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Will COVID-19 change the public’s attitude toward climate change?
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the public’s concern about climate change and improved support for green recovery policies.
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Members of the Asian Citizen's Center for Environment and Health perform during an Earth Day event in opposition to climate change at Gwanghwamun square in Seoul on April 22, 2020. (AFP/Jung Yeon-je )
“The pandemic is not over,” World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said repeatedly. As of a couple of weeks ago, the death rate due to COVID-19 averaged one person every 44 seconds.
It is important to note, therefore, that we’re still not out of the woods yet, but at the same time it’s also important to appreciate how far we have come.
Since the WHO announced the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, scientists around the world have come together to identify the virus, invent diagnostic kits, develop viable vaccines and antiviral drugs and make many more development – in what we consider practically “overnight” in the scientific world.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky was right, the pandemic showed us that science can actually move from the “data for publication” approach to “data for action”, when our hands are tied. Other stakeholders – politicians, businesspeople and the population at large – were also forced to adapt to policy and behavioral changes at lightning speed.
It makes me wonder whether a similar set of urgent, definitive actions could be taken to preempt the world’s next major disruption – climate change.
The pandemic and climate change are both similar in the sense that they have brought, or will bring, large-scale, multi-faceted change to our lives unless we choose to do something about them collectively. Also, like the pandemic, the fight against climate change is a race against time.
For the pandemic, the faster we were able to identify and trace the virus, as well as educate the public, the better chance we had at containing the spread. Analogously, in the fight against climate change, the sooner we move along the road of decarbonization, the better chance we have of slowing it down, which in turn provides us with more time to build up resilience and come up with better contingency plans to help us reach the new “stable state”.
