Could COVID-19 inspire real climate action?
As we grapple with major changes in our daily routines in the midst of COVID-19, I am repeatedly struck by the uniqueness of the situation and the unprecedented nature of the events unfolding. Surely in our lives or our parents’ lives, we have never dealt with a crisis quite like this involving school closures and stock market swings. Profound disruptions of our work, family, and social lives upend all of our patterns and expectations, and additionally threaten to collapse our economy — and all of it taking place on a global scale. As a social scientist, it is stunning to watch these events evolve in real-time.
Journalists, scholars, poets, and the entirety of twitter are weighing in with a torrent of opinions but most end with more questions. Will COVID-19 change the way we carry on with our lives after the peak outbreak is over? How does this crisis expose existing structural inequality, a question that’s become central to a contentious Democratic primary race? What will the ultra-rich do when they realize they can’t power their yachts with hoarded stashes of hand sanitizer?
I have another question to pose: what might we learn from this crisis that can help us to prepare for, and even help prevent, the increasing disruptions of climate change? A global pandemic and a changing climate are of course apples and oranges, but our responses to the effects of each depend on the quality of our leadership, public cooperation, and willingness to lean into change.
Climate change and the novel coronavirus are both plagued by (varying) levels of scientific uncertainty, which we know from experience translates poorly through public conservation. This widely publicized uncertainty tends to elicit wildly opposing responses — sheer panic, apathy, denial. This uncertainty is also easily exploited by those who seek to profit from business as usual, even when massive change is necessary.
As a climate-focused social scientist, I study the ways in which messaging affects behavior, so it’s been interesting to observe how messages coming from the government and media have unfurled over the past few weeks. A strong data visualization, like the “flatten the curve” graph, can have a major impact. There is much to be learned by studying this crisis in real-time as well as in retrospect. COVID-19 is such a fast-moving crisis, and such a universal one, that it can give us a great deal of insight into how we might bring people together to reach a common goal. Like a changing climate, this pandemic knows no borders — both require unprecedented levels of global cooperation.
I’ve been wondering if the variables we use to predict opinion on climate change (like level of education, political orientation, or values) would also predict initial response to COVID-19. Based on the ways that the climate crisis and COVID-19 crisis are similar, there is little doubt that trust in government, the media, and other large institutions might be common predictors. Mixed messages from the government, messages that clashed with those coming from the scientific community, made it difficult to get a unified response. After President Trump’s address on Wednesday, markets across the world saw stunning drops. When the President re-set course on Friday and communicated a clearer message and let scientists discuss paths forward, markets showed signs of improvement. This made it abundantly clear that how we deliver information can have a major impact.
Still, the ways these crises are different lead to such different governmental and social responses. COVID-19 is disruptive on a much shorter time scale — within a week we have seen the US government move from cautious press statements to national emergency declarations. The path of a virus, though microscopic, is often clear to conceptualize, and time from initial infection to onset of symptoms can be predicted (3–14 days). It is much more difficult for most people to look at projections of greenhouse gas emissions and resulting feet of sea-level rise over the next century. If we could visualize as clearly the impacts we are driving, I think our climate response would align more closely with efforts to curb COVID-19. While climate change unfolds on a drastically longer timescale and reducing emissions is much more complex a process than social distancing, the similarities in data projections are abundantly clear. There’s potential to drastically improve future outcomes if we act soon.
In New Jersey, state officials are stressing the importance of ‘mitigation’ — reducing the number of people infected and the rate of infection through measures like social distancing. The climate science community has been stressing mitigation for decades, with goals to reduce the amount of global greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change, ultimately avoiding the worst of its potential impacts. For both climate and COVID-19, mitigation depends on large scale societal cooperation, both as individuals in communities and nations in a global community.
COVID-19 lockdowns have also exposed the ways that our global economic structure and drivers of climate change are inexorably linked — evidenced in the decline of air pollution over Italy and drop in coal consumption in Chinese power plants.
We’ve been largely unsuccessful on the climate front, and it remains to be seen how COVID-19 will play out. Countries appear to be handling mitigation very differently — some have reflected on low death rates in South Korea as a result of a collective memory of SARS, with others commenting that Italians generally have trouble tolerating bureaucracy. While there are cultural and geographical factors at play, cooperation and care within individual communities are key to minimizing harm during crises.
While the organizing of individuals within communities can contribute considerably to local resilience, we need good governance to get through such large-scale existential threats. We desperately need our social safety nets to avoid throwing our most vulnerable under the bus, and we desperately need science-informed planning well before the crisis. The way COVID-19 in the US is currently playing out, in a best-case scenario, thousands of families are going to miss rent and mortgage payments, be forced to close small businesses, and become crippled by medical debt. More will drain through their last bit of savings because they don’t have paid sick time or be forced to leave jobs because they depend on public schools for childcare.
We will face these same issues again as climate impacts ramp up as projected by the IPCC. We have already seen wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts. We will see these on a larger scale, in more countries at once. Research shows clear links between climate impacts and human health. Unlike the (mostly) unforeseeable nature of a pandemic, scientists have long been urging governments to prepare for climate impacts.
Can COVID-19 show us that the cracks in our system are really sinkholes? Will we bail out families or Fortune 500s? This might sound dramatic, but pandemics are, by definition, pretty dramatic: in the midst of the chaos and suffering it causes, COVID-19’s silver lining has to be the window to expose the flaws in our systems of governance, giving us the license to unequivocally demand equity and change. It could save us, or at least provide some hope.
We are still in the midst of the crisis and when cases start to overwhelm our medical infrastructure at the same time that the pandemic assaults our economy, we will have very hard choices to make as a nation. How those choices play out could set the course that our country takes into the future. While the COVID-19 crisis is not exactly the same as the climate crisis, connections between the two are easy to make. Understanding how we might use this connection to clarify the importance of addressing climate change rapidly could help us turn this crisis into a profound opportunity for change.
