk and other units, and examine tele-coupled investor-host country relationships associated with these patterns. We find that Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa are major hosts, while spillover risks are more concentrated in Southeast Asia and Latin America. High-risk units tend to feature larger transacted areas and higher forest cover, but lower population and road network density. Domestic and intra-regional transactions account for over half of transacted areas and associated spillover risks. These results highlight the importance of ecological integrity and landscape immunity in sustainability-oriented land-use governance. Potential zoonotic spillover risk concentrates around larger land deals in forested, low-density regions and is often associated with domestic and regional investment flows, according to an analysis of the global land rush and zoonotic reservoir species distributions.