Shaping the Future of Science: COVID‐19 Highlighting the Importance of GeoHealth

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is providing an unprecedented opportunity to observe how changes in human behavior during lockdown have impacted the Earth system, how aspects of the Earth system may affect COVID-19 disease dynamics, and the role of geoscientists during the pandemic. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of bridging the Earth system and human health through scientific research. Through these unfortunate and dire circumstances, GeoHealth has been brought to the forefront of visibility in the geosciences-especially throughout the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2020 (AGU20) and in the public health policies designed to mitigate the spread of the disease. GeoHealth lies at the nexus of humans, health, and the Earth system (Figure 1), all of which are interconnected to the COVID-19 pandemic.Though the pandemic pushed many professional meetings, including AGU20, to a fully virtual platform, the scientific response and communication remained. AGU20 featured 47 sessions under the umbrella of COVID-19, partitioned into three different themes: impact of COVID-19 on the Earth system, impact of changes in the Earth system on COVID-19, and science in the time of COVID-19. Seven separate AGU sections featured sessions on COVID-19 and there were 12 other supporting sessions formatted as innovative, union, plenary, and town halls.The annual theme for AGU20 was "Shaping the Future of Science," which was designed to focus on how the decisions we make now will affect the future. COVID-19 and its connection to the Earth system has demonstrated how GeoHealth, a relatively new AGU section, is an imperative addition to the geoscience community. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed geoscientists to think outside the box and consider how our access to data and geospatial analytic methods can help the COVID-19 response and inform both short-Abstract From the heated debates over the airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus to the abrupt Earth system changes caused by the sudden lockdowns, the dire circumstances resulting from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have brought the field of GeoHealth to the forefront of visibility in science and policy. The pandemic has inadvertently provided an opportunity to study how human response has impacted the Earth system, how the Earth system may impact the pandemic, and the capacity of GeoHealth to inform real-time policy. The lessons learned throughout our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are shaping the future of GeoHealth.Plain Language Summary From the heated debates over whether the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is primarily spread by airborne droplets to the abrupt changes in human behavior such as less driving and factory emissions that have caused changes to the Earth, the pandemic has highlighted the importance of the scientific field called GeoHealth. GeoHealth is the scientific study connecting humans, health, and the Earth-all of which are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The unique circumstances from the pandemic ha...

Earth System's Gatekeeping of “One Health” Approach to Manage Climate‐Sensitive Infectious Diseases

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Risks associated with 10 different disasters of bio-geophysical origins globally including coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been found to be interconnected (United Nations University-Institute for Environment and Human Security, UNU-EHS, 2021). The UNU-EHS report conciliates the political space available in health for roles of modern Earth system science in disease origin, early detection, and management, similarly, observed elsewhere (e.g., Gorris et al, 2021;Thazhathedath et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2020). Of this space is "One Health" which describes the integrated approach to better understand and respond rapidly to diseases at the human-animal-environment interfaces, requiring coordinated, collaborative, multidisciplinary, and cross-sectoral approaches (Lerner & Berg, 2017;Mackenzie et al, 2013).

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“…Additionally, biodiversity loss has been found to frequently increase the rate of transmission for pathogens associated with over three hundred emerging disease events including the West Nile virus in the Americas, and SARS in humans around the world with climate change as one of the drivers (Keesing et al., 2010 ). Arguably, there is need to improve understanding of how spatio‐temporal processes of climate change and shifts in infectious diseases are predicted (Gorris et al., 2021 ; Keesing et al., 2010 ). Thus, the need to establish measurable indicators at the interface of health, climatic factors, and ecosystems and how they feed into temporal trends of the cumulative incidence of climate‐sensitive diseases and basis for accounting for the elements of the Earth system across boundaries and connectivity was long overdue.…”

“…Gorris et al. ( 2021 ) make a case for exploring the intersectionality of human and environmental health to benefit from GeoHealth. Therefore, the emphasis on the Earth system as gatekeeper to human health and related dynamics through diverse connectivity phenomena (e.g., Figure 1 ).…”

Elucidating the impacts of COVID-19 lockdown on air quality and ozone chemical characteristics in India

“…While NO x and VOCs (including CO, and methane (CH 4 )) are the main precursors of ozone, the OH radical is also a key species in the ozone chemistry. The reason is that OH can oxidize VOCs and produce organic peroxy radicals (RO 2 ) as shown in reaction (1). Then, RO 2 can react with NO and produce NO 2 without involving ozone (reaction (2): for simplicity, we do not show the pathway towards hydroperoxyl radical (HO 2 ) formation), which can eventually lead to net ozone via reactions (3) and (4).…”

“…While the COVID-19 virus is a global disaster in terms of its health and economy damage, it provides a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of earth system sciences. 1 As many countries initiated stay-at-home orders (hereafter called lockdown) in early 2020 to control the spread of the virus, anthropogenic air pollutant emissions started to decline in different sectors. 2 While many past studies have explored the impacts of future stringent emission control “scenarios” on air quality, 3 the worldwide lockdowns provide a real-world scenario accompanied by actual observations on how the air quality responded.…”