Hi, Alex here. As you can probably imagine, I have been thinking as much about the current
pandemic as sustainability recently. And then, I started connecting the dots between the
two. Today we are going to talk about white-footed mice, speaking trees, opossums, humans and
we will look at 6 unexpected ways the coronavirus is connected to sustainability, the environment
and climate change. Ok, let’s get drawing!
When the coronavirus crisis started, I discovered, like many of you, this graph. Essentially,
our primary goal quickly became to have fewer cases than our health care system capacity
could take. And then people started saying “Hey, can we flatten that curve too?”,
using the crisis to get people’s attention on climate change. I thought that was clever.
But the part that I found most interesting, is that even if these 2 curves represent the
same number of people who eventually get infected, in the slower scenario, fewer people die.
And this is exactly what sustainability is about. Even if the amount of used natural
resources is the same, in the sustainable scenario we are using them at a rate that
causes fewer casualties (animal life, ecosystems, people and otherwise). In other words, it
is meeting human needs within ecological constraints.
Let’s look at our ecological footprint for instance. Here is the graph: it is about using
only one planet whereas we are currently using 1.7 planets. Even if we are using the same
amount of resources, in the good scenario, we are living off the interest, in the bad
scenario we are digging into our natural capital. This footprint perspective is also interesting
because it is precisely our encroachment on nature that increases the risk of a pandemic.
In this Vox article, Sonia Shah, author of the 2017 book Pandemic, explains that “when
you cut down forests, bats don’t just go away. They come roost in the trees in your
backyard or farm which means it’s easier to have casual contact with their excretions.
With Ebola, the first case was a 2-year-old child in West Africa who was playing near
a tree where bats live”. It is also why there has been outbreaks of tick-borne disease
like Lyme in the northeast of the US: when the forests were intacts, opossums and chipmunks
controlled the tick population. Now 50 years later with fewer forests, there are fewer
opossums and chipmunks and more white-footed mice and deer but the mice destroy only about
50 ticks a week when an opossum destroys several hundred just by grooming. We live in a complex
system and our actions have an impact. My video on the story of the cats in Borneo is
another example.
As mentioned at the beginning, flattening the curve also means keeping our CO2 concentration
under 350 parts per million. It does not mean we can’t
produce CO2, it means that when we produce CO2 at such a rate that nature can process
it, it does not impact the planet and people nearly as much. With the coronavirus probably
coming from a wet market, it is tempting to look at our meat consumption, isn’t it?
We know the amount of meat we eat is a great contributor to climate change: 25% of greenhouse
gas emissions are attributed to agriculture and around 15% are attributed to meat production
and livestock (this is as much as the emissions attributed to all transportation by the way).
More often than not, the animals are packed very close together to increase profit. And
guess what, according to Sonia Shah again, two of the most dangerous threats of a new
pandemic (highly drug-resistant forms of bacterial pathogens and virulent avian influenza) are
both driven by the crowding in factory farms. Well, I call that that a great opportunity
to fix two major problems at once, what do you think? This closes the loop on the deforestation
we mentioned earlier as cattle ranching is one of the main reasons for the destruction
of the Amazon rainforest: at current rates 25% of Amazon will have no trees by 2030 according
to WWF and the forest will stop being a carbon sink in 2035.
This brings us to our next point: just as the capacity of the healthcare system can
fall as healthcare practitioners get sick during a pandemic, climate change and degradation
of nature also decrease the capacity of the earth to sustain us. This is called a positive
feedback loop (although it does not not do anything positive to us in this case). We
already know that, as glaciers melt, their reduced white surface reflects less of the
heat coming from the sun, further increasing global warming. In a recent study published
in the journal Science, Tim Brodribb reviewed the last 10 years of research on tree mortality,
and concluded that “most trees alive today won't be able to survive in the climate expected
in 40 years.” He says, with a microphone, you can hear them take their last laboured
breaths. This could mean less capacity to absorb our CO2 emissions, more wild animals
coming to our backyard and more potential risks for pandemics. Another good reason to
address climate change and systematic degradation of nature right away. As I explained in a
previous video using a funnel metaphor, the more we wait, the less margin to maneuver.
As US biologist Thomas Lovejoy pointed out in a recent Guardian article “this is not
nature’s revenge, we did it to ourselves.” Nature is sending us a message and the COVID-19
crisis has created a great opportunity to change some of our practices and to look at
how we live and work in better partnership with nature. Paradoxically, the pandemic also
results in a significant cut in emissions worldwide (an estimated 5.5% drop in carbon
dioxide emissions would be the largest yearly change on record) and great improvement in
air quality in many large cities. Can we resist the temptation to jump back to our failing
system as soon as the pandemic fades out and instead create the systems that the future
requires of us? Please let me know what you think in the comments down below.
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