Putting the climate crisis into perspective
To say this upfront: It is generally neither appropriate nor helpful to put the Corona crisis into direct opposition with the climate crisis, for in both cases human lifes are at stake, demanding an urgent and effective response amid resource constraints. Moreover, there is a lot we can learn from the current crisis in order to more effectively (and wisely) address other pandemics and global emergencies in the future. There are a number of interesting commonalities between Covid-19 and climate change to consider, including:
- a high level of global interconnectedness and interdependency,
- a scientifically established urgency and neccessity, calling for wide-reaching behavioral changes based on the precautionary principle,
- a disproportionate humanitarian burden on developing/emerging economies and socially disadvantaged parts of the population),
- a high level of targeted and anti-scientific disinformation attempting to discredit and delay effective and well-balanced measures.
But inspite of these similarities, there are also notable differences between Covid-19 and climate change to take into account. And as I attempt to show in this article, perhaps our experience with the Corona crisis can help put the climate crisis into a proper perspective.
In general, it is imperative to keep in mind the different magnitude and timeline of the climate crisis, which is as much real and currently on-going (though much less visible) as the pandemic. The Corona crisis will hopefully be mostly over by 2021. Unlike a pandemic, which reaches a saturation point within a few years, the climate crisis is going stay with mankind until the end of the century and beyond — for millennia, actually — unless it can be sufficiently mitigated. And we can only hope that future interventions to fight the climate crisis are going to be rather different from what we can currently observe (at least in some instances), meaning: long-sighted rather than short-sighted, structural/systemic and enduring rather than superficial and temporary, participatory/empowering rather than autocratic, and based on cooperation, inclusion and fairness rather than based on (national) isolation and separation.
Within the course of months, it has become clear that in many ways the post-Corona world is going to look very differently from the one we have known before. Our societies will likely be more digitalized, less open and permeable, and more sensitive to the risk of global pandemics. The global economy is likely to find itself in the middle of a deep recession, and public debt may have reached new record levels. According to the IMF, “The cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic crisis could be around 9 trillion dollars”. At the same time, the post-Corona world may look disappointingly familiar. If it were up to fossil-fuel-driven industry interests, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions trajectory will largely resume violating the Paris agreement. At the same time, economic losses and damages caused by climate change will increasingly accumulate as global temperatures continue to rise. If the Corona crisis might cost the world economy some 9 trillion USD in 2020/2021, how much might the climate crisis cost over the next 80 years?
A recent study has provided new estimates for cumulative GDP losses until 2100 in a business-as-usual scenario: The median damage values for different climate sensitivities ranging between 2 and 4 degrees C are ranging between ~2000 and ~4000 trillion USD (in 2005 US Dollars). The study confirms that the Paris Agreement’s target of stabilizing the future global temperature increase at below 2 degrees C is near-optimal from a cost-benefit perspective, especially at climate sensitivities of 3 degrees C and less.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13961-1
If these damage estimates (which are based on the assumption of continued world GDP growth) are at least somewhat valid, the cumulative climate crisis-related global economic losses by the end of this century could be more than 200 to 400-times higher than what the world economy is experiencing in 2020/2021. Put differently: Cumulative losses and damages between 2000 and 4000 trillion USD over 80 years imply an average of 25–50 trillion USD per year, i.e. 3–5 times the Corona-crisis related economic losses for 80 years, every year. In reality these damages are going to be unevently distributed, with a disproportionate share of them waiting to occur in the second half of this century, when some of us won’t be alive, but our children and grandchildren will. This does not even include the losses in terms of biodiversity, human lifes and democratic freedom, driven by food shortages, armed conflicts, and mass migrations. Those are hard to quantify. And if the global economy is not resilient enough, it will likely (partially) collapse or at least substantially contract under the accumulating weight of climate damages as the century unfolds. In this case, the aforementioned damage estimates might lose their meaning altogether, for there won’t be as much economic value left to be lost in the first place.
Given these findings we may need to acknowledge — perhaps more than ever — that we are currently finding ourselves stuck somewhere between a hard place and a rock, with our backs behind a wall. A key question that I believe is defining our (pre-)Millennial generation is this: How determined are we to fight our way out of this mess and how we can be as smart and compassionate as possible about it? If we fail to properly combine the limited resources that we are going to spend in the next few years to restart the global economy with the resources which need to be spent NOW (and should have been spent decades ago) in order to stabilize mean global temperatures in the long-term, we may well find that (in economic terms) we will have lost several hundred times more in the long-run than we could ever hope to gain in the near-term.
