The World's response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Lesson for Addressing the Climate Change Crisis?
THE WORLD’S RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: WHAT LESSONS FOR ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS?
Yakubu Aliyu Bununu, PhD
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria
The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are two crises that not only resemble one another but also interact. The two care very little about international or regional borders, making both scourges that are unfolding at a global scale. Just like climate change, the virus puts poor and vulnerable populations at greater risks than the elite and call for government action at a scale never witnessed in peacetime[i]. At the same time, a point of departure between the two is that the climate crisis has been proved to have a greater impact on poor and more vulnerable countries which contribute very little in causing it. COVID-19 and climate change have also exhibited remarkable levels of interaction with one another. This remarkable level
It is clear that COVID-19 and the climate crises are unfolding at a global and unprecedented scale bringing about huge levels of disruption that require a coordinated response by policy and decision makers, businesses and individual members of society. As they are very similar, so are they also markedly different. While the pandemic poses a direct threat to individuals and health systems, climate change on the other hand causes disruptions in and undermines broader national and human systems. Thus, COVID-19 requires responses within days and weeks, whereas reactions to climate change appear less urgent and acute. Nevertheless, the scientific evidence suggests that the impacts of climate change will worsen as the world takes longer in responding to it. Available evidence suggests that the world is indeed taking longer as many of the countries that form the Conference of Parties (COP) are on course to miss their emission reduction targets set for 2030 except if radical changes in production and consumption are introduced urgently[iii]. Therefore, humanity is today confronted with overlapping crises that require immediate societal mobilization[iv].
Just like the climate crisis has and is forecast to continue to, the
As COVID-19 spread all over the world, city after city have experienced remarkably similar patterns of the spread of the virus and have responded with drastic but necessary measures in order to stop or at the minimum slow the spread of the virus. These measures that have now become part of everyday vocabulary include social distancing, respiratory and hand hygiene, wearing of face masks, lockdown, quarantine, contact tracing, testing and self-isolation. In some instances, the measures instituted by cities that were hit by the virus earliest served as lessons for those the virus hit later on. This was enabled by the ability to share knowledge, experiences and best practices and this helped
However, the response to covid19 has varied from city to city. while it has been established that there is a link between high densities and fast as well as easy spread of infections, it is still a mystery to many experts why New York for instance has had more cases of infections and deaths due to COVID-19 than denser, more populated cities like Mani
The experts have also stated that in the absence of a vaccine or even a therapeutic treatment, the best weapon against the COVID-19 pandemic is each individual taking personal responsibility of observing public health guidelines such as wearing of masks, practicing good respiratory hygiene and social distancing. This also brings to mind how remarkably similar COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are because it has severally been argued by experts in the field that personal responsibility especially in consumption and other lifestyle choices hold the greatest potential for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and taming global warming and climate change. Here, it is important to stress that the rich nations of the world have a responsibility of showing the rest of the world the way by reforming and transitioning their economies from their current state of fossil fuel dependency to those anchored on cleaner and renewable energy resources.
As earlier stated, COVID-19 has occasioned the shutdown of the economies of many countries and the World Bank forecast states that the global economy would experience a very deep recession that will see it shrink by up to 5.2%[vi]. As the COVID-19 lockdowns are gradually being lifted and several national economies are staggering back to life, a unique opportunity is being presented to institute government policies that will move national economies away from fossil fuels and carbon at much lower political, financial and social costs that would have been otherwise obtained. Indeed, it is the tension between politics and economics on the one hand and concerns for the environment on the other that has been blamed for lack of or very little action at addressing climate change. This tension remains even as the pandemic continues to ravage many regions of the world and may actually have been aggravated by recent actions of isolationism rather than cooperation by many of the leading countries of the world like the United States, Germany and China. At the same time, there are signs of hope. About 17 European countries have stuck together and are calling on the European Commission to make the Green Deal central in the COVID-19 economic recovery efforts2.
The COVID-19 pause and the resultant reduction in the emission of GHGs is not necessarily climate-friendly. The global community must make it so. The 2021 stock-taking meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) should be used as an avenue not just for evaluation of the 2015 Paris Agreement but also an opportunity for raising their game in order to show that the lessons of the pandemic has catalysed them into taking more substantial actions that will lead to a breakthrough on the environment. How likely is this to happen going by the current state of global geopolitics? Where will the leadership come from considering that the United States under the Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that it is not interested in continuing with the long-established model of multilateral cooperation in global international relations? What is in no doubt however is that COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that the foundations of our societies and their well being and prosperity are precarious. In all of this, the poorer, more vulnerable regions of the world as well as minority groups in the United States and Western Europe appear more at risk of being plunged further into poverty, disease and even death. The disasters that have been long talked about and have been the subject of fictitious movies and books can actually become reality without any prior warning, turning life upside down and destabilizing all that seemed unshakably stable. The harm to our societies from climate change may be slower in unfolding than the pandemic, but when it eventually arrives, it will most likely be more devastating and longer lasting. If there was ever a good time for the leaders of the world to demonstrate the requisite courage in averting the climate disaster, that time is now as they may never have a more attentive audience should this opportunity be missed.
[i] The Economist (2020, 21 May). A new opportunity to tackle climate change: countries should seize the moment to flatten the climate curve. www.economist.com, retrieved 02.06.20.
[ii] The Economist (2020, 21 May). The other crisis. www.economist.com, retrieved 02.06.20
[iii] Bununu, Y.A. (2020). Domestic Material Consumption, Our Modern Economies, Lifestyles and Environmental Sustainability. In: Leal Wet al (eds) Sustainable cities and communities, encyclopedia of the UN sustainable development goals. Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Gewerbestrasse, Cham, Switzerland.
[iv] Science (2020, 1 May). A COVID-19 recovery for climate. http://science.sciencemag.org/, retrieved 04.06.20.
[v] Losavio and Charles (2020). Cities are especially vulnerable to COVID-19. www.reuters.com retrieved 04.06.20.
[vi] The World Bank (2020). The Global Economic Outlook During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Changed World. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/06/08/the-global-economic-outlook-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-changed-world, retrieved 12.06.20.
No 9 - This blog article is written under the auspices of the British Academy supported Critical Thinking and Writing Workshop for Urban Studies Researchers in Nigeria.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development or the University of Lagos, Nigeria.
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