Across the world, efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19 are in full effect. Cities are on lockdown, governments have advised their citizens to practice physical distancing, and billions of dollars are being spent to help people who are struggling and to keep the economy afloat.
People are staying home and economic activity has reduced, leading to a drop in pollution across the world. In the face of this pandemic response, advocates say we need to apply the lessons learned from dealing with COVID-19 to the fight against climate change.
According to Miriam Diamond, an environmental scientist and professor in the department of earth sciences at the University of Toronto, the temporary drop in emissions is important and significant, but not enough to avert climate change.
“We can make it more permanent by trying to aggressively restart the economy, but by moving it towards a low-carbon economy,” she said.
“Now is not the time to be investing in pipelines when we can’t afford to increase our greenhouse gas emissions,” Diamond added. “Now is the time to put that money for pipelines into alternative renewable energy sources.”
Other climate action organizations have expressed similar concerns, including Ecojustice, Canada’s largest environmental law charity.
“Ecojustice is worried that all levels of government may disregard the climate crisis or other environmental imperatives to enable short-term economic stability or recovery,” said Devon Page, executive director of Ecojustice, in an email interview.
Applying Pandemic Strategies to Climate Change
According to Page, though the pandemic is causing significant anxiety and suffering, it is showing people and governments can act quickly in the face of crisis.
“We now need governments to listen to scientists on the dangers of climate and similarly lead immediate action to prevent a climate crisis,” he said.
“The world is going to continue regardless of what we do. It’s not about saving the environment, it’s about saving society.”
– Miriam Diamond, environmental scientist and professor at University of Toronto
A report released in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that human-caused emissions are the main factor in heating up the planet and that global temperature rise has devastating effects on people and economies.
“Climate change kills people. Kills people as a result of flooding and the movement of infectious diseases,” Diamond said. “We have to invest today so that we don’t hurt more people tomorrow.”
Diamond said that the pandemic has encouraged politicians to listen more to experts and is a strategy they should be applying to the climate crisis.
“Our [health] policies right now are evidence-driven by experts,” Diamond said. “Experts on climate change have been talking for decades now, but they’ve not been giving those experts the platforms and the endorsements.”
According to Diamond, politicians have been “criticizing and marginalizing experts” and not heeding their expertise on climate change.
“They’ve been saying that experts are part of the liberal elite, they don’t belong to us, they have their own agenda.”
She says the future of society depends on the actions we take to adapt to climate change, and that means listening to our experts.
“We need to create policies that ensure that society continues. It’s not about being friendly to the environment, it’s about understanding that today’s society depends on a stable climate,” she said.
“The world is going to continue regardless of what we do. It’s not about saving the environment, it’s about saving society.”
Advocacy Work
Teika Newton, membership and domestic policy manager at CAN-RAC, said that members of the network are still working together to coordinate climate response, but now with a pandemic lens.
“[There is] a wide array of social justice concerns that all kind of meet at this crossroads of crisis and it’s no different than the climate crisis,” she said.
“The climate crisis also exacerbates all those other social injustices … the COVID crisis is a really valuable hands-on experience that is informing how we might respond to climate as well.”
In particular, Newton highlights how the response to climate change, like COVID-19, has to be based on international cooperation.
“To adequately respond to it, to eradicate [COVID-19] worldwide, to make sure that it doesn’t keep flaring up over and over and over again—that need to have multilateral international cooperation is exactly the same as climate change,” she said.
Despite the shift in international response away from climate and towards COVID-19, Newton said that CAN-RAC, along with many of their members, are still fighting for climate action.
In a webinar about the geopolitics of COVID-19 and climate change, Victor Galaz, deputy director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, summed up the current situation.
“The Corona crisis is a 100-metre race, and the climate crisis is a marathon. We have to run both at the same time.”
Feature image by Timothy Austen.
