Learn from the pandemic to prevent environmental catastrophe

Writing in the journal Current Biology, they say that lessons learned the hard way in containing COVID-19 – the need for early intervention to reduce death and economic damage; the curbing of some aspects of people’s lifestyles for the good of all of us – should also be at the heart of averting environmental catastrophe.

Lead author Professor Andrew Balmford (University of Cambridge) said: “We’ve seen the consequences of delayed action in the fight against COVID-19. The consequences of continued inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change and mass extinction are too grave to contemplate.”

The team argues that the spread of coronavirus shares common characteristics with both global heating and the impending “sixth mass extinction”.

For example, each new COVID-19 case can spawn others and so lead to escalating infection rates, just as hotter climates alter ecosystems, increasing emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause warming. “Both are dangerous feedback loops,” argue the scientists.

Intervening to contain both the pandemic and the environmental crises requires decision-makers and citizens to act in the interests of society as a whole, argue the researchers.

Co-author Professor Dame Georgina Mace (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research) said: “In the COVID-19 crisis we’ve seen young and working age people sacrificing education, income and social connection primarily for the benefit of older and more vulnerable people.”

“To stem the impacts of climate change and address biodiversity loss, wealthier and older adults will have to forgo short-term material extravagance for the benefit of the present-day poor and future generations. It’s time to keep our end of the social bargain,” she said.

The team also draw comparisons of what they term “lagged impacts”. For coronavirus, the delay – or lag – before symptoms materialise means infected people spread the disease long before they feel effects and change behaviour.

The researchers equate this with the lag between our destruction of habitat and eventual species extinction, as well as lags between the emissions we pump out and the full effects of global heating, such as sea-level rise. As with viral infection, behaviour change may come too late.

Co-author Ben Balmford (University of Exeter) said: “Like the twin crises of extinction and climate, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic might have seemed like a distant problem at first, one far removed from most people’s everyday lives.”

“But left unchecked for too long, the disease has forced major changes to the way we live. The same will be true of the environmental devastation we are causing, except the consequences could be truly irreversible.”

The authors find parallels in the indifference that has long greeted warnings from the scientific community about both new zoonotic diseases and human-induced shifts in climate and habitat.

Co-author Dr Brendan Fisher (University of Vermont) said: “The lagged impacts, feedback loops and complex dynamics of pandemics and environmental crises mean that identifying and responding to these challenges requires governments to listen to independent scientists. Such voices have been tragically ignored.”

The similarities between the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and environmental disaster lie not just in their nature but also in their mitigation, say the scientists, who write that “there is no substitute for early action”.

The researchers include an analysis of the timing of lockdown across OECD countries, and conclude that if it had come just a week earlier then around 17,000 lives in the UK (up to 21 May 2020) would have been saved, and nearly 45,000 in the US.

They say that, just as delayed lockdown cost thousands of lives, delayed climate action that gives us 2^oC of warming rather than 1.5 will expose an estimated extra 62-457 million people – mainly the world’s poorest – to “multi-sector climate risks” such as drought, flooding and famine.

Similarly, conservation programmes are less likely to succeed the longer they are delayed.

Co-author Professor David Wilcove (Princeton University) said: “As wilderness disappears we see an accelerating feedback loop, as a given loss of habitat causes ever-greater species loss.”

The scientists point out that delayed action resulting in more COVID-19 deaths will also cost those nations more in economic growth, according to IMF estimates, just as hotter and more disruptive climates will curtail economic prosperity.

Cambridge’s Professor Balmford added: “Scientists are not inventing these environmental threats, just as they weren’t inventing the threat of a pandemic such as COVID-19. They are real, and they are upon us.”

Links

• Comment piece in Current Biology
• Professor Georgina Mace’s academic profile
• UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research
• UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment

Image

• An Alaska Army National Guard helicopter fights a fire in Alaska in 2015. Source: US Department of Defense, Credit: U.S. Army Sgt. Balinda O'Neal, Alaska National Guard (CC BY-NC 3.0)

Source

• University of Cambridge

Media contact

Chris Lane

Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 9222

Email: chris.lane [at] ucl.ac.uk