COVID-19 lessons for climate change

Abstract

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak being declared a global pandemic, climate change was at the forefront of political and academic discourse. To protect the future of the planet, climate scientists and environmentalists were calling on policy makers for urgent and decisive action on a massive and global scale to control greenhouse gas emissions, not only highlighting the important role of mega infrastructure projects in delivering on climate-change mitigation but also bringing into sharp focus the need for significant investment in adaptation initiatives to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure going forward. As the public health crisis took hold, however, the world’s spotlight moved away from climate concerns to focus on the pandemic and its ramifications. The latter has since taken a terrible toll in both lives lost and those incapacitated by serious infection, as well as on-going suffering occasioned by long-COVID. It has affected all aspects of everyday life and work, and has had a major detrimental impact on the global economy. Despite initial hesitation in many countries on how to deal with the unfolding threat to public health, the urgency with which the global community has since responded to the crisis and managed to contain its destructive powers has been impressive. This is in sharp contrast to the prevarication and relatively slow response to the threats posed by climate change, in spite of a number of similarities between the two crises. Against this backdrop, the various successes and failures of the COVID-19 policy response offer unprecedented insights into how the global climate crisis could and perhaps should also be managed. There are many parallels between the current public health crisis and what we can expect from the impending global climate emergency, not least because highly infectious diseases such COVID-19 and anthropogenically induced global warming are both classic examples of what economists call negative externalities, i.e. situations where production and consumption behaviour results in costs to third parties that normal markets struggle to internalise and cannot therefore manage. Economic actors, for example, do not directly bear the climate-change related costs associated with the emissions that they can dump free of charge into the atmosphere, in the same way that asymptomatic COVID carriers who sneeze without a face-mask do not bear the costs of any infection that they may have transmitted inadvertently. Such market failure necessitates public intervention to redress the situation in order to achieve more economically efficient outcomes, and is the rationale for government intervention in even the most laissez-faire capitalist economies. But for the pandemic and climate change, even action by individual national governments is not enough. Both are global externalities that call for global intervention, and clearly face similar challenges in addressing governance, institutional and societal barriers against effective action. Reflecting on how these have been dealt with during the pandemic, and the lessons learnt, should therefore help us better prepare for the future climate challenge. Although a plethora of papers have started to appear as academics and other commentators have raised this possibility/opportunity (see for example, Klenert, et al. (2020),