Recovering a New (Environmental) Equilibrium
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and on this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, what might we do to help vulnerable populations through the near-term economic crisis without creating a longer-run, slower-moving environmental one?
This post, written by affiliate Jen Burney, Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, is part of a series of posts for Earth Day guest-authored by CEGA affiliates.
Earth Day 2020 finds us all in the middle of an extraordinary moment for the planet. The global COVID-19 pandemic has sickened nearly 2.5 million people around the world and killed more than 170,000, and those numbers will undoubtedly rise. To slow the coronavirus’s carnage, governments have closed borders, restricted travel, banned large gatherings, and effectively cordoned off more than 2 billion individuals in their homes. This rapid rearrangement of the social order and dampening of the global economy has meant that, in addition to the direct human toll, hundreds of millions of individuals have lost their formal jobs and informal livelihoods.
As this shock unfolds, effort and research by many development economists are rightly focused on mobilizing aid and information to help under-resourced communities handle the pandemic itself, and on identifying and getting relief to the communities hit hardest and fastest, like merchants and other workers in urban areas whose incomes stem directly from the vibrancy of city life. Recent research by CEGA affiliates feels more prescient than ever: With health concerns keeping travel and face-to-face interactions to a minimum, innovations for financial inclusion that facilitate targeting and disbursal of resources, and remote-sensing approaches to monitoring welfare and smallholder agriculture at high temporal resolution will be critical for lessening the secondary and tertiary effects of the pandemic.
But many of us are carrying around an additional worry. It feels secondary to the public health emergency, but intricately tied to everything after:
As efforts to nudge economies back into motion take place in the coming months and years, there is a risk that a short-run calculus to get individuals, families, communities, and nations back on their feet will take place at the expense of the environment. Some of this may be from the top down: bad-faith environmental regulation rollbacks are already taking place, and many policymakers buy into the either/or ideology that pits stewardship of natural resources against growth. But it’s not just leaders who make these tradeoffs. All around the globe, economically stressed and already poor households will likely face choices in the coming months between catastrophe and practices like expanding cropland into native habitat, depleting soils, overfishing, overhunting, overgrazing, cutting down trees, burning solid fuels. These actions will save lives and livelihoods in the short term, but the destruction of natural capital — which can take decades or more to replenish, and would perturb the global carbon cycle to accelerate warming — will depress growth in the longer term.
It seems fitting, then, on this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, to embody the original spirit of the day as a teach-in and think about what we as a community might do in the very short term to help vulnerable populations through the near-term economic crisis without creating a longer-run, slower-moving environmental one. I’m inspired by all that we have learned that could be put into action immediately: Access to improved inputs, storage mechanisms, post-harvest processing, and market information and connectivity help grow more food and sell it at better prices. New credit and insurance products could help pastoralists and other entrepreneurs — especially women — navigate uncertain future markets. Digital financial services (including mobile money) may help reach the poor with direct payments, and facilitate remittances. Investments in all of these areas would be expected to help avoid environmental damages, but they could also be coupled with direct payments for preservation of forests and other ecosystem services (these may be most effective when targeted at the neediest households). Finally, those who do act locally for conservation and against corruption need documenting and reporting systems that protect them.
Through such actions and investments, I hope we will recover towards a new equilibrium, and be bold about re-imagining the future after. Earth Day was meant to inspire planetary stewardship. While that has been true for half a century, this year more than ever it feels both urgently necessary and finally possible.
