AT THE height of the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns, we commented here on the falls in pollution and carbon emissions because of car-free roads and plane-free skies. We also warned that “we must be realistic that this will have little if any long-term effect on global warming“.
Five months on, and the scores are on the doors. Global emissions are indeed more or less back to where they were before the pandemic. Meanwhile, more valuable time has been lost in creating a workable plan to restrict global warming to the “safe” level of 1.5°C set out in the 2015 Paris agreement (see “How the coronavirus has impacted climate change – for good and bad”).
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Yet the coronavirus pandemic has shown us that another world is possible. Governments can act decisively: in the words of natural hazards researcher Hannah Cloke, we now have “more than enough precedent to spend money to save people’s lives” (see “Hidden killers”). And individual behaviour and culture can change in weeks rather than years.
True, the emissions bounceback has shown us limits to behavioural change. But no serious plans advocate harmful coronavirus-style restrictions as a template for how to drastically cut emissions. Systems need overhauling, with sweeping, deep-reaching changes to how we power our homes, industry and transport, and how we use land.
The good news is that the technology and know-how to do that now exists, in ways it perhaps didn’t even a decade ago. What happens next will hinge on the colour of the financial stimulus that follows the pandemic, and the technologies that leaders back. They need to be green.
As this week’s columnist, Graham Lawton, points out, individuals aren’t powerless to effect systemic change, either. Bare economic reality is already greening the financial system. Anyone lucky enough to have a pension or other savings pot can exert pressure to accelerate that process (see “Rethinking your pension may just be the greenest thing you can do”).
Coronavirus won’t be the last crisis the world faces as climate change grinds on. The mathematics of cutting carbon emissions demands that, like covid-19 vaccine trials, we must tackle these crises in parallel, not in series. It is time to start firing on all cylinders.
