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Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath are the most significant socio-economic crises in modern history. The pandemic’s devastating impacts have prompted urgent policy and regulatory action to reduce the risks of future spillover events and pandemics. Stronger regulatory measures for the trade of wildlife are central to discussions of a policy response. A variety of measures, including broad bans on the trade and sale of wildlife to banning specific species for human consumption are among a suite of discussed options. However, the wildlife trade is diverse, complex, and important for the livelihoods of millions of people globally. We argue that reducing the risk of future pandemics stemming from the wildlife trade must follow established principles of governance which include being equitable, responsive, robust, and effective. We demonstrate how incorporating these principles will support the development of context-specific, culturally sensitive, and inclusive responses that recognize the on-the-ground complexity of disease emergence and the social-ecological systems in which the wildlife trade occurs. 

The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage to gauge its potential as a global research and monitoring tool. To address this gap, we created the Worldwide Soundscapes project, a collaborative network and growing database comprising metadata from 416 datasets across all realms (terrestrial, marine, freshwater and subterranean).