What can COVID-19 teach us about tackling climate change?

I’m a fairly optimistic person, I’ll admit. It’s sort-of a necessity when you’re prone to intentionally plonking yourself in extreme survival situations, as I have been known to do over the years. Negative thinking doesn’t get you very far when you’re alone in the Arctic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested my optimism somewhat but, through it all, I have found some positive threads to pull on. Of course, I would much rather the pandemic – and all the misery and hardship it has wrought – had never happened, but simply wishing things away does very little to alter reality (that’s another thing you learn pretty quickly in survival school).

I’m an environmentalist. Put simply that means I would quite like for us to move towards a healthier and more sustainable relationship with Mother Nature, and I spend a lot of my professional life working towards that goal. And when it comes to climate change, which has been my focus over the last 15 years, I think our current COVID-19 predicament has a few useful things to teach us.  

I believe that COVID-19 is a clear example of us pushing the planet too hard. Without putting too fine a point on things, it’s a symptom of our poor relationship with the natural world. As we take more land from nature and push further and further into wilderness areas, we expose ourselves to zoonotic diseases (those that move from animals to humans), like COVID-19, which we have little or no resistance to. 

If you push against any living thing for too long – whether it’s an animal, a plant or an entire ecosystem –  you’ll eventually get a push back. COVID-19 is Mother Nature pushing back; it’s a warning shot (and certainly not her first).  

Working from home, self-isolation, quarantine, face masks in public, driving less, hand sanitiser in every shop and café, barely any air travel – if you’d have told me a year ago that this is what 2020 would look like, there’s no way I’d have believed you. But here we are.

Under no circumstances am I suggesting that we should, or could, keep up these measures in an attempt to tackle climate change. Global emissions might be down thanks to the worldwide halting of everyday life, but living a life of lockdown would not be sustainable over the long-term, nor practical.

But what this period has proven is that we can make big lifestyle changes, en masse. Of course, many of these changes were government-prescribed, but a precedent has been set. We now have an example of what collective lifestyle changes can do when it comes to preservation of our species – in the face of climate change, I think that’s empowering. 

Behaviour change experts think habits can take as little as 21 days to form, and firmly entrenched in just over two months. Maybe we’ll be happier jumping on Zoom as opposed to commuting every day, or flying interstate for a meeting. Perhaps we’ll ride our bikes, walk or run to work more – a side-effect of avoiding busy public transport systems during a pandemic. In a range of these cases, the environment – and often our individual health – will benefit as a result.

In addition to the individual changes, governments also have an opportunity to invest stimulus packages in greener and more sustainable infrastructure. These stimulus measures will define the future for the environment.

Perhaps we can revive industry while accelerating our transition to a low-carbon economy. Aside from the environmental imperative, it’d make pretty good business sense. To use an Australian example (since that’s where I live), the impact of a less stable climate is expected to inflict some $A762 billion worth of damage to the national economy by 2050. 

We acted on COVID-19 because it was indiscriminate, and had the potential to affect us, our families, and our friends. This made it a very tangible and immediate threat.

Climate change, over the long-term, is just as tangible and indiscriminate but the dangers often aren’t communicated as such. Getting people to take action on it therefore requires a shift in the way we talk about it. We can’t just guilt or shame people into action – we need to find communication techniques that speak to the person whose behaviour we are trying to change.

To take an extreme example: imagine you’re trying to get Donald Trump to act on climate change. Instead of trying to convince him that climate change is real, and that he invests in renewable energy for moral reasons to help combat it, perhaps a better approach might be to look at what motivates him. If instead we said “renewable energy represents an opportunity for the US to become more energy independent, create job, and maintain America’s position at the top of the global world order”, we’d surely have a far better chance of getting him to invest in renewable energy.

We’re doing it because we want to fight climate change, and he’s doing it to make a dollar, but the outcome is the same: we both get the benefit of the planet being a better place. Effective communication is key to tackling any issue, and climate change is certainly no different.