Pandemic Climate Lessons: The Economy Is Not Ready for the Environmental Crisis
Hopes are that Covid-19 could act as a lesson and pose necessary change
The numbers of deaths, as well as suspected and infected cases from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) are constantly rising. Whether in Europe, the current epicenter of the pandemic, the Middle East or the Americas. China’s contamination peak is over, and numbers are decreasing, but that is far from implying everything is back to normal. A group of scientists warns that the crash could extend until 2021 — affecting everything from people’s mental health to the global economy. What the Coronavirus pandemic is teaching us is that we are not prepared to deal with a worldwide disaster like climate change.
Many questioned why the Coronavirus was able to mobilize both the media and world leaders more effectively and faster than climate change and its resulting disasters. Faced with the undeniable reality that there are latent relations between the pandemic and climate change, the enigma is why large vehicles and political leaders are not making the necessary correlations more intensely at such an opportune moment. The answer, in addition to the fear linked to the spread of the new disease, lies in economic reasons.
Although the virus arose in 2019, no one predicted that its spread would hit the economy in this way. From March 9 to 16, that is in just one week, 3 thousand people died, the dollar reached R$ 5, and the stock exchanges of the world fell in historical numbers — only Ibovespa (Brazilian stock exchange) interrupted its negotiations five times last week.
While the virus was restricted to the Wuhan region, the world was merely watching what happened in China: the hospital that was built in ten days, the isolation, the videos posted on the internet from the crowded emergency wards, and exhausted doctors. When the first cases were reported in the western portion of the world, we were already aware of some characteristics of the virus, like the resulting symptoms, transmission, the age group with the highest chance of mortality. But it was only when the numbers started to grow daily in the tens, and Chinese exports and imports stopped, that the political leaders woke up. But they woke up late. As always. Last Wednesday (11), the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic stage. Coronavirus, which came to be treated as an imminent crisis, showed that we are not prepared to deal with the effects of climate collapse.
Crisis in all spheres
The Chinese government did not have many choices to deal with the emergency. They had to isolate the population of Wuhan (a city considered to be the hub of world civil construction), to apply quarantine measures, and also close spaces with agglomerations, such as companies, factories, and public spaces. The city, which in 2018–2019 had a total area dedicated to construction sites equivalent to the size of Hong Kong Island, was deserted, and production ceased. The restrictive measure was followed in other regions of the country. As a consequence, NASA detected that strong spots of nitrogen dioxide that hung between Wuhan, Shanghai, and Beijing disappeared within a month.
The country faces an old and severe air pollution problem for a long time. It has reached levels 45 times higher than the limit acceptable by WHO. Complications with air quality are so critical that China has become the primary buyer of bottled oxygen, sold by Canadian company Vitality Air. In 2019, the WHO elected air pollution, along with climate change, as one of ten greatest threats to global health, causing 9 out of 10 people to breathe polluted air in the world. According to the UN, air pollution kills 6 to 7 million people annually.
But the question that remains silent for economists and politicians around the world is of a “practical” order: when will Chinese production become active again?
Economists’ distress is not for nothing. With the spread of the virus in Europe, American President Donald Trump suspended, on the 12th, flights from the continent to the country. The decision shook the market, and the American stock exchange closed with the worst result since 1987. On the same day, Ibovespa had triggered a circuit breaker twice.
In an interview with Uol, analysts stated that economic recovery should take at least four months. Other sectors were also affected: the Brazilian Association of the Electrical and Electronics Industry (Abinee) announced, on the 9th, that the interruption of Chinese exports has already affected 70% of the Brazilian industry. China is responsible for almost 50% of all components used in the sector, such as chips, integrated circuits, washing machine parts, televisions, among others.
Aviation, which accounts for 2.5% of all carbon emissions in the atmosphere, has seen small businesses fail in various parts of the world. In Brazil, the Brazilian Association of Airlines (Abear) presented a package of proposals to reduce the losses caused by the decrease in passengers due to the Coronavirus. Tax reductions on aviation kerosene, aircraft leasing, employee payroll, and on the rates for air navigation and landing are among the requests. What Abear’s rapid and preventive movement signals are that the sector is neither prepared nor willing to deal with a — necessary — drop in demand if we want to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary, it expects to double the number of passengers to 8.2 billion by 2037.
As much as dozens of texts and analyses have shown how a pandemic like the one we are experiencing can be an opportunity to rethink everything, the priority of global leaders in the short-term is economic recovery. No thought is given building other possibilities. WHO has already stated that, by 2030, climate change will cause health expenditures of up to US$ 4 billion (R$ 20 billion) per year. Yet, we see movements like the American Central Bank System, the Fed, injecting US$ 1.5 trillion in the credit market to secure investors and banks.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a possible Democratic Party candidate for the US presidential election, taunted about political priorities on Twitter: “When we say it’s time to provide healthcare to all our people, we are told we cannot afford it. But if the stock market is in trouble, no problem! The government can just hand out $1.5 trillion to calm bankers on Wall Street”.
The tip of the iceberg
Human-made changes in the natural world have been dated and analyzed for more than a century. In 1965, an advisory committee communicated to the United States presidency that the greenhouse effect was a real concern. In 1988, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was created, which assesses the consequences of the environmental crisis. Nevertheless, in 2020, men continue to take their pollution to every corner of the earth. Like the plastic seen in Arctic snow and inside the body of a newly discovered marine animal, which lives 7 km deep in the Mariana Trench, between Japan and the Philippines.
In 2020, air pollution is responsible for one in every four premature deaths in the world. Rising temperatures not only cause heat waves that harm agriculture and increase the number of deaths — especially in the elderly — but also contribute to the spread of diseases in new regions, such as dengue. In 2019, the disease killed 2,000 people a day worldwide. In the Brazilian state of Paraná, 52,652 cases were confirmed only in 2020, with 30% of the municipalities in an epidemic. The March bulletin shows an increase of 1000% in relation to the previous one, from January 7.
Municipality resources are being spent. However, according to Rodrigo Said (dengue’s program coordinator from the Ministry of Health), the high temperatures and rains in the summer contributed to the occurrence of the epidemic. He also mentioned the change in the serotype. Infectologist Rivaldo Venâncio, the coordinator of health surveillance at Fiocruz (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) and professor at the University of Medicine at UFMS, points out that dengue deaths are preventable, but what has been observed are errors that contribute to the worsening of conditions, such as deficiencies in the public health system or delay in seeking medical help. Still, the attention given to cases is minimal. There is no study on how the disease impacts the lives of the infected, neither socially or economically. It was only after reaching the mark of 50,000 cases that ranchers and farmers showed concern for their production and began to monitor water-retaining spots on their properties.
As for the Coronavirus, there are those prone to poetry, saying the economic paralysis means holidays for Nature. Venice canals are as clean as ever. For the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the pandemic is “a sign that we cannot follow the same path that we have come up to now, that we need a radical change.” Focusing all efforts on containing the disease, with the sole objective of ensuring economic stability, is wasting the chance to invest and test alternative socio-economic models, which are genuinely sustainable and capable of protecting people’s lives in all fields, including the economic.
The executive director of the NGO 350.org, May Boeve, reflects on the urgency with which the Coronavirus was treated: “We saw that governments can act and people can change their behavior in a very short period. And that is exactly what the climate movement has been asking governments and people to do for years, and we do not see proportionate actions ”. Let us be realistic: we do not believe that it is a simple measure. To halt the economy from one day to the next would cost us many jobs, the breakdown of small and medium-sized businesses and, as always, would affect the most socially vulnerable groups: the poorest and women. But policies and technologies already exist to build new development paths that could prevent the climate scenario from advancing.
According to Joyeeta Gupta and Paul Ekins, who co-chaired UN’s 6th Global Environment Outlook report process, released in 2019, what is lacking is the political will to implement policies and technologies at a sufficient speed and scale. The climate collapse should be treated as a pandemic. It already affects us on all the continents of the world. It is already responsible for the death of thousands annually, and already has a drastic influence on countries’ economies. What else is missing? When the need actually forces us to stop everything, as the Coronavirus did, there will be no vaccine, quarantine, or circuit breaker that will soothe, save, or contain its effects.
Written by Juliana Aguilera
Originally published at modefica.com.br on March 20, 2020.
