Edited by Nicole Wong
Until the year 2019, we’ve all heard a lot about climate change, and how it was destroying our planet and the species living here. The human population plays a major role in this climate change, where greater populations resulted in higher usage of natural resources, creating a never-ending chain of issues, such as global warming. However, 2020 was the year the chain had broken due to the coronavirus pandemic. With over 3.9 billion people or half of the world’s population, in 90 countries or territories forced to stay at home to avoid the further spread of the virus, nature has finally gotten a chance to breathe again (Sandford, 2020). Global lockdowns have caused the largest drop in energy demands in the last 70 years. Moreover, 2020 saw the biggest decline in annual emissions ("How Nature," 2020). Silent cities, empty streets, closed factories and blue skies were then dominated by animals and birds all over the world.
However, is this enough for climate change to be reversed once and for all?
Well, no. Obviously. Nature ‘healing’ itself during the pandemic has had little to no significant impact on carbon dioxide levels on a global and long-term scale, nor will it be enough to permanently terminate global warming.
Here’s why the coronavirus pandemic won’t exactly save the environment, and how we CAN attempt doing so ourselves.
It is almost impossible to create a comparison between 2 completely different global crises. However, the reactions of governments to deal with a global emergency such as the coronavirus pandemic, versus decades of global inaction to deal with an equally important and life-threatening climate crisis, effectively describes what is actually going on. Entire societies were taking part in absolute social lockdown which helped us grasp the instantaneous threat to our lives. The effects of the coronavirus were clearly visible as we heard and saw people losing their lives to the virus. Meanwhile, climate change was affecting our lives too ("Why Coronavirus," 2020).
If more media covered environmental-climate crises as a threat to humans, governments would take it just as seriously as the pandemic needed to be taken. Environmental crises are rarely covered by the media, despite their very high death toll. Let’s look at air pollution; for example, according to World Health Organization, an estimated 4.6 million people die PER YEAR from respiratory difficulties directly attributed to air pollution (Air Pollution, n.d.). For comparison, that’s more than the death counts of the top 15 countries with the highest number of coronavirus cases, including the USA, India, Brazil, UK, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, etc, ALL COMBINED (COVID Live, n.d.). Ironically, the worsening of the climate led to respiratory difficulties in patients. Now the same patients are at a greater risk of Covid-19 complications. In fact, scientists at Stanford recently estimated that China’s pandemic lockdown alone saved up to 77,000 lives by curbing carbon dioxide emissions from factories and vehicles (Yoder, 2020).
The outbreak of the coronavirus has conclusively proven that there is a clear link between the economy and the health of the planet.
On the other hand, the fact that many governments reacted significantly to the coronavirus outbreak proves that certain economies do have the financial and political ability to react almost immediately to a life-threatening crisis. The fact that many governments reacted so quickly to the coronavirus outbreak proved that we humans, and society overall, were capable and empathetic enough to make sacrifices for the good of the people. Now that we know what we are capable of, the coronavirus pandemic offers us a ray of hope for the future, by creating structural changes needed to transition towards an ecologically sustainable society.
References
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COVID Live Update. (n.d.). Worldometers.info. Retrieved November 1, 2021, from
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
How Nature Is Healing During Lockdown? Coronavirus Pandemic | Things2do [Video].
(2020, May 4). Youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUV3KaLjl10
Kendrick, R. (2019, May 13). Steam and smoke rise from the cooling towers and chimneys
of a power plant. [Photograph]. Nationalgeographic.com.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/greenhouse-gases
Sandford, A. (2020, April 3). Coronavirus: Half of humanity now on lockdown as 90 countries
call for confinement. Euronews.com. Retrieved November 1, 2021, from
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