In the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ study, participants are asked to count how many times a ball is passed in a video. While they almost always report the number of passes correctly, they almost always fail to notice the person dressed as a gorilla who appears (quite obviously) on screen. This phenomenon, called ‘inattention blindness’, demonstrates just how easily we can be blinkered when focusing intently on one thing.
For almost a year and a half, the world has been in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, and lives and societies have been turned upside down as we all take the protective measures needed to stop the spread of the virus. On 30 June 2021, we are approaching 4 million global deaths.
But while we earnestly tackle the many immediate challenges and tragedies of the pandemic, we also must choose how we tackle, or side-line, other superimposed problems.
What about the invisible gorillas that are waving at us right now?
The tendency to crisis
It seems to be a sad and slightly alarming fact that there is always a crisis, and something is always urgent. We have to prioritise to get through the tough stuff, and that’s right.
But in all this, there are problems, too, and our inattention blindness might mean problems are able to balloon before we finally pay attention to them. As illustrated during the pandemic, inactivity carries a high price: it’s estimated that there were almost 120,000 excess deaths in the UK alone in the first 13 months of the crisis. The cost could be just as high for other problems — like climate change — that keep slipping into our blind spot as they don’t quite make it to the top of the immediately urgent list.
At the beginning of the pandemic, climate briefly took the spotlight as reports flooded in of much improved air and water quality as the world stayed at home. Although the environment has since fallen off the headlines, it will not be untouched by the pandemic, which will leave positives, negatives, and lessons to be learnt.
Climate and Covid-19
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Covid-19, a respiratory disease first identified in Wuhan, China, a global pandemic. As governments grappled with new and increasingly urgent challenges, interventions to confine populations and their movement shut global and local doors. It’s estimated that as many as 4.4 billion people — 57% of the global population — were living under a full or partial lockdown restriction on 5 April 2020.
Restrictions on the movement of people, goods, and the suspension of industrial activities have had remarkable effects on emission and pollution levels.
Unsurprisingly, partial and full lockdowns slowed global transport and trade. Analysis published in the Global Energy Review 2020 shows that countries in full lockdown experienced an average 25% decrease in energy demand per week compared to the pre-lockdown average. Global average road transport activity fell to 50% of the 2019 level at the end of March 2020, leading to an unprecedented (57%) decline in global oil demand. In China, carbon emissions dropped by 25% during lockdown — a decrease of approximately 1 million tons compared to the same period in 2019.
As shops and offices in many countries shut their doors for the foreseeable future, so global electricity demand decreased. In France, India, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the US northwest, full lockdown reduced daily electricity demand by at least 15%, with declines largest in countries with the strictest measures and the largest service economies.
Nitrogen dioxide emissions, which are mainly produced by power plants, transportation and lighting, were observed to drop by 30% globally, with most marked decreases in Asia: a 70% and 20–30% decrease in India and China respectively.
In Barcelona, air pollution levels dropped by 50% during the lockdown period and similar decreases were measured in many major world cities, including New York and Beijing. According to China’s ecology and environment ministry, there was more than an 11% improvement in China’s air quality compared to the previous year.
A contagious world is a wasteful world
But despite the positive impacts associated with the scaling back of human industrial and transport activity, there have been environmental negatives associated with the pandemic, too.
Medical waste is on the rise: pre-pandemic, Wuhan hospitals produced on average fewer than 50 metric tons of medical waste a day, but this rose significantly to 240 metric tons a day during the first Covid outbreak. This pattern has been mirrored in hospitals across the world.
Growing use of personal protective equipment, particularly disposable masks and gloves, has been and will continue to be a significant source of rubbish. One study estimates that 40 million disposable surgical face masks are required each day just to cater for suspected Covid patients, care givers and one third of global healthcare workers — let alone the billions of people who took up the habit virtually overnight.
Worldwide lockdown restrictions mean consumers have turned to the internet to get their groceries, new loungewear, and everything in between. Each online shop comes wrapped in its own ceremonial dress of plastic packaging and additional waste, and the boom in online grocery shopping has been a simultaneous increase in the amount of organic waste produced. The pandemic has changed our patterns of disposal, as well as consumption; in the USA, recycling centres were closed for fear they would become vectors for viral transmission.
Over in a blink?
It feels wishful to hope that improved climate outcomes might be one of the few positives to come out of the pandemic.
Global economic activity is expected to return gradually to a pre-pandemic normal in most countries and there is no evidence that the brief interlude to the environmental pummelling we’re giving the planet will continue after the pandemic ends.
When China completely lifts the lockdown and resumes large-scale industrial production, it is expected that its energy use and emissions will exceed pre-Covid levels.
A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that rather than falling, energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions will actually rise by 1.5 gigatonnes to 33 gigatonnes in 2021— an increase of almost 5%. This is the largest increase in absolute terms since the global financial crisis of 2007–09, when governments used carbon-intensive projects to stimulate their economies.
The period of post-Covid recovery presents a very real opportunity to look for greener solutions, for example using clean recovery stimulus packages to minimise economic damage.
Covid-19, climate and transferrable skills
Covid-19 has provided valuable learning opportunities for national and international communities that are particularly transferrable to the climate crisis:
- Delay is costly. The pandemic has highlighted the tendency of political leaders to react slowly to unprecedented threats. In the case of the climate crisis, a full appreciation of the magnitude of the threat may only happen when it’s too late. For example, tipping points represent thresholds after which change becomes irreversible. While politicians filibuster and tipping points approach, the cost of delay — both to the environment and the economy — grows. A recently leaked draft of an IPCC report due to be published this summer steps up the urgency around tipping points, warning: ‘Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems…humans cannot.’ A 2012 model comparison study estimates that delaying climate policy compatible with 2 degrees warming by the end of this century until 2020 would increase mitigation costs by around 50%.
- Inequalities can be exacerbated both by the threat itself and (often inadvertently) by mitigation policies. There is increasing international evidence suggests that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people are at higher risk of developing severe Covid-19 and dying of the disease. Restrictions have had unequal impacts: successive lockdowns and prolonged restrictions have had an asymmetric effect on the labour market, with large job losses in non-essential sectors where remote working is not possible. Lower-educated workers have been hit particularly hard. An estimated 91% of students have been affected by closure of worldwide education settings and the advent of widescale home-schooling will produce unequal outcomes based on (among other things) access to technology, adequate study space and parental education. The pandemic has hit the poorest in society hardest, and this pattern looks to be mirrored in the impact of the climate crisis. Climate change is already having unequal impacts, felt most keenly by those living in least developed countries that have played almost no role in causing climate change. Generally, low-emission countries are predicted to be more adversely impacted and exposed to climate change and less able to cope. These effects are already playing out: between 2010 and 2015, deaths from climate-related disasters in these countries were more than five times the global average.
- Broad public support is critical. The pandemic has taught us that once disaster hits, most people are willing to accept harsh limitations to their freedom for the greater good. Compliance with lockdown regulations in the UK has been high — estimated to be about 90%. Understanding how threats are perceived and internalised by members of the general public is vital to predicting how compliant they are likely to be with remedial measures and the extent to which they may give up their personal liberties.
- Global problems need global solutions. Covid-19 has negatively affected all countries. Through the crisis, the level of international collaboration has changed and previously insurmountable pollical boundaries have been overcome. Climate change, too, will be a crisis that affects all nations, and from the pandemic we learn that accelerating well-organised, pragmatic and proactive global collaboration, not just relying on global agreements, is pivotally important.
- Transparency is needed to combat mis- and disinformation. Clear, accessible science and communication of new policies had been vital during the pandemic, but challenges remain. Most recently, confusion, fear and misinformation have contributed to patterns of worldwide vaccine hesitancy, which in 2019 the WHO cited as one of the top 10 threats to global health. Climate change, too, poses a communication challenge in requiring an understanding of the science — which isn’t quite as tangible as the pandemic — and a reorientation of understanding to see the cross-cutting implications of its impacts. Leaders need to be singing from the same hymn sheet: then-President Donald Trump asserting that climate change ‘was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive’, was an unhelpful move.
The urgency of climate change
The urgency required in our response to climate change can be difficult to grasp because its effects are less direct and immediate than a pandemic. Undoubtedly, this is a serious problem and one that needs to be taken seriously now, rather than later, when that invisible gorilla has walked right up to us and slapped us or, in more scientific terms, when tipping points have been passed and damage becomes irreparable.
We’ve already seen the impact of climate change: extreme weather events, wildfires and sea level rise, but so far these have been mild. It’s easy to sweep these under the carpet of our collective consciousness when the events feel far-removed from our personal experience or when we manage to enjoy a few more summer BBQs. These are harbingers of far bigger, more dramatic changes that could push the physiological bounds of homo sapiens.
By 2050, as many as 200 million people are expected to be overtaken by disruptions of monsoon and rainfall system. Droughts of unprecedented severity and duration which will contribute to a decrease in global crop production of almost 25%. Extreme events, like hurricanes, will have a higher intensity and be superimposed on coastal challenges of sea level rise and flooding. We may lose thousands of plant and animal species — and possibly even whole ecosystems — to human-driven climate change. The WHO estimates that climate change is expected to cause an additional quarter of a million deaths per year 2030–2050, and the burden of disease from climate change will continue to fall mainly on children in developing countries.
It’s a bleak picture.
Gorilla: spotted!
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that we are capable of responding globally with the force required to tackle a global problem. It’s also provided a valuable learning experience and lens through which to consider the barriers and enablers to a coordinated, impactful response to future problems, including climate change.
Shutting down global industry and transport during the pandemic and the noticeable positive impact this had on environmental indicators, even in the short term, shows the extent to which human activity is the problem. But this has also offered a tantalising peek into what could be done if dramatic measures were put in place and enforced.
In an era of Covid-19, climate change might just be the invisible gorilla. We have a duty to the generations that come after us to make sure we stare that gorilla in the face, no matter how difficult, and really see it before it’s too late.
