Since the pandemic started to show its teeth on our shores in March, there’s been a trend to wave away any other matter other than COVID-19 with an examination of, ‘Just one crisis at a time — we’ll get to climate change after we’ve got the economy back on its feet.’
The only problem is we don’t have the luxury as a nation to solely focus on one crisis at a time.
Earlier this year, we already saw climate change in our backyards with the catastrophic 2019-20 bushfire season. During these fires, an estimated 18.6 million hectares burnt, over 5,900 buildings were destroyed, 34 lives were lost and one billion animals were killed. Not to forget the many endangered species driven closer to extinction.
These awful months brought the climate emergency heatedly into our reality. The people of Australia were scared and they started to increasingly press the Morrison government on the country’s climate action.
But then another crisis took all our attention away: COVID-19. By the time all the fires in New South Wales were extinguished on March 4th, we were already panic buying toilet paper. Soon every corner of conversation across the globe became dominated by coronavirus and its implications. There wasn’t any room left to talk about anything else.
As Prime Minister Scott Morrison said to a business audience in Sydney regarding coronavirus, ‘We now have one goal together this year: to protect the health, the wellbeing, and livelihoods of Australians through this global crisis, and to ensure that when the recovery comes — and it will — we are well-positioned to bounce back strongly on the other side.’
'The COVID-19 pandemic has riddled us all with exhaustion. And yet we can’t put all else aside to solely focus on the coronavirus effort.'
Yet with each day that passes, climate change becomes a more pressing issue, and mother nature isn’t going to wait for us to play catch up.
This year, Queensland marked the official bushfire season on the first of August with the state seeing fires burning already. In New South Wales, twenty-one local councils started their bushfire season at the beginning of September and the RFS has already battled multiple fires on the north-east coast. Fire ecologist David Bowman, told the ABC, ‘It's extremely difficult to predict what an individual fire season will do… But am I relaxed about the coming fire season? Absolutely not.’
Our worsening bushfire seasons are just one example of many. Australia is expected to see continued and increased drought, affecting agricultural yields, rising sea levels, increasing the risk of damage from storm surges and flooding in low-lying communities, frequent and more intense heatwaves, damage to biodiversity and ecosystems and increased coral bleaching. And new research by Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal has found that global warming has killed half the coral on the Great Barrier Reef and caused irreversible damage.
What’s important to note too is that crises don’t work completely separately of each other; we can’t simply put them into individual boxes to deal with one by one but rather need to address them in conjunction with each other. For example, operations for the next bushfire season in Australia will need to take into account coronavirus and its implications. Large-scale evacuations and the gathering of people in community centres could mark a huge threat in becoming a hub for coronavirus spread. International cooperation has also been already compromised with global aid unable to risk their safety by moving across oceans during a pandemic.
There’s an argument to be made that we need to recover our economy from the impacts of the pandemic before planning for mitigating climate change or putting in steps for action. However, economically speaking it’s far more advantageous for climate change to be included in all discussions of economic efforts, given it too has already had significant impacts on our economy and will only continue to hit it harder.
The longer we wait to mitigate climate change and put in preventative policies, the bigger the strain it will have on the Australian economy. If we continue to look at the bushfire crisis of 2019-20, it was Australia’s costliest natural disaster, with an expected cost to the tourism sector alone of $4.5 billion and bushfire related insurance claims lodged between November and February racking up to an estimated $1.9 billion.
Therefore, it’s in our best economic interests to be addressing climate change now and putting policies in place for prevention, management and mitigation. Inaction will not serve well in the long run — it's already gravely harming communities across our nation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has riddled us all with exhaustion. And yet we can’t put all else aside to solely focus on the coronavirus effort.
The oceans will continue to rise, the planet will continue to get hotter, and the floods and fires are coming. Right now, there’s a strong sentiment going around that we’ll get through these troubling times together. Despite wars, depressions and disease, the human spirit proves its resilience. But when we get to the other side of this pandemic, we need to also make sure we have a home left to enjoy the fruits of our survival. There’s no point making sure we get through the COVID pandemic if we don’t have a planet to live on at the end of it.
Marnie Vinall is a freelance writer and copywriter in Melbourne, Australia. She is a regular contributor of Beat Magazine and Concrete Playground, and has bylines in ABC News, Mumbrella, B&T and Globo Hobo.
Main image: Illustration Chris Johnston