We face two different global crises: the Covid-19 pandemic and the looming prospect of a destabilised climate. One a medical emergency, the other a series of changes in the atmospheric conditions which determine the patterns of the world’s weather. Both, however, are global phenomena requiring global solutions. What—if anything—can our experience of the first over the last 18 months tell us about how to approach the second?
Perhaps the first lesson is that risk management requires immediate flexibility in the face of the unexpected. Pandemics and climate change have long been concerns but have largely been treated as distant issues for the medium- and long-term future. Pandemics were on the list of risks drawn up by scientists and government planners for several decades but, once noted, were sidelined. Few—if any—real preparations were put in place after the UK government’s desk exercise—codenamed Cygnus in 2016—nor after comparable exercises in the United States and elsewhere.
The climate debate has focused on what might happen in 2050 if we fail to move away from a carbon-based economy. The last 18 months have demonstrated that both crises are occurring now and require immediate responses. As the residents of the flooded states in Germany or those suffering from wildfires in Oregon or the heatwave in Canada can tell you, climate change is not a problem which will emerge gradually over three decades. It is as immediate a challenge as the waves of Covid and its variants which continue to spread across the world.
The second key lesson is that both crises impose new demands on governments already overstretched and ill-prepared. Covid has required lockdowns and detailed control of social interaction, from enforced distancing to the wearing of masks to the restriction of travel and free movement—measures alien to most governments. Climate change will require even greater state intervention: pushing changes in individual behaviour, forcing individuals and businesses to transform their homes and factories and raising the money through charges or taxation to pay for vast amounts of new infrastructure. States weakened by decades of low taxation and a preference for private over public provision will have to be rebuilt.
National governments at least exist. Global government is virtually non-existent. Covid has shown up the reluctance of nation states to cooperate even in the direst circumstances. Information was not shared by the Chinese in the early days of the crisis. Vaccines have not been shared to any significant degree, with the result that the latest Covid variants are surging through Africa and parts of Asia.
Something similar is happening on climate change. The European Union, usually one of the most enlightened forces in the global climate debate, has adopted a policy of tariffs on energy-intensive imports from countries whose poverty has held back the transformation to a low-carbon economy. Instead of investment in the modernisation of industry in India and other such countries, Europe will impose a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. If carried through—a big “if” given the complexity of the proposal, as spelt out in a 291-page document published by the European Commission last month—Europe will be able to reduce the 10 per cent of global emissions it currently produces without losing jobs, while India and others will be poorer and less able to invest in the necessary move away from coal. The result will be a clean Europe in a dirty world—an outcome which will do nothing for climate security.
Equally unproductive in solving either problem is the continuing conflict between China and the rest of the world. China clings to its approach of secrecy and denial. On Covid its treatment of the doctors and scientists who wanted to tell the world the truth was shocking, as detailed in Jeremy Farrar’s tremendous new book with Anjana Ahuja. On climate, President Xi and his successors must see that global warming will impose desertification across the Gobi region and other parts of western China, and water shortages throughout the country. The consequent migration to the cities of the Eastern seaboard will have an impact far exceeding any migration yet seen in Europe.
The Chinese climate is already changing. According to a paper published by the Chinese Meteorological Administration in early August, the temperature across China has risen by an average of 0.26 degrees centigrade per decade since 1950, a figure significantly higher than the global average of 0.15 degrees per decade. Equally, the developed world should see that its climate security depends on cooperation with a country which now produces almost 30 per cent of daily global emissions. Few things are more important in the complex world of climate diplomacy than a prudent rapprochement between China and the west.
The great hope, of course, is science and technology. Vaccines are beginning to protect the developed world from Covid. Over time, vaccination can become commonplace across the world a scientists responding to each new variants. Science can also provide some answers to climate change, given the resources. That will require the development of low-cost, low-carbon sources of energy capable of transcending all national boundaries, and capable of sweeping away low-cost but high-carbon sources such as coal on economic grounds alone. Competition in finding such a solution should be open. But the benefits must be shared.
The final—and perhaps the hardest—lesson is that both Covid and climate change will not go away completely. With good policies and cooperation, both can be managed and perhaps contained. But Covid variants are likely to continue to spread, especially in areas with weak health systems—most of Africa, Latin America and South Asia. In a world of global trade and travel, the disease will continue to reach Europe and the United States. Even the best vaccination systems fail to provide full protection. The worst effects of climate change could be averted, but the process of disruption to the global climate has already begun, and the build-up of emissions in the atmosphere will continue to have unpredictable impacts on temperature and weather conditions into the future. Some problems simply cannot be “solved” in a definitive way. To talk of adaptation can sound like defeatism—but for climate change as for Covid, it begins to look like an essential part of the strategy for survival.
