Climate and COVID
The past year of 2020 has seen many changes, perhaps the largest being a world-wide pandemic that has changed everything from the economy, to work, but mostly our daily lives. Many people now find themselves working from home more, staying home more, and even hanging out outside more. Many people lost their jobs, businesses, or maybe lost money to the stock market. Although much bad has happened, environmentally, this has been a good thing- for the most part.
One noticeable difference since the major shutdown earlier this year is air pollutants have gone down significantly. This shouldn’t be surprising, as everyone stayed home. Agreed upon in the Sustainability article, “Consistent with this characterization, carbon monoxide (CO) and other pollutants have plummeted along with carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions (McGrath 2020), birds long unheard fill the streets with song, and dolphins are alleged to be frolicking in Venice.” (Goffman, 2020) Many people don’t believe that climate change is caused by human activity. Even beaches are seen to be much cleaner than before. One could ask themselves, if it were not caused by human activity, why does the environment seem to be doing better once we take ourselves out of it?
Perhaps the pandemic is the start of a new reality, as cities move towards more clean energy with more walking, biking, and using more public transit. (p 49) When non-essentials were closed, people were forced to find new hobbies besides shopping and eating out. Personally, I’ve never seen parks so packed, filled with entire families out biking and going for walks. It hasn’t stopped though, with a mask mandate most people don’t want to be in the gyms, sweating, and wearing a mask. Instead of being inside at a gym, they exercise outside. Things like movie theatres still aren’t open, and restaurant are only at 50%. People don’t want to wait outside of bars for an hour before they get in, many simply stay home instead. The future of business in a world that doesn’t go out much takes the form of zoom calls, online shopping, take-out from restaurants, grocery delivery, and an enourmous amount of hand sanitizer.
What do global warming and COVID have in common? Both were cause by human activity. As stated in Press’s article “The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 3 out of every 4 new or emerging diseases come from animals, further exposing the dangers of deforestation, which is a main driver of climate change.” With its earliest links coming from a food market in Wuhan, one can guess that an animal with a disease began this pandemic. Despite what many people like to belive our actions are giving us consequences. Overall, this great start on lowering emissions. Much more action needs to be taken if these lower emissions will last, and if want to see real change for our warming climate.
Sources: Goffman, E. (2020). In the wake of COVID-19, is glocalization our sustainability future? Sustainability : Science, Practice, & Policy, 16(1), 48–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2020.1765678
Press, Brady. (2020). COVID-19 and Climate Change-SDGs 13 and 15. Medium,https://medium.com/sdg-counting/covid-19-and-climate-change-sdgs-13-and-15-1c8d063686ce
