The deep social and economic impacts of COVID-19 will be felt long after we emerge from the health crisis. The question is how we will emerge: having “only” vanquished a virus pandemic or having used the financial restart measures to also significantly advance on the synchronous climate change emergency, having created a new social and environmental contract that meets the Sustainable Development Goals. Will we dangerously return to policies, technologies, business processes, and behaviors of the past, or will we derive valuable lessons for clean long-term growth and social inclusion, making us better equipped to take the other crises in our stride?
Some have pointed to the sudden drop in greenhouse gases as the link between COVID-19 and climate change. This is a false nexus. The temporary emission reduction is caused by economic paralysis and comes at a very high cost in human lives and livelihoods. The response to climate change has to be radically different.
In just a few short months the health crisis has already provided valuable insights applicable to the climate change crisis. We have learned that global challenges are in fact global, as they stop at no border and spare no geography. We have learned that global challenges require both governmental policy measures and individual behavioral changes and that both can be enacted quickly. We have relearned that it is best to prevent rather than to cure, and to do so with measures based on science rather than fantasy. Finally, we have learned that no one is safe until we are all safe.
We are all in this together, and there is an urgent need for building community and collaborating across governments, corporations, the financial sector, and civil society.
There are, of course, major differences between the two emergencies. Coronavirus is an acute challenge that sprang out of nowhere, resulting in understandable mass panic. The proverbial frog was suddenly dropped into the boiling water. Governments reacted to the imminent emergency swiftly and decisively. Conversely, climate change is a chronic threat, the mother of all risks, about which we have had decades of scientific warnings and ample destructive evidence.
The threat has been with us for so long that it has taken on the characteristics of the unaware frog swimming in water that is warming. Unconscious of the gravity of the situation, our responses have been insufficient to control the increasing global temperatures. We are perilously close to irreversible tipping points in nature, after which disastrous feedback loops kick in. The health crisis is a bitter foretaste of what climate change might bring: massive social breakdown, permanent poverty, and economic devastation for decades to come. Having experienced the social and economic trauma of the health crisis, we should decide not to tempt our fate any further.
We did not ask for these crises to converge upon us, but they have. In theory we could deal with each of them separately, or sequentially. But that makes no sense, and addressing one while ignoring the other would be disastrous. We must address them both in consonance with each other.