Covid -19 provides window on earth system

By Dr Debapriya Mukherjee                      

Former Senior Scientist

Central Pollution Control Board, India

Beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is reasonably well understood; cronavirus is believed to have jumped to humans from some animals at a wet market. COVID-19 is the latest in a long line of diseases that have crossed from animals to people, including HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Ebola. In fact, 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, and of the pathogens that cause these, at least 71% originate in wildlife. For any such pandemic, it is easy to realize the beginnings of these diseases but difficult to understand how the pandemic will end and what damage it will cause. New strains of COVID 19 virus continue to emerge. The World Bank estimated that up to 115 million more people would fall into extreme poverty (living on less than US$1.90 per day) in 2020 owing to the economic shocks of the pandemic. This, in turn, will have significant impacts on food security, nutrition, health and the environment.

It is well established that COVID-19 is already disrupting lives and livelihoods around the world. The most important consequences are public health crises and associated economic and humanitarian disasters, which are having huge adverse impacts on human wellbeing. The scale and persistence of socioeconomic disruption represent an unprecedented modification of human interactions with the earth system; the impacts of which will be long-lasting, widespread and varying across space and time. Almost overnight, people across the world had to change their lifestyles, the way they work and their consumer behaviours. It is critical for us to better understand how future societal disruptions and catastrophes could affect interactions among energy systems and other systems that serve society.

Considering the above, we can highlight the various links between ecologically, economically, and socially unsustainable behaviours and the outbreak and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic with reference to large-scale land-use changes—such as agricultural intensification, industrial development, mining, road building, and deforestation—and the resulting loss of habitats and biodiversity around the world, often initiated by the need to grow more food, puts people in ever closer contact with wild animals and makes the transmission of infections more likely. In this context, it is pertinent to mention that ecosystems as well as reduced contact between animals and people could prevent the transmission of wildlife diseases to humans.

Like the legendary falling apple that hit Isaac Newton on the head and is said to have led to his groundbreaking insight on the nature of gravity, COVID-19 could not only provide unintended glimpses into how complex Earth systems operate and critical role of human but also  a window of opportunity for promoting sustainability transitions in consumption and production—which are desperately needed to prevent other similarly dramatic crises brought on by climate change; this goal can only be achieved with deliberate planning and carefully designed strategic communication in the public sphere. This Covid-19 crisis has explored the processes linking heterogeneous local pollutant emissions and regional atmospheric chemistry and air quality, or the relationship between global economic integration and poverty-driven environmental degradation. The uniquely pervasive disruption also has the potential to reveal novel questions that have not previously been raised about the earth system. From this perspective, the impacts of COVID-19-related social disruption may be easily focused on two multidisciplinary pathways: energy, ‘emissions, climate and air quality’, and ‘poverty, globalization, food and biodiversity’. 

The human footprint on the earth system is vast. Thereby any disorder from normal functioning of earth system that we can observe needs a very large perturbation. COVID-19 has provided that perturbation. As of July 2020, approximately half the world’s population had been under some version of sheltering orders that substantially reduced human mobility and economic activity with 70% of the global workforce living in countries that have required closures for all non-essential workplaces and 90% living in countries with at least some workplace closures.

The reduction of human activities, and the efforts to manage their revival, have varied around the world. The large-scale reduction in human activity will necessarily be temporary but still there will be an opportunity to observe returning of the earth system processes to their previous states after activity returns to something the pre-pandemic levels. The event, therefore, provides a unique test bed for probing hypotheses about the earth system sensitivities, feedbacks, boundaries and cascades presuming that the observing systems are in place to capture these responses.

Impacts on energy consumption, and associated emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants are likely to cascade across timescales. In the near-term, reductions in mobility and economic activity have reduced energy use in the commercial, industrial and transportation sectors, and might have increased energy use in the residential sector. Of course, misunderstandings may have arisen with regards to declines in carbon dioxide emissions caused by COVID-19-related disruption, with some interpreting short-term reductions to suggest that austerity of energy consumption could be sufficient to curb the pace of global warming. A reduction in fossil CO2 emissions proportional to the economic decline would be dramatic relative to previous declines. Progress in understanding the carbon-cycle responses to COVID-19 will, therefore, be challenging and, at a minimum, will require new methods for tracking the unprecedented short-term perturbation in emissions through the earth system.

Now our primary motivation is to search for insight into the basic functioning of the earth system, which could be helpful in managing and recovering from the event, and in avoiding future impacts. The analysis of the earth system response can enable early detection of hotspots of environmental risk or degradation emerging during the event. The individual, societal and government responses to these economic effects will influence the long-term trajectory of the human footprint on the Earth System.

The current socioeconomic disruption is a singular perturbation of that human footprint. Advancing understanding of this forcing, and the processes by which different components of the Earth System respond can help enhance robustness and resilience now and in the future.