What Covid-19 teaches us about climate change

Coronavirus took us by surprise, even though there were early warning signs. The same story might play out with climate change if we refuse to learn lessons from the pandemic...  

As I write this, most countries are slowly coming out of the lockdown but we all know that the coronavirus pandemic is far from over.

What are our urgent needs? Immediate healthcare for the infected and protection for those who are not. Plus, timely and effective financial assistance for everyone big and small who has to suffer the economic fallout of the pandemic. 

Eventually, the situation will come under control if we act appropriately. But what comes after, is something I believe we have to address early in the recovery process. In particular, climate change.

There are striking parallels between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. The pandemic underscores the consequences of being aware of a risk in principle but not addressing it adequately on time. In the early 2000s, the SARS outbreak had highlighted the possibility of a virus spreading fast across the world. We saw it, heard it, experienced it, and then promptly forgot about it as the outbreak died down.

Five years ago, Bill Gates had also warned us in a TED Talk that the greatest risk of a global catastrophe lay in an outbreak of a highly infectious virus. 

No one thought at the time that Covid-19 will claim more than 215,000 lives in a matter of months. And still counting. If we had prepared our healthcare and medical research systems for such an eventuality, many lives could have been saved.

It’s the same with climate change. We know it’s coming. It has started already. We know the consequences will be severe. But it has not been priority for most of us for a while now.

Could we have stopped the pandemic? Probably not. What we could have done is been better prepared.

To be brutally honest, our attitude to climate change mirrors our attitude to coronavirus. Many societies were unprepared for it because when it emerged, they thought: ‘It’s happening in another part of the world. It won’t affect us.’

Just like there is no vaccine or medicine against Covid-19, there is no way to prevent climate change completely. All we can do is slow them down – both the infection rate through social distancing and climate change through effective policies and procedures. Let’s ‘flatten the curve’ – for infections, for temperatures.

We all – including myself – owe it to our parents and grandparents to be safe now and to our children to be safe in the future.

So what is the lesson here? That we should not put climate change on the backburner as we try to recover from this crisis. Green recovery should remain our principle despite arguments for delaying the planned decarbonization measures to accelerate economic reconstruction. 

If it doesn’t, the next crisis will be here before we know it.

The pandemic has indeed changed behaviors. Some of these behaviors are here to stay and they will contribute to the environmental cause - more digitalization, less business travel, more remote working, wider adoption of virtual services are just some examples.

Our macro and micro recovery measures must make the global economy resilient, drive structural changes towards climate neutrality, and facilitate a sustainable as well as inclusive growth model.

The way we move forward globally will define our future.

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