Our health is personal, but health risks are not. Around the world, entire populations — both human and wildlife — are facing new infectious diseases driven by the same culprit: environmental degradation.

In a sweeping new analysis of disease data, scientists found that global trends like biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution and the rise in invasive species are putting humans, plants and animals at higher risk of contracting infectious diseases, Emily Anthes reported for The New York Times .

While environmental changes varied across the places and species studied, research consistently found that infectious diseases were becoming more common. And the loss of nature — driven by human activities such as deforestation — is responsible for an outsized portion of that growing risk.

Why?…