So, the coronavirus… I won’t tell you what you already know – you should be listening to scientists and credible news sources for that, not me, a climate activist. But instead, here’s what I’d like to tell you: this is what happens when we continue to destroy nature.
However, if we can learn from this crisis, we can prevent another one from happening.
Now don’t get me wrong, the fact that carbon emissions have dropped by no means makes the pandemic a good occasion. After all, environmentalists like me only care about the climate crisis so much because we care about people.
We simply don’t want anyone to die.
Right now, the pandemic has taken away so many lives. On the other hand, climate change has been killing people for many years now, and it continues to do so and will most likely worsen as the years go by. Perhaps we can use this current crisis as a lesson to prevent the next one: the climate catastrophe.
If you read the news at all, you should know that the root cause of this virus is most likely the encroachment of natural habitats, not some conspiracy theory you read about.
Whether it was SARS, MERS, Zika, Ebola or AIDS, when people go into wild territory and bring out unknown creatures, they expose exotic viruses to the human community, giving birth to what we call zoonotic diseases, or germs transmitted from animals to humans.
The same goes for stealing wild animals from their homes, locking them up with other unfamiliar species – some ill – in hot, dirty, humid cages and selling them as pets to locals and tourists. You may be familiar with such a place in Bangkok, and it doesn’t take being a zoologist to recognize how a nasty monster germ might mutate from those living conditions.
There’s this concept called the One Health Model, which acknowledges that for humans to stay healthy, we also need healthy animals and healthy environments. After all, we depend on the earth and its inhabitants for our survival, not the other way around. Had we implemented this model more seriously before this outbreak, we could have simply avoided it.
However, seeing the efforts that have been taken to prevent the further spread of the virus – though clearly, some countries are less effective than others – it’s amazing how humans are able to cooperate with immediacy in reaction to a crisis. We’ve seen governments act to mobilize resources and enforce strict laws in a short amount of time. Public citizens who could afford to have self-isolated and social distanced for the better of the community, whether voluntary or by imposed law. With that, emissions and pollution levels have drastically declined from reduced economic activity.
Because of this sudden disruption, governments and the media are finally beginning to address how deforestation and the wildlife trade is linked to the outbreak. If anything, there’s never been such a great opportunity to highlight both our environmental and social issues.
When the roads of Bangkok became (somewhat) void of cars, air pollution dropped dramatically. This is just one example which showed not only that we are able to reduce our dependence on personal cars should we decide to, but also that we need to, for the health of urban dwellers and the environment. There’s finally room to make amends for more inclusive pedestrian spaces and shared modes of transportation, which will both ease traffic congestion and improve living standards which in turn increase overall productivity.
What’s happening right now is a reminder that we humans cause ourselves problems by messing with nature, but also that when we come together and cooperate, we have the ingenuity to turn around a crisis.
COVID-19 has taken quite a turn since its inception, but on the bright side, we still managed to handle it before it wiped out half our population. Now, as our healthcare providers and frontline heroes are battling with this issue, let’s think further about how not to spur another such worldbreaker.
While the coronavirus has killed thousands so far worldwide, every single day for the past many years, our governments have been wasting money and people have been dying because of climate change. It’s harder to pinpoint because climate change doesn’t come labeled as climate change–instead it comes as wildfires, floods, droughts, air pollution, storms, heatwaves, food and water scarcity, mass migration, and of course, disease outbreak.
And these disasters, while they affect all of us, tend to hit the most vulnerable ones first and hardest. To address both the pandemic and the climate crisis, we not only need to shift to more sustainable cities and societies, but in doing so, we also need a just transition so that no one gets left behind.
If the world saw the climate crisis as serious as the virus — which it is — governments would already have set up climate funds–like they’re trying to for COVID-19, but are a bit late to it – while transitioning to renewable energy infrastructure, regenerative agriculture and more eco-centric infrastructures.
While quarantining people is definitely not the best solution to reducing emissions, our world has shown that we can do it, should we see climate change as an urgent problem. And the fact is, climate change is an emergency which takes many years to unfold, but once past a threshold, may be extremely difficult to overturn. When that happens, remember the scenes of this pandemic, because more people will die, more will panic and more will hoard toilet paper.
Once this pandemic flattens out, I hope we can all take the civic responsibility to keep our governments and corporations in check so they don’t repeat the same mistake. If we act now, we might just save ourselves from countless tragic natural disasters and lives lost, so let’s not wait for the last minute.
