The lessons we can learn from the global response to coronavirus to help us tackle the climate crisis

There are good reasons to believe that the climate emergency will be even harder to defeat than Covid-19, even though we have more time to confront it, writes Franziska Funke

The world's quick response to coronavirus in many countries shows what's possible in tackling climate change (Getty)

Covid-19 and the climate crisis are markedly similar: the worst damages are only diverted when society commits to decisive and early action in the face of an abstract threat. In the past months we have experienced first-hand the tragedy of when political leaders procrastinated: the longer they waited the harder the virus hit back. In June, a former government advisor estimated that going into lockdown one week earlier could have halved the UK’s coronavirus death toll.

Similarly, the more we delay global climate action the closer we inch towards dangerous tipping points that send us down a spiral of increasingly strong and frequent heat waves, floods and storms.

There are good reasons to believe that climate change will be even harder to defeat than the virus, even though – or precisely because – we have more time to confront it. We will probably resume some semblance of normalcy in a post-pandemic world, once an effective treatment protocol and vaccine have emerged. Stabilising the climate requires much more lasting transformations that need to be implemented way before climate change reaches catastrophic dimensions.

On the bright side, while these transformations would last longer, they would not be as disruptive to the economy: the IMF predicts a 4.9 per cent contraction of the world economy in 2020. In comparison, the International Panel on Climate Change predicts that reaching the goals of the Paris Agreements will slow economic growth by just 0.06 per cent per cent per year. Apparently, saving the planet doesn’t cost the Earth.

People often think the major bottleneck for more ambitious climate action is that it will be too expensive. In our new research, my colleagues, from the European Commission and the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, and I examined what we can learn from the Covid-19 pandemic for advancing climate change mitigation. We demonstrate that the pandemic can teach important lessons about where the real challenges lie: in garnering political will and sharing the costs fairly.

One of the main barriers for more ambitious climate action is our own psychology. Humans are psychologically wired to underestimate abstract and far-away threats like climate change. The virus, which in the beginning seemed like a remote possibility when it appeared still confined to the city of Wuhan, has meanwhile succeeded to capture our imagination. Climate change has failed to attract a similar level of alertness. Greta Thunberg wanted us to panic – but we didn’t. The future success of climate policy may also depend on whether we will finally grasp the full sense of urgency.

While saving the climate may not be as expensive as commonly thought, climate policy will inevitably create losers. The most imminent group of losers, the fossil fuel industry, is incidentally also one that has seemingly unconquerable lobbying power. It is time that we find a way to give more power to institutions that are better aligned with long-term goals – and more lobby-proof – than politicians on a re-election mission. The Committee on Climate Change was a good start, as was the creation of a Citizen Assembly on Climate Change. Now it needs to be made sure that they are listened to.

Perhaps most importantly, policymakers need to ensure that mitigation measures are designed such that they take account of citizens’ concerns: What if heating becomes so expensive that we cannot afford it next winter? Will I still be able to afford my daily commutes? Insulating highly affected communities and low-income households from exorbitant price hikes will be key to ensuring public support.

For these solutions to emerge, however, we need to overcome the politicisation of climate change. Around the world, many measures against Covid-19 were only successful because they built on a platform of broad cross-partisan support. Harnessing support for climate change across political divides is crucial. So is getting disgruntled climate sceptics and those led astray by misinformation back on board.

Eventually, the current pandemic might just culminate in exactly the change in political culture needed to progress climate action. Amid the pandemic we have been living through the harshest restrictions on personal and economic liberties that most people have seen in their lifetime. Globally, the sums of money mobilised for economic recovery are unprecedented. Covid-19 has shown what is possible once there is just enough political will.

In a post-pandemic world, will politicians still get away with decrying the demands of climate activists as unrealistic? Chances are that the new generation of climate strikers will give policy makers a much harder time to dismiss ambitious mitigation proposals, such as higher carbon prices, on the basis of them being too much of a burden on the economy.

Franziska Funke is a research assistant and visiting doctoral student at the University of Oxford, researching climate change mitigation policies.