Using an Emergency Medicine Mindset to Guide Climate Action: Lessons from the COVID
The vast differences between countries in bringing the 2020 pandemic under control show the consequences of failing to invest in ICU surge capacity, public health, preparedness, and emergency economic planning. In the US, a streak of anti-science, anti-expertise sentiment resulted in an incompetent White House. In East Asia, stay-at-home was only needed for brief periods, giving them advantages over competitors weakened by self-inflicted recessions.
The pandemic has shown how failure of leadership leads to crisis and loss of life at a scale that is now, unfortunately, imaginable. Climate-amplified extreme weather is now more severe and frequent, with sustained surges in severe storms (up 7x since 2008), inland floods, mega heatwaves, hot-dry-windy “fire weather,” and stalled hurricanes. These events can catalyze famine, civil disorder, and public health emergencies beyond the scale of the COVID-19 crisis. They threaten a human population crash via famine and genocides. Because streams of refugees contaminate water supplies, they can trigger pandemics.
Using an emergency medicine mindset for climate can also onboard medical and public health professionals into understanding the nature of the climate crisis and the scale of solutions necessary, including emissions reduction and rapid CO2 sequestration.
There is need to rethink what preparedness and counter measures look like in this new era of high risk. Climate response leadership must quickly adapt working frameworks from other emergency experts. Here I adapt the physician’s mental check list to show what a “climate doctor” would need to consider.
It starts with anticipation (e.g. stockpiling, undergrounding power lines), stabilizing the patient (emergency economic plans), diagnosis (excess CO2), prognosis (climate models), ruling out concurrent problems (extreme weather surges), formulating a plan of action (CO2 removal), and, finally, preventing the problem from repeating (zero emissions).
Characterizing the climate crisis simply as “gradual overheating” understates the risk. Rather, we must treat the climate crisis in the same way we view the pandemic: a crisis that intersects across human health, economic security, geopolitical conflict, and leadership failure. We are in the territory where fast tracks to global disaster must be headed off.
