COVID-19 & Climate Change : Connections & Shared Concerns

The speed and scope of the COVID-19 outbreak have taken governments all over the world by surprise and left the stock markets reeling. The pandemic has forced governments into a difficult balancing act between ensuring safety and wellbeing of people and maintaining profit margins and growth targets. Ultimately, the prospect of a large death toll and the collapse of health systems have forced countries to put millions of people in lockdown. The sweeping and unprecedented measures taken by the governments and international institutions make some of us wonder about another protracted global emergency that needs urgent action - The Climate Change. This threat multiplier is identified as the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century by WHO.

Around the world, pollution and carbon emission levels have taken a dramatic dip due to the lockdown. News of this reduction quickly made its way around social media as ‘good news’ for climate change. Today we are seeing stories about blue skies, improved air quality, cleaner rivers and photos of places reclaimed by nature. But is this really a ‘good news’?  This temporary decrease in greenhouse gases should not be a cause for celebration as these benefits are result of stopping or decreasing industrial and economic activities and not the result of any thoughtful policy. And hence, it is not sustainable. They're not going to fundamentally change the trajectory of emissions unless structural changes happen. Talking about it as any kind of good news is about the worst messaging that you could have with respect to climate change. Also, the solution to climate change cannot be a shutdown of the global economy. We don’t want people to start thinking that dealing with climate change requires massive unemployment and a freeze in the global economy.

Climate Change: A brief introduction

Human activities, from pollution to over population, are driving up the Earth's temperature and fundamentally changing the world around us. There are always natural fluctuations in the climate; but now the globe is warming at an alarming rate due to greenhouse effect. Earth is constantly bombarded with enormous amounts of radiation, primarily from the sun. This solar radiation strikes the Earth's atmosphere in the form of visible light, plus ultraviolet (UV), infrared (IR) and other types of radiation that are invisible to the human eye. The exchange of incoming and outgoing radiation that warms the Earth is often referred to as the ‘greenhouse effect’ because a greenhouse works in much the same way.

Gases, whose molecules absorb thermal infrared radiation, and are present in enough significant quantity, such that they affect the climate system, are called greenhouse gases – e.g. water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons. Water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, both by weight and by volume. Water vapour is also an effective greenhouse gas, as it does absorb longwave radiation and radiates it back to the surface, thus contributing to warming. But compared to other greenhouse gases, water vapour stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter period of time. CO2, however, persists for much longer.

Even if we stop emitting the greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several decades to come.That’s because it takes a while for the planet (i.e. the oceans and the forests) to respond, and because carbon dioxide – the predominant heat trapping gas, – lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Since the industrial revolution began, CO2 levels have risen by more than 40%. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years. Most manmade emissions of CO2 come from burning of fossil fuels. When carbon absorbing forests are cut down and left to rot, or burned, the stored carbon is released, contributing to global warming.

If global warming continues unchecked, it will cause significant climate change, a rise in sea levels, extreme weather events and other severe natural and societal impacts.

Effects of climate change on :

Oceans - Oceans regulate the Earth's temperature, provide 50% of Earth's oxygen and absorb a significant portion of the CO2 emissions resulting from human activities. The global ocean is already experiencing the significant impact of climate change and its accompanying effects, e.g. increase in ocean acidification (When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, it forms carbonic acid decreasing the ocean’s pH and the water becomes more acidic), increasing water temperature, shifts in distribution of marine species, coral bleaching, sea level rise, coastal inundation (when sea water rises high enough that it floods infrastructure), coastal erosion, harmful algal blooms, hypoxic zones (reduced level of oxygen in the water), new marine diseases, loss of marine life and decline in fish populations.

Weather - In the early 2000s, a new field of climate-science research emerged that began to explore the human fingerprint on extreme weather known as ‘extreme event attribution’. Their analysis reveals that nearly 78% of all extreme weather events are caused by human factors.Scientists project that extreme weather features and events such as heat waves, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, wildfires, lightning strikes, heavy rainfall, floods will continue to occur more often and with greater intensity due to global warming.At the time of writing this article, Cyclone Amphan has made landfall in eastern India. The West Bengal and Odisha governments have had to evacuate over six lakh people from vulnerable areas due to the cyclone. Experts say occurrence of such intense cyclones is due to global warming and warmer surface temperatures of the oceans.

Food - Climate change affects food production; as well as the availability, access, quality, utilization and stability of food systems. Freshwater environments around the world are already under excessive pressure from drainage, dredging, damming, pollution, extraction, silting and invasive species. Climate change only aggravates the problem and makes it worst.

Health - Climate change, along with other natural and human made health stressors, influences human health and disease in numerous ways. Some existing health threats will intensify, and new health threats will emerge. The effects of these disruptions on health include increase in respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, injuries and premature deaths related to extreme weather events, changes in the prevalence and geographical distribution of food and water borne illnesses and other infectious diseases, and even threats to mental health.

COVID-19 & climate change: Concerns rising from the common ground  

The COVID-19 outbreak is challenging governments, communities and families all over the world and while there is rightfully a lot of focus on the needs of healthcare workers responding to the crisis, as well as on the near-term and longer-term economic impact, another interesting theme is developing around the relationship between the COVID-19 and climate change. There are some really concerning aspects about the way we have responded to both.

Global crisis

Climate change or the emissions that drive the climate change spread around the world and are truly a global problem, just as the COVID-19 is. The virus can jump from one country to another and no one is safe, no one is protected. The same is true of climate change. Both the issues, COVID-19 and climate change, cannot be addressed by any single country alone and truly requires a global response. Hopefully, coming out of this, we will see a shift in how people identify themselves and see their relationship to the global community on climate issues and ultimately, individuals can see themselves as part of a deeply interconnected system.

Delay in response makes large & potentially lethal problems much worse

For all its uncertainty, the pandemic comes as no surprise to those who study infectious diseases. For years, they used their scientific knowledge to map out the effect of a novel virus appearance. For years, they warned us that we need to be prepared. The magnitude of that warning was not heeded, and now we are paying the price. As with the threat of a pandemic, scientists who study climate change have been warning for decades that we are unprepared for what lies just over the horizon. Using similar mathematical tools deployed by epidemiologists, they have predicted the course of global warming, laid out its potential effects on the networks that make up civilization and told us what needs to be done to avoid calamity.

It has taken a disaster of the magnitude of the COVID-19 to get the governments, and the common people as well, to understand the immediacy with which to respond. In many ways the climate crisis is a bigger problem than the COVID-19 is. Yet, we never see the kinds of government action that we're seeing on COVID-19, in part because it always seems to be over the horizon. Even when the SARS-CoV-2 was limited to Wuhan and then limited to China, the rest of the governments around the world essentially ignored the problem until it landed on their shores. That is very troubling parallel with climate change, because it suggests that not only the crisis has to be a grave one, it also has to be immediate, before we start seeing the kind of responses that are going to be necessary. Obviously, we need different responses to climate change than we do to COVID-19, but we need action and it is amazing how grave and how immediate a crisis has to be before we see real action on a global level today.

Disrespecting scientific contribution

This is extremely dangerous especially during this type of crisis. We are paying the price for the development in the past few years, when irresponsible politicians and public figures undermine public trust in science, public institutes and reliable media. COVID-19 is a large faithful science-based threat with enormous consequences that many people, including politicians, rejected and belittled, which has now turned out to be very real. At various times, political attempts were made to alter or silence scientific information on SARS-CoV-2 and climate change. Medical professionals were initially silenced in China during the initial days of the COVID-19 epidemic, too. U.S. State governors and federal agencies prevented their employees from using the words ‘climate change’ in government reports. Scientists who spoke openly about these issues were persecuted. In China, Dr. Li Wenliang and Dr. Ai Fen were persecuted for raising the alarm about COVID-19. Failure to listen to the scientists’ calls delayed the action on both these issues, leading to negative consequences.

Importance of science literacy and role of scientists in policy making

What we've seen with COVID-19 could have some positive impact if the right lessons are learnt. This situation may lead to providing a greater credibility for science and facts, and the role of government in addressing a big, dangerous problem. The power of science is unique in human history because of its capacity to predict future events. The predictions are not only based on observed past but also on our modern understandings of how nature works and what our interaction with nature is. Now with the help of artificial intelligence, data scientists can create more detailed and accurate algorithms, models and simulations and predict the future scenarios.

The reaction of governments to the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change perfectly illustrates the importance of maintaining strong links between the scientific and political communities. The constructive integration of scientific evidence into political decision-making strengthens policy initiatives, improves the quality of debate and leads to robust, cost-effective and successful outcomes for society and planet, both.

The modern civilization is fragile

As physicist Adam Frank has said, we have lived our entire lives taking for granted that this thing we call ‘civilization’ was a machine that could never fail. This crisis has helped demonstrate the degree to which our very modern, networked, dynamic digital civilization is quite fragile, and maybe a lot more fragile than people thought. We are extremely ill-equipped to deal with such global crises.

The global high-tech society we've built over the last 100 years is actually a series of networks laid on top of one another. The transportation network (roads, trains, ships and airplanes) moves our goods around. Energy network (electric grids, oil and natural gas pipelines) deliver the power, when and where it's needed. Economic network (banks, investment firms and brokers) keep the funds circulating for trade. Then there is healthcare network (doctors, nurses, hospitals) that manages the endless stream of sickness and injury. Today, health officials across the country are watching in horror and desperation as their network gets overwhelmed. The fear the pandemic has caused is already pushing on the food distribution and economic network.

Like this pandemic, climate change is also going to have profound impact on these networks that make up our civilization. The warnings must be taken seriously; as studies of multilayered networks show they can be fragile: breaking links in one network cascades through the others. Unlike the pandemic, its effects will be long term, and there won't be a vaccine that can save us.

Need of large-scale intervention

The COVID-19 response has also shown that remarkably large scale, and until now unimagined, interventions can happen when there is will. Who would have thought that entire countries would be shut down, locked down, in order to deal with a problem? So, we need to see the large-scale interventions that need to happen with respect to climate change. The COVID-19 response from some countries certainly shows that that is possible. Although, again, it all depends upon political will.

Need of biosafety

Warming climates and increasing variability in weather patterns across the globe make it inherently easier to transmit diseases of any origin. Human expansions shrink wildlife areas and fragment the ecosystems. Humans are coming more and more into contact with animal populations that have nowhere to go. Then, as climate changes, wherever different types of vegetation grow or different animal species live there is an increasing risk of droughts that wipe out food supply. That's also making animals more desperate and more likely to engage with humans in their search for food which puts us additionally at risk from getting more of these diseases making that jump from animals over to humans.

Both crises are perceived by several environmental scientists as outcomes of human violation of the natural world. Encroachment on the natural world in the name of development is seen as both escalating climate change as well as opening the way to a succession of diseases that threatens to take on pandemic proportions. Activities such as mining, logging and slash-and-burn agriculture degrade natural habitats and undermine biodiversity while forcing animals to live in evermore crowded, stressed and ecologically unbalanced conditions that are in ever closer proximity to human communities. These very activities intensify carbon release and reduce carbon sinks while rising global surface temperatures. A very important role should be played by governments with respect to biosafety. We've seen the bad effects, particularly from China, as it is continuing to maintain what they call wet markets where wild animals are found because of their use in various kinds of so-called medicinal purposes. And hence you have wild animals in close proximity with humans and non-wild animals. And there's absolutely no excuse for that. We've had other outbreaks not as serious as this one coming from exactly the same kinds of markets. Impact of climate change with respect to habitats and bringing animals closer to people and so forth is dangerous. Still, governments ought to be managing biosafety in a completely different way than has happened in China. And this is the third warning now, and obviously, the most serious one yet.

Poverty and marginalization increase vulnerability

This pandemic illustrates how inequality is a major barrier in ensuring the health and wellbeing of people, and how social and economic inequality materializes in unequal access to healthcare systems. Lack of food and clean water, lack of access to health care, no reserves for emergencies, poverty etc. make people vulnerable, both against the impacts of climate change and the current health crisis. Both factors can easily become an existential threat for the particularly vulnerable people in many countries. Hunger weakens the immune systems of the poorest populations, and the necessary measures to contain the COVID-19 crisis are hardly feasible for them: clean water, adequate sanitation or even hand cleansers are not available and ‘physical distancing’ is almost impossible in many settlements and slums. Even in the United States we are seeing that African-American populations are being disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

A shutdown is an existential threat for many day labourers who depend on their wage for their daily meals. As we see in India, central and state governments have been clueless about the whole migrant issue. This pandemic and events related to climate change are devastating for the world's migrants. The climate crisis has already created millions of invisible refugees and the International Organization for Migration projects it could create up to 1.5 billion more in the next 30 years. We are not ready to cope with mass migration as a result of climate change.

Flaws in the current economic model

There are now a growing number of eminent scientists and economists arguing that our current methods of measuring the size and growth rate of the economy are deeply flawed, leading us to produce more goods and services than the Earth's resources can sustain. One of those outcomes, they argue, is the possibility of frequent, and ever more ferocious, outbreaks of infectious diseases as commercial interests push humanity into closer contact with natural habitats that are reservoirs of pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2. But the researchers and thinkers warning about such events are not part of mainstream economics, which is focused on the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the sum value of all finished goods and services generated in a country, and the most commonly used indicator of economic health. The origin of the virus makes it a perfect example of how capitalism commodifying life to turn it into profit can directly endanger human life. In this sense, the ongoing pandemic is the product of unrestrained capitalist production and consumption patterns.

Threat to public interest and democratic values

Although in some democratic countries, surveillance is being used to analyze health data related to COVID-19, authoritarian regimes also appear to be using the pandemic as an excuse to double down on gathering data, silence critics and misuse information. By closely monitoring people’s smartphones, making use of hundreds of millions of face-recognizing cameras, and obliging people to check and report their body temperature and medical condition, the authorities can not only quickly identify suspected COVID-19 carriers, but also track their movements and identify of anyone they came in contact with. We see some governments have escalated suppression online by blocking independent reporting, information sharing and critical comments on government responses. Renee Xia, International Director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, says, ‘aggressive cyber policing and invasive online surveillance have played a key role in the initial government cover-up of the outbreak and hampering vital information flow, contributing to significant delay of emergency responses and loss of life.’

Authoritarians love crises or regularly manufacture them because they justify unrestricted power. Emergencies are very often the pretext for permanent interruption of freedoms and starting point of totalitarian temptation, so it is particularly important that current measures and their long-term consequences with respect to human rights are subject to close scrutiny. Social and political freedom must not become collateral damage in the fight against the crisis.

Lack of effective leadership

The other big concern is how we responded to COVID-19 at local or national level. There is also a growing skepticism about the effective functionality of the international organizations. We haven't seen the UN or the G20 or even the WHO playing effective leadership roles in the COVID-19 crisis in any way. Opinions are divided on whether the outcome of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was a success or failure. The framework sets non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. This could lead to an enhanced skepticism of the role of the UNFCCC for climate change and the principal negotiating forum dealing with climate as we come out of the COVID-19.

The scientist who had warned that climate change was upon us in 1988 – James Hansen – called the Paris Agreement a fraud, and since 2015, many nations are failing to meet their Paris commitments. Even if they did, global average temperature rise this century would be far in excess of the two degrees above pre-industrial levels that the deal is supposed to ensure. The US pulled out of the Paris agreement in June 2017. A clear pattern has emerged.

Climate change and eruption of new diseases

Presumably, the COVID-19 outbreak is a zoonotic disease. It jumped from a bat to some intermediary host and then eventually to a human being. Human engagement with the environment is both necessary and dangerous. But then we have moved human conduct into places and into proximity with nature in ways that really can have extraordinary consequences and COVID-19 is obviously one of those consequences. Climate change will worsen those interactions, as animals move to places that are safer as their habitats become uninhabitable. As biologist Rob Wallace argues in his book ‘Big Farms Make Big Flu’, this has created the perfect environment for the mutation and emergence of new diseases such as Hepatitis E, Nipah virus, Q fever, and others.

Climate change is melting ‘permafrost’ (permanently frozen ground often found in Arctic regions) that has remained frozen for thousands of years, and as the ice melts, ancient viruses and bacteria hidden therein are springing back to life. In recent years, researchers have pulled samples of Smallpox, Spanish flu, Bubonic Plague, and even Anthrax from the thawing permafrost. In January 2020, scientists unearthed 28 previously undiscovered viruses, which were trapped in glacial ice from 15,000 years ago. That means melting ice could potentially open a Pandora's Box of diseases. Scientists have also found harmful pollutants, such as mercury, trapped in the reservoirs beneath Alaskan permafrost. Gases like methane and carbon dioxide, which have been trapped in the long-frozen earth, are being released into the atmosphere at alarming rates.

People who already live in areas with very poor air quality, which is primarily due to burning fossil fuels which is what causes climate change, are much more vulnerable to diseases. A study on SARS showed that if you caught SARS and you lived in an area with very dirty air you were twice more likely to die from it than if you lived in a place with clean air.

Loss of focus on climate change

As we've already seen in this crisis, governments have a limited capacity to deal with things. Most governments in the world right now are focused exclusively on COVID-19. And once the crisis passes, they're going to be focused mostly on stimulus and return of economies back to normal. So, it could be a longer period that government attention is essentially distracted from climate. There is certainly a loss of focus by governments, by business, by the public on climate change due to current pandemic. And the climate change situation is already urgent. The objective at this point is net zero emissions by 2050. But to get there, we've got to be moving to transform the global model of economy very rapidly.

Climate change is slower and stealthier in its onset and we do not get daily updates on the death toll caused by climate change, as we do with COVID-19. Though there have been horrifying examples of disasters amplified by climate change such as the recent Australian bush fires, there are many parts of the world where climate change seems ‘out there’ whereas COVID-19 could come knocking at anyone’s door at any time. The problem is that the dangers presented by the climate crisis seem too distant to matter to most, especially politicians. But if we think COVID-19 is bad, we haven’t seen anything yet; the effects of the climate emergency will be far worse down the line.

Returning to ‘Normal’

For the COVID-19, by ‘flattening the curve’, we seek to avoid overwhelming our medical systems while we wait for a vaccine. There is no vaccine for climate change. But by ‘flattening the curve’, we can provide time to develop innovative non-carbon technologies and societal approaches that are cost-effective and suitable. So, solving both virus and climate change problems involve mitigation and adaptation.

The question is whether post COVID-19, there will be any fundamental rethinking of what development entails or we’ll restore the ‘normal’ at whatever cost to health and the environment. Confluence of the two emergencies presents the global community with a potentially productive moment. Once the COVID-19 crisis has somewhat abated, there will be a tremendous pressure to get life back to normal. But it also opens a window of opportunity for transformative change.

The problem with bouncing back to normal is that ‘normal’ got us into trouble in the first place; it is this ‘normal’ that has proved brittle and vulnerable. It has failed to meet the needs of people and protect the integrity of the environment in multiple ways. As Editor-in-Chief of ‘Disasters’ journal Sara Pantuliano says, ‘we won’t get back to normal because normal was the problem’. Rather, she holds that the COVID-19 crisis offers the opportunity to seize a different type of ‘normal’, a new order to set the world on a more sustainable and equal path.

‘What we thought was normal before the pandemic,’ writes editor of Uneven Earth, Vijay Kolinjivadi, ‘was already a crisis and so returning to it cannot be an option. The reduced human footprint on the earth has given us a glimpse of what the world would look like without fossil fuels.’ Hopefully, humanity could emerge from this horror into a healthier, cleaner world. But it will depend not on the short-term impacts of the virus, but on the long-term political decisions made about what follows. Also, it is very important to strike a right balance between green recovery from COVID-19 and the economic stimulus packages that many governments have announced. Once we eventually overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, we can hopefully hold on to the sense of shared humanity in order to rebuild our social and economic systems to make them better, more resilient, and compassionate. The financial and social support packages to maintain and eventually revive the global economy post-pandemic, should therefore promote health, equity and environmental protection.

For further reading –

https://www.climate.gov/

https://www.carbonbrief.org/

https://climate.nasa.gov/

https://oceanfdn.org/ocean-and-climate-change/

https://climatefeedback.org/

https://www.climatemigrantsproject.com/resources

https://www.orfonline.org/research/climate-change-and-food-security-in-india/

https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/effects/default.htm

http://www.iitk.ac.in/math/workshop-and-conference/CIJK-2017/CIJK-IITK-MODELING-GLOBAL-WARMING-AND-%20CLIMATE%20CHANGE.pdf

https://www.bmu.de/en/topics/climate-energy/climate/international-climate-policy/climate-conferences/chronicle-of-climate-change-conferences/

https://mnre.gov.in/

Prajakta Kolte

koltepatil.praj@gmail.com

(Prajakta Kolte is an architect by profession with deep interest in environmental and social issues.)

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