What COVID Can Teach Us About Climate Action

We are amidst an unprecedented situation: the first truly global crisis in the modern age of digital communication.  

The magnitude: a 2-3% mortality rate pandemic with potential for seasonal return.  Global markets have plummeted, quarantine and shelter-in-place are status quo, and the world is almost singularly focused on the crisis at hand.

This is a unique opportunity for learning – about ourselves, about our systems, about our tools – that can be applied to other global threats of even greater magnitude.  

Which leads me to climate change.  Yes, maybe I’m just a single-minded person.  But even if your only lens of human interest is public health, there is no greater public health threat we will have ever faced than the ravishing effects of climate change.  Even if your only lens is disease, climate change will be the source of unprecedented contagion.  

In what ways is the present situation similar to the threat of climate change?  

The challenge is one that is global in nature, it affects the health outcomes of millions of people, it is affecting and limiting the action and behavior of billions of people, it involves an externality (in the sense that we ourselves are disease vectors), and there are known actionable steps that we can take to mitigate the disaster and find solutions to return to our lives.  There is also the potential for catastrophe should we not act.  The solutions cost individuals and society $ in the short term.

In what ways is the present situation distinct?  

The threat is imminent, it can affect us and our loved ones directly in the near term, it invokes a fear response, and the unit of influence and impact is the individual.  The actions we can take are somewhat agreed upon by national and international authorities – and our governments are taking action to mitigate damage.  This is frequently done under the guidance of a commander-in-chief of the pandemic mitigation efforts in a given country – a COVID czar (i.e. in many cases there is concentrated authority).  The solutions themselves make us feel personally safe – there is agency for personal protection.  In general, there is a sense of agency about the problem.

How We Might Learn

The principal axes of learning might include:

• Human behavior and what drives it
• The power of modern tools and information on how they are most effectively wielded
• What remote networks are most effective at organizing and taking action? And how?
• What societies and governments prove most resilient and effective in response to the crisis?
• What local communities prove most resilient and effective in response to the crisis?
• What drives volunteerism?
• The willingness of the population to grant the government control of their behavior
• What is driving governments to take action?

Some Hypotheses

Helping people feel a sense of agency over the outcome, and especially over their own, their family’s, and their community’s outcomes is a first step to encouraging behavior change.

How can people be expected to act if they don’t have a belief that their action is of consequence?

Fear is a stronger motivator to action than greed

Loss aversion is real.  People will be more likely to take action if they believe they will lose what they value than through the opportunity to gain something intangible to them in the present.  The convolution of what people value and what will be damaged by climate change will be fertile ground.

Social reward is sufficient to drive concerted action and volunteerism in global digital communities.  

The ubiquity of global digital networks has enabled the formation of communities across wildly diverse geographies.  Modern collaboration tools enable productive engagement of remote teams and communities working on complex problems.  Individuals in these communities respond to social rewards – community acceptance, positive reinforcement for adherence and exemplification of community norms and values, and feelings of contribution.  In essence, being valued.  There will be much to learn from the communities that were most effective and resilient in positively contributing to efforts on COVID-19 mitigation that we might apply to communities focused on climate change mitigation.  

Further, there are several types of communities.  Most broadly bucketed, there are communities of individuals with skills to contribute to a greater, and specific, work effort (e.g. 3D printed ventilators) and there are communities of individuals whose principal means of contributing to the cause is through the modulation of their own behavior and consumption (e.g. participating in social distancing, supporting the local community by purchasing gift cards at businesses at risk, and buying groceries for their elderly neighbor).  Both of these types of communities could be of value to the effort to mitigate climate disaster.  In the former case, through the enablement of talent to engage on problems of relevance.  In the latter, by providing best practices and social reward for adherence to them.   

Societies and governments with more central authority organized around collective principles will be better-equipped to take political action and more effective in managing this crisis

The statement is obvious.  What is less obvious is what we can learn from the organization of these societies, the actions that they take, and the concentration of authority in government around issues of existential societal magnitude.

Marginalia:

• Communities with a culture of care-of-neighbor will be more resilient
• People will adapt remarkably fast to new realities and adjust their metrics of quality of life accordingly
• People will adapt remarkably fast to new regulatory realities and society will adjust to new norms
• A felt disaster can permanently shift behavior

Where to Dig

What are the relevant networks that are responding?  The relevant systems worth analyzing?

• Countries
• States 
• Cities
• Local communities
• Online networks of scientists and engineers
• Online networks of individuals looking for answers / best practices
• Volunteer communities
• Social networks

The Cost

We could have planned for, and eliminated the extreme damage of, COVID-19 with 100B dollars, instead of it costing >5T dollars.  In this we find perhaps the most stunning analogy to climate.  While acting now would cost on the order of 1% of GDP, if we wait 20-30 years, we will be forced to spend upwards of 5% of GDP just to manage climate adaptation.  But there is a yet more terrifying issue with our failure to address climate disaster.  While we can still address COVID, even though we failed to take early action, we won’t be able to address climate once we reach tipping points.  We’re on a one-way road.  Hopefully the present crisis will help remind us that we do have agency over our collective future and that the actions that we take today are indeed of consequence.

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