Why are we so much more afraid of COVID-19 than of climate change? Early lessons from a health crisis for the communication of climate change

Abstract

As most countries of the world were affected by the COVID-19 in the first months of 2020, many of them took radical measures to contain the spread of the pandemic. Thousands of flights were cancelled, schools and shops were closed, industrial production was slashed, people were confined at home. The whole economy came to a standstill. Many of these measures resulted in very significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric pollution. Estimates by Carbon Brief reckon that greenhouse gas emissions in China were down 25 percent in February 2020, while fine particle levels were down 20–30 percent across the country (Myllyvirta, 2020). Global air traffic was reduced by 4.3 percent that same month – and this was before the ban on flights from Europe to the US imposed by US president Donald Trump in early March. Paradoxically perhaps, some of these measures had a positive impact for human health. Marshall Burke, from the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University, calculated that ‘reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved twenty times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to infection with the virus in that country’ (Burke, 2020). Though the global impact of the pandemic on climate change will be difficult to assess, given the far-reaching economic, political and social implications of some of the containment measures, one thing is certain: it is possible for world leaders to take urgent and radical measures in the face of an imminent threat, and for the populations to accept them. Yet we haven’t been able, so far, to take similar measures to confront climate change. Until the pandemic outbreak, and despite many calls from activists and scientists alike to declare a state of ‘climate emergency’, emissions were still rising at a yearly increase of 1 per cent.