Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis to Overcome the Global Environmental Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis and the environmental crisis share a range of similarities. Both crises take place on a global scale and affect all aspects of our lives. However, we humans respond differently to these challenges. Here, we compare and comment on characteristics of the COVID-19 crisis and the environmental crisis, explore how far these two crises are comparable, and what we can learn from actions that have been taken against the COVID-19 crisis. We discuss how human societies are affected by the respective crises, and analyze policy makers’ responses and offer pathways to better inform policy. We highlight the role of science, which significantly contributed to decision making throughout the COVID-19 crisis, but seems frequently underrepresented in the environmental crisis. We conclude that there are significant differences between the two crises in terms of perceptibility and thus communicability. While problems and solutions in the COVID-19 crisis are largely linearly correlated, the challenges of the environmental crisis are far more complex and decoupled, and thus appear much more complex and are often only perceived with difficulty by humans. Thus, tackling the environmental crisis is much more challenging than solving the COVID-19 crisis. To overcome the environmental crisis, purely technical approaches for combating symptoms are not sufficient. However, political interests are usually short-term, and do not correspond with the temporal and spatial scales of global change. There is an urgent need to improve institutionalized scientific advisory mechanisms and to empower global policy makers who are independent of local interest groups. Furthermore, we need the sound communication of complex interactions to the general public and the translation of scientific findings into action. One possibility to achieve this is to bring together natural scientists with expertise in biology, climate and geosciences and social scientists, psychologists, and, possibly, artists.

The mass public’s science literacy and co-production during the COVID-19 pandemic: empirical evidence from 140 cities in China

“…The greatest lesson that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught mankind is to strengthen the focus on science (Von Hagke et al, 2022), which has played a key role in decision-making for the prevention and control of the pandemic, both for government departments and the public. Looking at the world as a whole, governments that performed well in pandemic control followed the principles of scientific prevention and control, rather than spreading conspiracy theories and politicizing the issue (Chan et al, 2021;Sanchez and Dunning, 2021).…”