Coronavirus collides with another global menace — climate change
The hits came this past week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Friday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe.
It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world’s poor.
Climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and more intense. Now, because of the pandemic, they come at a time when economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits.
Relief organisations working in eastern India and Bangladesh, for instance, say the lockdown had already forced people to rely on food aid by the time the storm, Cyclone Amphan, hit. Then, the high winds and heavy rains ruined newly sown crops that were meant to feed communities through next season. The worst may be yet to come. Several other climate hazards are looming. They include heatwaves in Europe and South Asia, wildfires from the western United States to Europe to Australia, and water scarcity in South America and southern Africa, where a persistent drought is already deepening hunger.
And then there’s the locusts. Abnormally heavy rains last year, which scientists say were made more likely by the long-term warming of the Indian Ocean, have exacerbated a locust infestation across eastern Africa. Higher temperatures mean locusts spread to places where the climate wasn’t as suitable before — and in turn, destroy vast swathes of farmland and pastures for some of the poorest people on the planet.
While the risks differ from region to region, taken together, “they should
be seen as a sobering signal of what lies ahead for countries all over the world”, a group of scientists and economists warned this month in an opinion piece in Nature Climate
Change.
The impact of the accumulated warming is already felt by those who were in the eye of Cyclone Amphan this week: those who live in the delta regions of eastern India and Bangladesh, and who are at the mercy of intensifying heatwaves, sea level rise, storm surges and super cyclones like this one. In rural Bangladesh, for example, the storm punched through embankments. Seawater ate the paddy fields. Mud and thatch homes collapsed.
The slow burn of climate change has increasingly made it tough for many to make a living farming and fishing, as generations had before them; many workers had migrated to urban areas nearby to earn a living. The lockdown has put an end to that coping strategy. Migrant workers in India have been trying to head home in droves.
The extreme weather events of the past week, coming on top of the coronavirus pandemic, throw into sharp relief, said Corinne Le Que´re´, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in England, the perils of underestimating the impact of compounding risks.
Economic recovery policies that governments enacted after the pandemic lifts, she said, would impact the trajectory of emissions for decades to come. “Reconstruction post Covid-19 should be shaped in a way that reduces our vulnerability,” she said. “That means both to prepare for extreme climatic risks, and to reduce emissions that underpin the climatic risks.”