Climate Change: Lessons from the Pandemic

ALLY MARECEK—THE SANTA CLARA

Coronavirus and climate change have more in common than you’d think

As emissions have plummeted by 18 percent, the air above China’s Hubei Province has given way to clear blue skies. Rivers in Italy are cleaner than they’ve been in decades. The air quality in New York City is twice as good as last year. 

In these three hotspots of the global pandemic, it seems the dark cloud of coronavirus has presented a silver lining for the environment.

But these silver linings offer short-term, and some might argue fleeting, benefits to the environment. The greater opportunity this moment presents for the planet is a chance to reevaluate the way we live our lives, to move forward on greater environmental efforts and to build resilience into our future. 

The horrible truth of the coronavirus is that no community has been spared. And that we face an enormous and indifferent enemy that is attacking us all with devastating consequences. In many ways, the challenges we face in dealing with the coronavirus are a kind of microcosm for the challenges we’ve been facing all along with climate change. In fact, the two are hauntingly similar.  

Consider the specifics of these three broad approaches to confronting both the pandemic and climate change: leadership, business and people. 

In the absence of a coordinated federal response to the pandemic from the White House, governors have stepped up. New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom ’89 have proven to have a command of the facts, pulling together resources and implementing plans that have allowed these hard-hit states to remain relatively calm through the crisis. Similarly, with President Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement, regional leaders have the ability to lead and adhere to the global commitments of aggressive emission standards and incentives to reduce greenhouse gasses. 

The pandemic caused an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression, devastating both small businesses and large corporations alike. This has exposed companies that failed to consider comprehensive preparation strategies for a dramatic downturn. The least prepared companies suffered the biggest losses. The looming threat of climate change is also going to force companies to be well prepared to meet extreme challenges.  The good news is companies have a chance to learn from this pandemic, to consider it an early-warning to build future resilience through environmental, social and governance strategies. The future economy will favor those most prepared.

This global pandemic has forced us all to change the way we live. Personal sacrifices like limiting air travel, working from home and shutting down non-essential industries has given the planet a glimpse of how dramatically these actions can restore the environment. Similarly, confronting climate change is at its core all about individual sacrifices. The problem feels too big to solve on an individual level, but if we can learn from the pandemic to fly less, to drive less and to think more carefully about what is essential, we can make dramatic strides in living up to the global goals to reduce carbon emissions. 

Beyond these broad approaches, climate change and coronavirus draw similarities in four areas: a shared history, financial risk, human loss and exacerbating inequality. 

Our reaction to both of these global threats follows the same playbook. First, we met both problems with denial, despite many warnings from scientists on the magnitude. Then, we minimized the severity of the problem, believing we had more time than we did. As the crises enveloped us both in the pandemic and in climate change, we descended into despair and said this might be impossible to solve. Then we too often rejected solutions that may compromise our sense of individual freedom. And through it all, we lacked the imagination needed to foresee the immense costs that these two threats pose for the future of the planet. 

Furthermore, the financial stakes of the coronavirus crisis and climate change are similarly grave. The World Economic Forum estimated in March that the total financial costs of the coronavirus has been more than $2 trillion and rising. When it comes to climate change, most economic projections predict the financial losses are more staggering but spread out over a longer period of time. By 2100, the total cost of climate change will be close to $6.5 trillion, or about seven percent of global GDP, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

Both of these threats will also take a human toll. So far, the coronavirus has taken 190,000 lives worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, conservative estimates predict that climate change will be directly related to more than 250,000 deaths per year by 2050.

The pandemic and climate change also hit the poor the hardest. In this cruel calculus, it is the most vulnerable countries that will suffer the most during this pandemic and it is the countries with the lowest levels of carbon emissions that are often hit hardest by the consequences of climate change set in motion by the world’s richest countries. 

So where do we go from here? The combination of effective local leadership and individual sacrifice eventually spurred action on coronavirus. And we are now seeing the clear results of these approaches as the curve moves closer to flattening. With that said, we could have done better, and we certainly can’t think of shutting down the economy as we’ve seen during this pandemic as a viable way to address climate change. The challenge going forward is to be sure we learn all of the lessons that this pandemic offers— lessons for governments, business and people - and bring them to our struggle to confront climate change.   

When the global pandemic finally passes, we will be left with a decision. We can return to our daily lives with the same mentality as before and continue on a path with a grim environmental future. Or, we can take to heart the lessons offered to us by this modern plague. And when the dark cloud of coronavirus lifts, we can have those blue skies remain over China, the clean rivers continue to flow in Italy and improved air quality sustained in New York.  We can learn from history, or be condemned to repeat it.