Climate emergency in the COVID-19 wake

COVID-19, and the sanitary crisis it has triggered, has put a halt on many fronts. Even the economy, understood as the ‘holy’ consumption-driven activity to produce ever increasing corporate profits, has been suddenly halted. Under this ‘shock’-like mental framework it is easy to give-in to the thought that other processes that were underway will also halt and wait for us to recover business as usual (BAU). With climate change this would be a fatal mistake. We should instead use all the lessons offered by the COVID-19 crisis to intensify action to address the climate emergency, since failure to do so will bring about deeper crisis for which we now have the evidence that our BAU socio-economic structures are poorly prepared.

The COVID-19 crisis is offering us many lessons about how our societies face collective challenges, including: the need of strong social networks and how these have been undervalued and dismantled during the last decades; the thin line between responsible and authoritarian governments which are ready to take any chance to step over social values and human rights; how the burden of collective response is often enforced on people, without enough care for the required economic support linked to a redistribution of the available resources; the importance of public buy-in and education to trigger collaborative behaviors; the power of solidarity; the wickedness deeply rooted in some dominating power groups, which explicitly advocate for sacrificing our elders for the sake of saving what they wrongly call ‘the economy’ (in terms of climate change the young generations are the ones that will be called to be sacrificed for today’s corporate profit).

From the COVID-19 crisis we can also learn about the structural drivers behind collective crisis, the value of diversified economies with strong domestic supply chains in all fronts (and not only industrial), where social value lies and how it has been systematically undervalued during the last decades.

This crisis also evidences how growth dependency has become a structural critical disease of our economic system: It seems fundamentally wrong to put all our socio-economic system to service corporate profit, in such a way that when this material growth (measured by monetized output irrespective of its social value) fails, all our socio-economic structure collapses. Resilience is missing.

Last but not least, this crisis also offers important lessons about the uttermost relevance of early action following scientific knowledge, and about the extremely high rates of change that can be deployed once there is a collective understanding of the urgency of change. These insights directly speak to the ongoing climate crisis.

Let’s come back to the emergency of the climate crisis and how important it is that we find our way to an appropriate collective management of this challenge.

What emerges after COVID-19 depends on today’s choices and on how many and how deep we internalize the lessons that the COVID-19 crisis offered us.

In the post-COVID period three frameworks are possible:

• Coming back to a reinforced fossil fuel BAU (FF-BAU), including nuclear and CCS resurgence.
• Recovering what we could already call the Renewables BAU (RE-BAU), pushing for renewables and efficiency to gradually take-up the role of conventional energy technologies without major structural changes in our socio-economic system.
• Addressing structural changes (SC) in our socio-economic system, in such a way that besides having an energy system based on renewables and efficiency, wider systemic resilience is developed.

The implications for the energy transition and effective climate action of the post-COVID framework will be very important: FF-BAU will lead to decades of delay; RE-BAU would bring us back to the pre-COVID framework that already involves a significant delay compared to the climate imperative; SC would provide room for significantly speeding up the transition.

Strategic movements can already be seen pushing ahead these frameworks, with pressures for bailouts to fossil fuel industries and regulatory rollbacks (both financial and environmental) already finding their way through proposed ‘stimulus’ measures all around the globe.

The dominating thinking (and certainly policy-making) today seems to be longing for a fast return to BAU. However, this might not be the best thing to do, considering the deep links between BAU and the origin of structural crisis like COVID-19 or climate change.

Even recovering the pre-COVID push for renewables and avoiding going back to a reinforced FF-BAU does not seem to suffice anymore on light of the accumulated delay and the evidence provided by the COVID-19 crisis about the weakness of our socio-economic system to navigate these collective challenges.

COVID-19 reveals once more the strong link between carbon emissions and economic activity as we understand it today (and as pursued during the last decades). The huge impact expected from the pandemic to current economic activity will probably mean that carbon emissions fall in 2020 for the first time since the Great Recession of 2008. But this is an undesirable, unsustainable and non-lasting way to reduce emissions; emissions rebounded sharply after 2009.

If economic stimulus programs and bailing out policies are linked to climate goals (RE-BAU), and if people and institutions get used to telecommuting (and perhaps other behavioral changes than can be internalized through the COVID-19 crisis, like reduced flying), the COVID-19 crisis could also deliver some longer-term climate benefits along the RE-BAU roadmap. But if the pre-COVID socio-economic structures are kept unchanged, climate benefits are likely to be small compared to the size of the challenge.

A crisis like COVID-19, with its heap of lessons offered and the halt in the BAU inertia that produces, opens a window of opportunity for rethinking old structures from scratch. What just few weeks ago was difficult to be opened for discussion, now can be explored. And there is also an increased appetite to address these discussions now. However, the window of opportunity can be small due to the different competing forces.

But how tight is the situation regarding the climate crisis and why do we need to address it without further delay, channeling all the lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis to double down on climate ambition?

Figure-1 presents the remaining carbon budgets as of January 2020, i.e. the cumulative amount of CO2 that can be emitted since January 2020 in order to stabilize global warming at 1.5C or 2C with different likelihoods. The presented carbon budgets are taken from the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5C, updated to 2020, expressed in terms of near surface temperature, and including the effect of 2019 updates in sea surface temperature measurement databases. These carbon budgets also include the conservative estimate of earth system feedbacks reported in the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5C. The presented uncertainty ranges are the ones recommended in 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5C, but is worth noting that uncertainties can be significantly higher.

Given the huge socio-economic impacts that we can expect if global warming goes beyond 1.5C (as documented in the 2018 IPCC Special Report on 1.5C), the collective social goal should really be to stay below 1.5C global warming with the maximum likelihood. Hence, from the carbon budgets presented in Figure-1 we should be aiming at the carbon budget for 1.5C global warming with a 67% likelihood, which is as meager as 110 GtCO2 (emissions during last decade have been about 40 GtCO2/year, every year!).

The most ambitious transition scenarios from the two main international agencies dealing with the energy transition, the IEA Sustainable Development Scenario (WEO, 2019) and IRENA's REmap scenario (GET, 2019), belong to the same climate tier, with cumulative energy-related emissions until completing the transition of around 850 GtCO2. Other CO2 emissions from industrial processes and LULUCF should be added to energy-related emissions before checking consistency with climate goals by comparing with available carbon budgets. In any case, comparing these energy-related cumulative emissions with the carbon budgets for 1.5C (110 GtCO2 for 67% likelihood, and 270 GtCO2 for 50% likelihood) provides a clear indication of how short the RE-BAU falls from climate requirements. 


Figure-1: Remaining carbon budgets, as of January 2020, for limiting global warming to 1.5C with 67% and 50% likelihood and to 2C with 67% likelihood.

How fast should we transition to be aligned with the remaining carbon budgets?

If for simplicity sake we consider a linear transition to decarbonize our economy, Figure-2 presents historic CO2 emissions and a transition pathway consistent with a given climate goal (stabilize global warming to a certain value with a given likelihood of success). The carbon budget linked to the climate goal is the yellow area under the transition pathway (cumulative emissions from 2020 onward have to match the carbon budget for alignment with any specific climate goal).

Figure-2: Historic CO2 emissions and linear transition pathway consistent with a given climate goal, with indication of the associated carbon budget and how it relates with the evolution of annual emissions.

When we apply this kind of linear transition pathway to the remaining carbon budgets for stabilizing global warming at 1.5C with 67% and 50% likelihoods, we get the results presented in Figure-3: Full decarbonization should be reached within 5 years (67% likelihood of staying under 1.5C global warming) or a bit more than 12 years (50% likelihood of staying under 1.5C global warming). This is an extreme emergency!

Figure-3: Linear transition pathways consistent with the 1.5C carbon budgets with 67% and 50% likelihood.

The subtle difference between the climate crisis and the COVID-19 crisis is that in the case of climate change the human suffering is yet not as visible to all, because of the associated time lags and the distance of current impacts from the global North. But once the climate change impacts on human life fully materialize it will make COVID-19 look negligible at its side. So, we better emerge from the COVID-19 crisis with all lessons learned and a disruptive approach to address climate change.