COVID-19 gave the planet a break. Now is the time to keep the momentum

You have seen the tweets or witnessed the changes first hand. With COVID-19 locks in place, skies over cities around the world were bluer. The notoriously dirty air in New Delhi was cleaner, and the canals in Venice were so clear that you could see marine life swimming through them.

The slogan “The Earth is healing, we are the virus”, was immortalized as a meme.

The observations were not just anecdotal. A May study found significant drops in daily global carbon dioxide emissions, with a maximum decrease of 17% in early April. But if he coronavirus The pandemic is giving Earth a breath of fresh air, it can only be temporary. How closing orders Around the world, experts have warned that emissions will recover quickly. As we resume daily tasks, any environmental progress can be undone as quickly as it came.

That is, unless policymakers, governments, and other groups start working on the structural and social changes necessary to address climate change. That includes flexible hugging. work hours from home Reduce traffic, close streets to vehicles, encourage bicycle use, and increase investments in clean energy.

“This is the right time to make drastic changes,” said Francisco Artigas, director of the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute in New Jersey. “We have to start designing ourselves out of the way we live, because it just isn’t sustainable.”

As governments make investments to restart the economy, it is critical that they think about promoting breakthroughs like electric vehicles and renewable energy, which create jobs while helping the planet, adds climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré, a professor at the University of East Anglia. If they bail out the auto or airline industries, for example, they must do so on the condition that companies produce electric vehicles within a certain period of time.

European Union lawmakers in June passed rules guaranteeing that investments will not support polluting industries. The Commission is studying ways in which the rules can support the European Green Agreement, which aims to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The United States has yet to come up with similar measures in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The changes seen during the closure are not structural changes,” said Le Quéré, co-author of the May study on daily carbon emissions, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. “They were never going to last.”

Changing our habits

With the many deadly and destructive effects of coronavirus pandemic – including more than half a million deaths worldwide, mass unemployment, business closure, and strains on the US healthcare system, there have also been some advances. In China, for example, air pollution plummeted in February during the country’s closing period. But the world’s most populous country, with nearly 1.4 billion people, also demonstrates why swift action is critical: air pollution in China had already increased in May after restrictions were lifted. It returned to 2019 levels in June.

As the US continues loosen restrictions and reopen more businessScientists anticipate that air pollution and daily emissions will also increase rapidly.

“We saw huge temporary declines, but things are returning to normal,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University and co-author of the Nature study.

Because the drop in daily emissions was due to forced behavioral change, and because governments ordered people to stay home, rather than because of systemic change, it was not designed to last, Jackson says. . Total miles traveled in the U.S., for example, decreased by more than 40% in March before rising again as more Americans got back on the road, even before restrictions were lifted. There have also been significant drops in air travel, and the Federal Aviation Administration reported in mid-May that the number of commercial flights operating in the US had dropped 71% compared to the same period last year.

To effectively tackle climate change, says Le Quéré, there must be a systemic change in energy infrastructure, such as a stronger focus on green energy and also behavioral change aimed at improving an individual’s well-being. Doing things like biking and walking instead of driving, in addition to eating less red meat, is not only good for the environment, it’s also good for personal health.

“These are behavioral changes that are not so brutal and rapid,” he said.

One of the biggest changes in behavior during blocking has been the exponential increase in people working from home. About half of American workers are telecommuting, according to an April report from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization in Washington, DC. That’s more than double what they were working from home in 2017-18. Climate scientists hope that trend will continue to some extent even after the pandemic ends, perhaps with some people. stay home permanently. Fewer people on the road means less vehicle pollution.

“We have had false starts in teleworking before,” Artigas said. “But maybe the pandemic will make a difference.”

Meanwhile, many people who cannot work from home are reconsidering their displacement in the era of social distancing. Traveling on a crowded train, for example, is much less attractive during a pandemic. Several cities around the world, including Milan and Paris, are reinventing their transit services by adding bike lanes and wider sidewalks. Seattle has permanently closed several highways to promote bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

“We realize that as things start to reopen, people will continue to need to move and traffic will not play exactly the same role it used to,” said Ethan Bergerson, spokesman for the Seattle Department of Transportation. . “We still want people to have those good and safe options for getting around without a car and we want to do everything we can to encourage it.”

But a push to socially isolate themselves in cars or seek sidewalk space means that COVID-19 could have a detrimental effect on public transportation infrastructure and investment. In the San Francisco Bay area, several bus lines are plummeting as traffic budgets decrease and passenger numbers plummet. Other cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have also made significant cuts in bus and train service amid declining revenue and passenger numbers.

Counting carbon

The drop in carbon emissions during the blockade, while significant, is still not enough to impart lasting change. Scientists say that won’t happen until we reduce emissions to net zero, which means we remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as we release it.

In fact, carbon dioxide levels still hit a record this year, according to data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In May, the highest monthly average amount of CO2 in the air was recorded, around 417 parts per million.

“We are still emitting,” said Ralph Keeling, director of Scripps’ CO2 program. “A short-term reduction like this doesn’t make much of a difference in the long-term, unless it’s followed by a change in the trajectory where we started issuing less year after year. The compound effect of that is what we need to make a change in course “.

It is easy to be pessimistic. Even with a global blockade, one might think, we still couldn’t cut emissions enough to meet environmental targets. But that’s not how we should consider the subject, says Dan Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. Instead, we should focus on implementing sustainable environmental measures, especially now that things are opening up again.

“If the lesson is confused with assuming that the path to a colder planet will come from everyone staying home, that is not a sustainable path,” he said. “This is in danger of people combining emission reductions with economic destruction.”

Tech companies are also taking steps to tackle climate change. Last week, Apple said it planned to become carbon neutral. across its business by 2030. Microsoft also partnered with major companies, including Nike, Unilever, and Starbucks to Transform form to net zero, an initiative aimed at achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company aims to become carbon negative by 2030 and seeks to undo by 2050 the greenhouse gas emissions that are sent to Earth’s atmosphere during the life of the company.

Cohan says stabilizing the climate will mean growing the economy, as it will be necessary to invest in measures such as replacing fossil fuels with cleaner forms of energy.

So far, a long-term value of blocking is that it provides a glimpse of how changed behavior can help reverse damage to the environment. Fewer cars on the road, for example, shows what is possible if more people choose to walk, bike, or drive electric cars. The decline in coal use, which started in the US long before the pandemic, also shows a picture of the impact that more green measures, such as wind and solar energy, you can have on the planet.

“Although the changes have been incredible,” said Artigas, “there is a long way to go.”