The COVID-19 pandemic has understandably superseded the issue that dominated the news, politics, business and academia for much of last year (2019) – the climate emergency.
But do they both have the same underlying causes with the same solutions?
The coronavirus is believed to have originated at wildlife markets in China, and was transmitted to humans because of proximity between wildlife and people.
Landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species are crowded together and are coming into greater contact with humans.
The characteristics of our connected modern way of life enhance the effects of disease occurrence. The spread of the disease can be rapid as in the case of COVID-19, initially because of overcrowding, then by travel.
Disease outbreaks become epidemics, which can quickly become pandemics. There is often an understandable reluctance to take the measures needed to contain the disease because of disruption to day-to-day life.
All these aspects of human activity are the same as those underlying the climate emergency.
While human health research considers these wider social factors, it seldom considers the effect of the surrounding natural ecosystems.
For millennia, the forces of nature kept everything in balance, with death by viral disease playing a part, affecting all species, including humans.
The human population grew to six billion by the end of the twentieth century, in part because of the ability to prevent and treat emerging diseases. Pressure on the environment continued to grow and the consequences of human-induced global change on the Earth’s ecosystems intensified.
There is now a continuous race to find new treatments and vaccines to keep up, and when a totally new, highly contagious virus appears, such as COVID-19, we fall short, with tragic consequences.
So what can we do about this?
We need to harness new technologies, not only in medicine, but also to enable sustainable transport, energy and food production.
Read more here.
Source: The Straits Times, 2 May 2020