Climate change and COVID-19: Which comparisons are useful?

This piece was originally published on March 31, 2020 on LinkedIn.

We are all seeing increasing amounts of content that draw parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and other pressing global challenges, most notably climate change. Many contain messages of optimism of what we will learn and apply from this current crisis and highlight the swift actions we’ve suddenly realised ourselves capable of. But with so many organisations and individuals seeking to keep themselves relevant in the our new reality by drawing hopeful connections to COVID-19, are we in danger of oversimplifying challenges like climate change?

Today, as I scrolled through LinkedIn, I glanced at a version of the widely shared “flatten the curve” coronavirus visualisation applied to the climate crisis, which I have replicated here. (Despite spending far too long scrolling back through my feed I cannot find the original source again, but due credit to the person/organisation that came up with it in the first place).

I was grabbed by its effectiveness. Simple messages like this delivered in ways that are now near-universally understood could help to emphasise the continued need for climate action to the public, governments and corporates alike. This is what we need!

But, pausing for a minute, my enthusiasm subsided. Whilst a powerful image, the visualisation above misses a fundamental point. With COVID-19, even in scenarios where governments and societies take no action or take action too late, eventually, the crisis likely would taper down (though at a terrible human cost).

Climate change, by contrast, threatens the stability of our societies and economies in a much more permanent fashion. Particularly as our understanding of possible tipping points in our future increases, we know that if we fail to keep climate change below levels deemed acceptable in the Paris Agreement, the only likely direction is toward more disruption. Heatwaves alone could kill more people each year than COVID has claimed thus far.[1]

So, whilst applying the “flatten the curve” visual to climate change is helpful in some ways, it needs adjusting. In reality, for the climate emergency, the visual should look something more like the image below (and with a y axis that rises far higher in terms of potential impact). Our ability to effectively adapt to climate risks diminishes if we reach potential runaway scenarios that exist past the boundaries of the Paris Goals, and we cannot reverse warming once it has occurred with any existing technologies. Adaptation and new technologies could eventually level off the curve, but not bring it back down.

The COVID-19 Pandemic is overwhelming, horrific. To highlight that the threat of climate change remains even more severe or more permanent should not for one second reduce the efforts we are making to stop this virus nor our support of those on the frontlines of this fight. The parallels that do exist show us that, as we are trying to do now with health workers and epidemiologists, we need to listen to climate activists, scientists and sensible politicians and to give them everything they say they need to fight this before it’s too late.

We should draw comparisons between climate change and COVID-19 that help us to convey the types of dramatic action we need to take, but we need to be careful to retain the nuances of these challenges. We must beware of trying to force everything through a COVID lens, even if it’s hard to think about anything else. Whilst both are invisible until it’s too late, and demand transformative and proactive action to avert, they are distinct in many of their other challenges and implications. For a start, catastrophic climate change could be here forever. COVID-19, mercifully, will one day be gone.

Whilst the rapid mobilisation of governments and societies has inspired hope that we can act quickly enough to address climate change, the reality is that few countries have thus far managed to establish trajectories that will keep COVID-19 infections below the lines of their healthcare systems’ capacity for care. The same failure to ‘stay below the line’ in climate action will have irreversible and terrible consequences.

It’s hard to think about, but the timeline we have to act on climate hasn’t changed and it’s incredibly short. We need to keep fighting as hard as we can for transformative action on climate change right now. As we do this, we can’t let searching for hopeful comparisons obscure the more permanent consequences of failure.

Addendum: After finishing this article, I came across this illustration which makes some of the same points I’ve tried to convey here in a much better way. Thanks for reading all the same.