Pandemic: an opportunity

By Robert Byron, MD, MPH, FACP, Vice Chair, Montana Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate

Even as we cope with and try to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic amidst the immense human and economic losses and devastation to countless individuals and families, we have an opportunity. Whether it is a learning opportunity or a missed opportunity is up to us.  The former leads to change for the better, the latter to doing what we have always done.

The COVID-19 pandemic can be compared with climate change in many ways.  In the interest of transparency, climate change did not directly cause COVID-19 to emerge as a human pathogen, but that does not mean there is no relationship between the two.  USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats factsheet in 2019 estimated that about three-fourths of new diseases in human originate in pathogens—bacteria, viruses, fungi—that come from animals. Deforestation, primarily related to agricultural uses, but also due to urbanization and extraction industries, is a major contributor to climate change. The same deforestation forces animals to move closer together due to habitat destruction, ultimately putting animal species that would not normally interact in close contact with each other. It also results in more people living near the edge of forests, thus putting humans in more intimate relationships with wild animals. If these same situations are combined with food insecurity, compelling people to hunt wild animals, termed “bush meat” in many parts of the world, to feed their families, that is yet another factor increasing the likelihood of a disease moving from wild animals into human populations as COVID-19 seems to have done.

Warmer temperatures of even a couple of degrees as most areas of the world have already experienced allows many animals and plants to expand the range of places they can live.   While this has primarily been studied on land relative to disease vectors, such as mosquitos and ticks, many researchers think similar migrations occur with larger animals, such as bats. Again, this puts certain animals in places where they previously did not exist thereby increasing the chances of transmitting pathogens they harbor to other species, including humans.

Separately, air pollution, the main cause of climate change, has been shown to negatively affect peoples’ response to some infections. Both during the 2003 SARS outbreak and now with COVID-19 there is strong evidence that people who live in areas with more air pollution are more at risk to die when infected with the viruses than people in areas with less polluted air.  

Climate change is no less a pandemic than the one caused by COVID-19, it is just playing out over a matter of years and decades, rather than months. Unfortunately, there is not even the potential for a vaccine against climate change like there is for COVID-19, but there are positive steps we can take to lessen global warming and lessen our risk of future pandemics. These include ending our dependence on fossil fuels and transitioning to clean, non-polluting forms of energy, providing support for those whose jobs are lost in that transition in the process; reducing our consumption and, thus, the demand for products that lead to deforestation, instead advocating for sustainable agricultural and forest management; and maintaining environmental protections that have saved so many lives, rather than removing them in the interest of corporate profits. All of these will help reduce pollution, which not only saves lives by itself, but also slows climate change.

Our world will be different once the threat of COVID-19 has passed. Whether anything good comes from the tragedies of COVID-19 is up to us. Hopefully, we can make this a learning opportunity, not a missed one.