Can coronavirus make politicians take the loss of nature seriously?

Way back when we could plausibly make plans for 2020, the start of this new decade was hailed by green campaigners as a ‘super year’ for the environment, with major global summits scheduled on climate change, nature and oceans.

One of these was set to be the first international environmental summit ever hosted in China , billed as the chance to ‘avert the sixth mass extinction’. This Convention on Biological Diversity summit has been tentatively rescheduled for next spring — yet international headlines and political discussions about China have made scant if any references to this major conference.

This might be unsurprising, given, y’know, a global pandemic. But let’s face it, the lack of awareness or political attention on a global nature conference is one thing we can’t blame on corona.

Biodiversity protection has barely ever made it to the political top table. Would there really have been global attention if this summit had gone ahead in China, even without coronavirus? But with environmental diplomacy tentatively restarting — world leaders met virtually at the UN Summit on Biodiversity this week — are we seeing signs that the experience of Covid-19 is putting our politics in better shape to reset our relationship with nature?

High on public engagement, low on political power

Researchers have looked into why biodiversity loss gets less attention than climate change — up to eight times less in media coverage. Is it because the term doesn’t translate well across languages (even in English alone, should we call it biodiversity, nature, wildlife…)? Is it too technical? Is it because there are so many causes behind the loss that it’s more difficult to pinpoint the problem compared with fossil fuel emissions? I’ve campaigned across climate and nature issues, and I’ve always been surprised by nature activists wistfully longing for the ‘ease’ of communicating about climate change: talking about immense forests and magnificent whales feels intuitively much more engaging than a discussion about parts-per-million of carbon dioxide.

Then again, it’s not a problem of public engagement. Millions of people over decades have signed petitions to save the rainforest. Before young people across the world went on strike to raise the alarm over the climate emergency, the threat of plastic pollution in our oceans got the Daily Mail and Greenpeace singing from the same hymn sheet (‘single-use’ was even named word of the year in 2018). David Attenborough’s Blue Planet 2 jammed the internet in China.

What’s missing is building the political power to get the change we need.

Climate change has, over the past decade, become a major geopolitical issue. ‘G7 leaders agree to phase out fossil fuels’ was the stand-out headline from discussions between Merkel, Obama, Abe and others in 2015. Xi Jingping made stepping up China’s climate goals central to his UN opening speech last week — resulting in a flurry of foreign policy analysis about what this meant for China’s relationships with Europe and positioning versus the US.

Yet, even though China is hosting the UN conference next year that will determine the international community’s response to devastating biodiversity loss over at least the next decade — Xi made no headline-grabbing, transformational announcements at this week’s UN Biodiversity Summit about protecting nature.

Nature protection just doesn’t seem to matter as much to politicians as climate change. Rather than being considered central to governments’ mandates to provide prosperity and security for their citizens, it’s largely a ‘nice to have’ — or more often than not, ‘we’ll get to that… later’. Without a step change in political engagement, we’ll never see change at the scale or urgency needed to prevent catastrophic loss of the natural world — just look at the recent news that governments failed to meet every single target they set themselves on nature protection a decade ago.

Rather than a series of global summits on the environment, 2020 will be remembered as the year of COVID. What faultlines in the politics of protecting nature does the experience of COVID-19 open up — or expose as key hurdles for us as campaigners to overcome?

Human health relies on healthy nature

First, we have to look at the root cause of diseases like COVID-19. Uprooting forests and exploiting nature creates fertile ground for new pandemics to emerge and spread. The initial diagnoses of how COVID-19 swept up on us may have focused narrowly (and neatly for certain political actors keen to cast blame) on Chinese wet markets and the wildlife trade. But the roots of this problem go wider and deeper. Scientists have become increasingly vocal that disturbing natural ecosystems through mining, logging and clearing land for agriculture removes the barriers between wildlife pathogens and humans. And conversely, protecting nature creates a shield, preventing infections spreading to humans.

None of these warnings are particularly new. A global report on the state of nature was released in spring 2019 — you may remember the warning of one million species going extinct or you may not; it came out on a bank holiday (back when they meant sunny afternoons outside rather than police megaphones). Compiled by top scientists and approved by all governments, the UN report affirmed that ‘The deterioration of nature and consequent disruption of benefits to people has both direct and indirect implications for public health … and can exacerbate existing inequalities in access to health care’.

COVID-19 as a disruptive experience has definitely not been felt evenly nor equally, across the globe nor within societies — but it has devastatingly shown us what environmental destruction can mean for human health. By impacting how people eat, work, and see family all across the world, billions of us now have a lived experience to flesh out descriptions about ‘nature’s life support systems’. We’ve witnessed first-hand the damage caused by a disease borne of nature destruction.

While repeating this scientific argument got a lot of lip service from leaders’ video messages at the UN summit this week, it didn’t unlock any decisive action to protect nature. Surveys have shown public awareness and understanding of how encroaching on nature creates the conditions for zoonotic diseases like COVID to emerge remain low — meaning while there’s strong science, there’s a lack of public pressure pushing politicians to act on the root causes.

We need to learn from air pollution campaigners, who alongside racking up clear evidence of the impact of polluting cars on human health worked alongside the most impacted communities, doctors, parents and schoolkids to build a political constituency with lived experience of this harm. They could powerfully demonstrate how environmental damage is personal, to win political victories restricting harmful diesel and petrol emissions.

Building political power, especially with those most exposed to the risk of COVID, around the premise that carrying on with business-as-usual nature destruction puts us all at unacceptable risk of new pandemics is now a central task for environmental campaigners.

Natural resources? Now we’re talking

This is all the more urgent as many industries have used lockdowns as a green light to ramp up exploitation of the natural world.

From loggers and miners making the most of limited patrols around protected areas and successfully lobbying to become ‘essential industries’ eligible for special conditions, to industrial agriculture winning bailout payments in the billions and stimulus packages that incentivise deforestation — many nature-destructive industries have benefited from the pandemic. It may be the opposite of intuitive, but the industries that have made us collectively more vulnerable to the outbreak of pandemics like COVID-19 could emerge from this crisis in an even stronger position.

When we think about nature protection not getting much political attention, we have to remember that the industrial interests destroying nature have plenty of political power. They’ve successfully made resource use and resource security far more politically sexy than biodiversity and nature — even though these are two sides of the same coin.

This siloeing of the tough, serious talk of resources from fluffy environmental protection is convenient for industrial interests — but is a far cry from the first time governments collectively engaged with environmental challenges at the United Nations. The focus of the Stockholm Conference in 1972 was explicitly on “the human environment”. The first principle of the declaration that governments agreed was centred around eliminating discrimination, apartheid and colonialism, and its second principle was all about resource use. While this was decried as “highly politicised”, that’s precisely the point. International cooperation over the global commons of vital life support systems is a highly complex political problem — we need to treat it as such.

Failing to engage with the more blatantly ‘political’ issues around resource use at a global scale means conservation efforts can disastrously backfire. Take Emmanuel Macron’s moralising crusade over the Amazon fires at last summer’s G7 summit. This played perfectly into Jair Bolsonaro’s “Keep your hands (or morals) off our land” nationalistic rallying cry, as he called out the hypocrisy between Macron’s show-boating and European demand for agricultural commodities borne of nature destruction. The Brazilian President repeated this message at the UN this week, telling other leaders, “I strongly reject international greed towards our coveted Amazon.” To work, nature protection has to be about more than certain leaders trying to polish their haloes. It needs systemic solutions that tackle whole systems predicated on driving us into ecological collapse and concentrating the wealth of the very few.

As the disproportionate risk and impact of COVID-19 on already marginalised communities has exposed the deep, and deadly, social inequalities within and across our societies, the space for more intersectional solutions has opened. This is the time to build alliances and support bold demands, rather than piecemeal policy asks, that can deliver transformations in how we care for people and nature.

Think local, act global

A final major problem to confront is the widespread political perception of biodiversity as only a local, or at most national, issue — leaving the international process designed to protect nature sapped of any meaningful political engagement (see again: governments failed to meet every single one of the global nature targets due this year).

The last trip I did before spring’s lockdown was to these Convention on Biological Diversity negotiations, prepping for the big nature summit in China. The meeting itself was disrupted by the rapid spread of COVID-19 — hastily moved from Kunming to Rome, the outbreak of the virus in northern Italy mid-way through forced delegates to undergo thermometer tests to enter the building, and a negotiator broke off her speech when her phone buzzed to tell her that borders to her home country had suddenly closed.

Yet even as the extent of our global interconnection was being made starkly apparent, I listened to a number of governments arguing that nature is a purely local issue. They asked why they were even negotiating a global biodiversity framework — at the very multilateral forum that’s based on the premise that biodiversity is an issue of shared global concern.

For too long, while campaigns have called for a ‘New Deal for Nature’, the lack of political engagement has left a disparate set of policy asks on protected areas and species extinction targets — which risk being watered down in technical negotiations. What’s needed is a political drive to thread these measures into a global resetting of our relationship with nature, building political action that can match the scale of the nature crisis we face.

Any kind of new deal, whether a green new deal or a new deal for nature, requires a new political logic: bringing together different voices, listening to those who have felt unheard, creating a new vision. At the heart of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was a new political deal: all countries will step forward together to tackle this global problem. This was marked most strongly by Presidents Obama and Xi making a joint announcement about their respective national pledges a year ahead of the Paris summit. This weaving together of national commitments added up to a global step-change — and with the sequencing of announcements by both the EU and China to enhance their climate pledges in the past week, this political deal is still holding — despite the Trump administration’s planned withdrawal.

This week, leaders from over 60 countries pledged to put protecting wildlife and nature at the heart of their recoveries — but with China, alongside the US, Brazil and Australia, notably absent. As this was just a voluntary pledge that can build momentum for but not replace formal multilateral action, will China find willing partners in other countries to make the overall outcome of next year’s nature summit a key part of an effective multilateral response to the coronavirus crisis?

There’s no ‘ta-da!’ moment or simple answers in COVID times. A deadly pandemic is not an ‘opportunity’ — the question is, how many more of these diseases can we afford without using the disruption they bring to force changes to conditions that let them emerge?

The global environmental summits will not deliver better outcomes when they’re rescheduled next year unless we shift the politics of nature protection. If biodiversity stays in a box marked ‘another reason we face impending doom’, action becomes even less politically palatable in the COVID context of governments being forced to take unpopular decisions amid consistently bad news. But if the recognition of nature as a shield in pandemic-proofing the world, combined with people’s newfound appreciation of green spaces during lockdowns, can build broader movements calling for change to improve people’s everyday lives across the world, there’s a chance to overcome the powerful industrial interests lobbying to entrench nature destruction in COVID recoveries.

After all, guns, nets and bulldozers are behind the nature destruction that exposes us to pandemics and a whole host of other problems. We need to make sure that the political dynamics of recovery create space for ceasefires, social safety nets and building back together — with, not against, the natural world.