What can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic that helps us with climate change ?

Professor Mark HowdenANU Climate Change InstituteVice Chair, IPCC Working Group II @ProfMarkHowden

Reconfiguring: your goals and resourcesSimilarities• Invisible• Lagged effects• Exponential nature• Personal to global implications• Systemic impacts requiring integrated responses• Impacts most on disadvantaged people

Differences

Is there a basis for comparison ?

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Justify COVID-19 responses ‘because immediate and large threats require an immediate and large response’‒ causing around 3 diagnosed deaths per 1000 right now

• And we frame climate change as an issue for the future BUT climate changes are also responsible for about 3 deaths per 1000 right now ‒ and air pollution (which we have seen is strongly linked to

GHG) is responsible for about 140 deaths per 1000• Let alone the other current costs from fire, smoke, heat,

flood, drought, sea level rise etc

Immediacy and severity

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Rapid response reduces damage, cost, duration and increases reversibility

• Delay damages and kills. Death rates:‒ Australia 1 : 250,000‒ US 1 : 3,000‒ UK 1 : 1,600

• No early response will be ‘perfect’– just get it roughly right• It is very difficult for a late response to be a good response

Early action is largely good action

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Revival of the value of ‘expertise’‒ comforting that dodgy stuff gets called out rapidly

• But also raised risk of ‘choose your expert’ (e.g. Norman Swan vs Brendan Murphy) in relation to schools, borders etc

• Experts coming to very different conclusions even with (presumably) the same underlying information base, pushes risk back into the political domain

• There are also fundamental political decisions which go way beyond medical expertise and the still-emerging knowledge base

Informed, early action is even better

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Possibly some over-excitement about ‘evidence-based decision-making’

Evidence-informed judgements

Evidence-free Evidence-informed judgements

Evidence-based

Political, subjective, biased, corrupt

Technocratic, unbalanced, clunky, slow

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• t

Where evidence meets politics

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Uncertainty did not hinder the COVID-19 response• I would argue that we know MUCH, MUCH more about

climate change and trade-offs between different responses than we do about COVID but that did not stop us making big decisions

Uncertainty

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources

The numbers matter

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Reason why we don’t commit to a net-zero GHG target: ‘We don’t know how much it will cost’ BUT that did not stop us from acting on COVID-19

• Frydenbungle – the $60B error-term in the COVID Jobkeeper response would almost be enough to transition us to net-zero by 2050 !

The numbers matter: cost

Kompas et al. 2019

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• The COVID-19 official death toll is horrifying and growing • But it could be a gross underestimate of the real toll• Compare expected deaths with all-cause deaths

‒ e.g. in the UK the week of 3 April 3,475 (21%) of deaths were attributed to COVID-19 BUT all-cause deaths were 6,082 higher than expected - with a range of things contributing

• Like with climate change, the way we measure things can seriously distort the public discourse and derail informed debate‒ e.g. death certificates not specifying heat-related cause

The numbers matter: lives

Fleming 2020, Quilty et al. 2020

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• We can reduce GHG emissions rapidly and significantly• Scale of annual reduction (4 to 8%) approx. aligned with

Paris Agreement temperature targets• But COVID policies not designed to do cost-effective

emission-reduction and so is a painful way to do it• We know how to reduce emissions and generate many co-

benefits

Rapid emission-reduction

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Initially a framing that COVID-19 was the ‘great leveller’• Instead it proportionately affects women, the poor and

disadvantaged racial groups

Inequality matters

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• There is no (significant) specific constituency FOR the coronavirus to block and misinform

• Ignoring expert guidance is not a good idea• It does not matter whether you believe that coronavirus is

dangerous or not

Denial matters

J. Keane

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Cascading, compounding, aggregating risks matter:‒ Cyclone Amphan in Bay of Bengal – interaction with

COVID during evacuation etc‒ Black Lives Matter protests potentially interacting with

COVID

Potential for interactions

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources• Importance of integrated responses and shared responsibilities (need both individual and collective responses working together)

• Choices to be made:‒ ‘Snapback’, ‘bounce back’ or ‘back to normal’‒ ‘Bounce forward’, ‘rethink and redirect’

• End of ideology ?? (doubtful)

The longer-term response

Reconfiguring: your goals and resources

Post-COVID recovery options

Hepburn et al. 2020

Reconfiguring: your goals and resourcesPolicies with high potential on both economic multiplier and climate impact metrics:

• clean physical infrastructure• building efficiency retrofits• investment in education and training• natural capital investment• clean R&D• rural support spending in some countries

Hepburn et al. 2020

Post-COVID recovery options

Thankyou

Prof Mark HowdenANU Climate Change Institutemark.howden@anu.edu.au@ProfMarkHowden+61 2 6125 7266

Vice Chair, IPCC Working Group II