COVID-19 Learns Us We Need a Climate Lockdown. Every Year.
A yearly Climate Lockdown will make for a positive Climate narrative.
And then the world was being put into emergency mode by COVID-19. For a couple of weeks, the hope was that it would remain a local or regional problem. After all, earlier viral outbreaks had been successfully managed on a national or regional level. But when the virus started spreading and popping up everywhere, societies around the world quickly realised the problem was growing out of their hands… unless they would act swiftly.
I found it truly bewildering to see how swift governments acted with unimaginable measures. By the end of February, you would be laughed at if you’d say we would put the whole world economy to a halt. Yet by the end of March most countries were in some kind of lockdown and we were all figuring out how to live without travel, teach from home and work from distance.
Now a couple of months later, in some regions (China & Europe mainly) societies are trying to put in place a fragile sense of old ‘normalcy’. Lockdowns are being lifted and people can somewhat return to life. Not as they knew it, because many measures are still in place and locally some are already being rolled back. The virus is still hanging around and waits for opportunities to spread and grow out of control again.
And when it does, the story is the same everywhere: a spike in cases leads to a strong influx of patients at health care facilities a couple of weeks later. And the economy suffers badly.
COVID-19 and its response have left societies wounded. The virus, having no motive, no goal, just hit. It exposed the weaknesses of our open, interlaced and efficient societies.
And most importantly, we’ve lost our sense of invincibility and control. The world economy was roaring, stock markets were sky-high and unemployment was at an all-time low. Nothing would stop us.
Yes, there was a looming Climate Crisis. And especially the young and scientists were getting quite alarmists about it. Time was indeed running short. In 2018 the IPCC gave us 12 years. But the true extent of that message did just not want to sink in. We would solve that problem just in time. And for now, lip-service (like declaring climate emergencies) seemed enough to put our fears to rest.
How much of what is happening now is the Climate Crisis in a fast-forward version?
Two years ago, the words ‘flattening the curve’ did not exist. And people in the Climate field have been quick to notice the similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Climate Crisis. The curve showing the incidence of cases over time needed a quick flattening. That was the only way to save our health services and by extension our economy. This was exactly what we needed for the Climate Crisis, especially since the lockdown cut CO2 emissions at a scale never seen before.
Yet, there are also big differences between the COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis. A straightforward one is speed. The velocity at which COVID-19 is raging is incomparable to the Climate Crisis, which is unfolding over decades, not weeks. Also, COVID-19 is targeting our older generation, whereas the Climate Crisis is affecting the younger one. Remember how in 2019 (it already seems a long time ago) the young took the streets to protest about our inaction to do something about it. They were demanding solidarity. While for COVID-19 the lockdowns were imposed in solidarity for the older generation.
But the main difference is that the Climate Crisis has yet to meet the threshold in which it is truly felt as a pandemic, even when the effects of Climate Change are being felt in every corner of the world. The list is endless: droughts, inundations, rising sea-levels, melting glaciers, thawing and burning permafrost, heating oceans, loss of biodiversity, locust plagues. With so much evidence in plain sight and so little action, scientists have gradually dropped their neutral messaging and taken a more activist and alarmist stance.
Unfortunately, for most people connecting these events into a single narrative is still too much of a stretch, let alone making a positive narrative out of it. For one: all these events are still being reported as individual unrelated events. The bigger scale showing the relations between these events is usually not being discussed much within the mainstream media. Secondly, the tone of the Climate Crisis is indeed negative and alarmist. And as long as it doesn’t affect us individually (like it was being felt for COVID-19), such a tone has never been a good motivator for action.
A positive narrative inspires big changes. Change the story and it will change everything. We’ve seen it at work with the German reunification, where the story for reunification was so strong that it became inevitable. And this was a story by design, by choice.
Though COVID-19 has managed a radical global response, its narrative has been the emergency one. We’re being taken by surprise and we need to take harsh and difficult measures to fight off the disaster. The images are warlike: our healthcare workers have become frontline workers.
It was a response by disaster, not by design. And this opens the opportunity to make our response to the Climate Crisis a positive response, a response by design.
Interestingly enough, COVID-19 was not a black swan, it was predicted. Every year, the World Economic Forum publishes a Global Risk Report and the spread of infectious diseases always ends high in the charts. So our global leaders were aware. They knew something like COVID-19 would be coming. The same holds for climate related risks. Their likelihood and impact are even perceived as a bigger risk than infectious diseases by the World Economic Forum.
So let’s not make the same mistake twice.
What does this mean for the the Climate Crisis? The past few months have made me more concerned but also more hopeful. First of all, the resilience, ingenuity and creativity of people around the globe are unsurpassed. We are able to cope with huge setbacks and bounce back. But secondly, we also see that crises are no watershed moments in terms of change of life. We easily go glide back to our lives before… unless we design them differently.
Tapping into this creativity by design, would allow us to go beyond the wake-up call of crises and make big changes.
I would suggest a yearly Climate Lockdown. We’re ready to battle COVID-19 with an emergency lockdown. So let’s draw a lesson from that and start a yearly Climate Lockdown. But this one designed and based on a positive and aspirational narrative.
The positive narrative is already out there. Project Drawdown could be a great example as a starting point. Their focus is on getting the CO2 levels back to normal. That’s a positive and aspirational invitation around with we can design and implement solutions. Importantly, such a narrative does not judge our current way of living (as so often happens when talking about climate) which I feel is often a hindrance to start acting.
The typical lockdown lasted a couple of weeks to up to three months. So say we agree on a global Climate Lockdown every year for a month. Just one month. That month will have as overarching goal to flatten the CO2 emission curve and to design radical steps to achieve this, be it by sucking out excess CO2 from the air or by mitigating our CO2 emissions.
The use of the word ‘radical’ is important here because it acknowledges the need for an overhaul of our societies in line with the Paris agreements. By experiencing the lockdown, we’ll feel the freedom to think radically. Doing it together will also make us aware of the deep connections that exist between ourselves and between different climate-related events. It will allow us to see the bigger picture and design responses for that. Just like we currently experience this with the COVID-19 lockdown. But then in a positive and aspirational way.
A yearly Climate Lockdown will help us to shed the old paradigm that keeps us on the wrong trajectory.
