A two-part blog post that looks into the similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change threats.

Part I: A Tale of Two Crises

The air at home in Los Angeles is cleaner than it has been for decades. China, Europe, USA, and other parts of the world are reporting reduced air pollution levels, with so many cars parked and many factories having reduced or suspended operations. Personally, I am probably spending more time outdoors than I normally would, taking a walk around the block each day in a desperate attempt to break up the tension and monotony of isolation. It’s an interesting time to be thinking about the connections between COVID-19 and our climate and environment on Earth.

True and concerning, climate change is expected to result in the increase and frequency of global pandemics, which is beyond concerning given what we’re seeing with COVID-19 today. But the most important connection is that COVID-19 and climate change both challenge global institutions to rethink their strategies in addressing threats that have the power to cripple the world as we know it. The world has mobilized into action to battle COVID-19 and its effects, but the warnings for climate change have often been met with deferrals to future generations. 

There is an opportunity to learn a lot from our response to COVID-19 when we are able to return to the fight against climate change. Just as COVID-19 has already taken over societies in China, Iran, Italy, and elsewhere, so too can the climate emergency overwhelm our societies’ ability to cope if we don’t take action. We have the ability to avoid the worst of the human health and environmental impacts by intervening early, and aggressively.

The threats are abstract and hard to see, until they are right in front of us

Climate change would be easier to understand if it were easier to see, in the same way that people are reacting to scenes of overfilled hospitals around the world. Carbon dioxide is a clear, colorless, odorless gas whose emissions have, essentially, never been regulated. Human activities produce nearly 38 billion tons of CO2 each year, but ...where is it? 

We know that global average temperature changes of two or three degrees could have severe long-term impacts on our way of life on earth. But day-to-day, a two or three-degree increase in the outside temperature doesn’t immediately seem like anything to worry about, and is not something we can feel, see, or touch viscerally. 

Like climate change, COVID-19 seems like an invisible threat. Carriers of the virus may not show symptoms, and testing is not 100% accurate, and even then there are small percentages of false negatives and positives. The virus itself is too small to see with the naked eye, but stays hidden in plain sight on surfaces and objects for hours or days.  Seeing is believing, so many people initially thought of this invisible threat as distant, remote, abstract. 

Today, the threat of the virus is recognized as a global public health emergency unlike anything most of us have ever witnessed. Each country and region is doing its best to tackle the challenge in any way they can. And most of the effort in changing the outcome of this virus is being defined by the actions of individual people in each country. In the climate world, the evidence and warning signs have been piling up for years, perhaps that evidence is too big yet to be recognized. So the world is not reacting the same way, it is not yet an all-hands-on-deck mobilization to fight back. 

As we do everything we can today to support our health workers, get them the supplies they need, let’s also endeavor to increase the speed and depth of collaboration around data and solutions to this and future crisis. And let’s redouble our efforts to not wait for climate change threats to be further upon us before we act. At XPRIZE we recently launched our Data Collaborative to serve as an innovative platform for the cause, and, thankfully, the number of partners is growing by day. In the face of these threats, all of humanity working together is our best hope.

Please stay tuned for the second installment of COVID-19 and Climate Change, which will explore what we can do to prevent these types of crises in the future.