Coronavirus and climate change: Is there any connection?
IN celebration of my 100th column in this esteemed paper — The Manila
Times — I am very excited to share with you the views of one of the climate scientists that I admire and follow — no less than professor Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University in the United States. In 2019, she was recognized as Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers and United Nations Champions of the Earth. I have followed her speaking engagements worldwide and have cited her works in my presentations.
One common question that admired climate scientist Hayhoe has been getting these days, as she shared in her Twitter account, is: “What does coronavirus disease — Covid- 19 — have to do with climate change?”
In a quick response, “the short answer is very little,” she said, “but the long answer is everything is related,” she continued. Hayhoe expounded her answers in a series of tweets.
She said that climate change is expected to increase the geographic range of infectious diseases with scary names like Zika or Chikingunya carried by “vectors” — ticks, mosquitoes and other animals — whose geographic range is limited, and expands in a warming climate. In the case of dengue, she said that the range of the disease will shift rather than expand.
She cited the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) Climate and Health Assessment which focuses on the health impacts of climate change.
Three of the key findings include:
1. Climate change is expected to alter the geographic and seasonal distributions of existing vectors and vectorborne diseases;
2. Rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and a higher frequency of some extreme weather events associated with climate change will influence the distribution, abundance and prevalence of infection in the mosquitoes that transmit West Nile virus and other pathogens by altering habitat availability and mosquito and viral reproduction rates; and
3. Vector- borne pathogens are expected to emerge or reemerge due to the interactions of climate factors with many other drivers, such as changing land- use patterns and its impacts to human disease, however, will be limited by the adaptive capacity of human populations, such as vector control practices or personal protective measures.
Climate and health impacts do not occur in isolation, and an individual or community could face multiple threats at the same time, at different stages in one’s life, or accumulating over the course of one’s life, the report continued to explain.
Covid- 19, believed to have originated from a wildlife market in Wuhan City, Hubei province in China, has spread throughout the world. Despite massive efforts to contain the disease, based on the data provided by WorldoMeters as of Mar. 25, 2020 ( 3: 20 GMT), Covid19 has affected 197 countries, infected 422,829 people worldwide and killed 18,907.
Like other known diseases — severe acute respiratory syndrome ( SARS), Ebola and Zika — that began in animals and transmitted into humans, Covid- 19, she explained, “is currently being spread by humans, not animals, everywhere humans live. So climate change is not significantly affecting the spread of the disease.” That one’s on us. It goes where we go, she added.
Hayhoe said that there’s the fact that a warmer climate may decrease ( humans) immune response that makes us more vulnerable to viruses like the flu. But as the planet warms, she added that the flu season could end up being year- round and this would give the virus more time to mutate into more dangerous strains.
In the article titled “Climate Change May Hamper Response to Flu: Study” published in The Scientist in February 2019, it claimed that previous studies have found that a warming climate may change the distribution of different diseases and the insects that carry them. Moreover, a new study suggests that a warming climate may also hinder the immune response of animals and humans infected with viruses and other pathogens.
In summarizing the impacts, she said that “climate change is a threat multiplier” — a statement shared by scientists, political figures and civil society around the world. Climate change takes what we already care about, she added.
As a threat multiplier, climate change makes already dangerous social and political situations even worse. Not only do we have to work to minimize the impact of climate change on our environment, but we also have to deal with how it affects human issues today.
In closing, she made one more connection between Covid- 19 and climate change. “When it all comes down to it, most of us want the same thing no matter what side of the political aisle we› re on,” she said.
“What really matters is the same for all of us. It’s the health and safety of our family, our friends, our loved ones, our communities, our cities and our country. That’s what the coronavirus pandemic threatens, and that’s exactly what climate change does, too,” Hayhoe added.
We humans are one species with very little variation in our basic DNA, and we evolved with other species in the planet’s biosphere by natural selection, responding to changes and stresses in our various habitats and environments — two basic lessons we have to realize after decades of self- inflicted global crises — the afflictions of pandemics, flooded cities, burned forestlands, droughts and other increasingly damaging climate disasters — based on the discoveries of Charles Darwin and other biologists in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The author is the executive director of the Young Environmental Forum. He completed his climate change and development course at the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom) and executive program on sustainability leadership at Yale University (USA). He can be emailed at ludwig. federigan@gmail.com.