Abstract
Global crises exhibit common patterns and interlinkages, from which critical lessons can be learned. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented moment for unearthing insights helpful for climate change response. This research aims to systematically identify, assess, and prioritize such relevant lessons. To this end, we adopted a Horizon Scanning (HS) approach to collect 553 related lessons from multiple sources, including reviewing 108 peer-reviewed journal articles and two surveys. A total of 372 respondents contributed and ranked relevant lessons, of which 31 experts across countries, sectors, and disciplines had ranked the same lessons ranked in the second survey. Adopting the HS approach was not only helpful to collect relevant lessons, but also effective in promoting the general public’s engagement in scientific research, which is essential to amplify its voice regarding two major crises that are directly affecting the lives and livelihoods of people. Results of this research indicate that both participant groups (experts and non-experts) perceived climate change to be more threatening than COVID-19. However, they expressed different areas of concern regarding the two crises. Among all thematic areas, “Research and innovation” and “Policy and governance” are of supreme importance for COVID-19 and climate change. This research provides invaluable information for actors who are at the frontline of fighting both crises.
1. Introduction
With millions of confirmed cases and deaths, the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis in the recent history of
humanity (Fan et al., 2020). The pandemic has triggered extraordinary
social measures (Cole and Dodds, 2021; Hepburn et al., 2020) and heavily
affected the global economy (Kumar and Ayedee, 2021) and imposed serious
implications for CO2 emissions and the Paris Agreement
on climate change (Shan et al., 2021). The implications of COVID-19 on
climate change action are enormous, including putting on hold many
climate actions (Loureiro and Alló, 2021). For instance, this includes
postponing the 26th conference of parties (COP26) in
Glasgow (United Kingdom), an important milestone for committing more
ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), for one year due
to the challenges of holding an inclusive and ambitious gathering of
climate change actors. The outbreak of this pandemic seems to be related
to several global problems, for instance, climate change, urbanization,
and global travel (Barouki et al., 2021). Despite the fundamental
differences between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change (Manzanedo
and Manning, 2020), there are interlinkages (e.g. both are global
crises), shared patterns (e.g. serious implications on multiple
sectors), and commonalities (e.g. multiple root causes and complex
interactions) that are typical for the Anthropocene era (Fuentes et al.,
2020; Heyd, 2021; Lancet, 2021). Both, COVID-19 and climate change have
interferences with development, research, global cooperation, and
resilience (Hepburn et al., 2020; Manzanedo and Manning, 2020). To
combat the COVID-19 pandemic, global societies have witnessed massive
changes in all life aspects, and governments committed to radical
measures to control the spread of COVID-19 and reduce losses of lives
(Baldwin and Lenton, 2020). On the other hand, the world has been
experiencing climate change effects for decades (IPCC, 2021), yet few
such drastic measures have been taken, reflecting the urgency of the
climate emergency (Coates et al., 2020). This has raised numerous
critical questions on comparable global efforts in fighting climate
change (Salas et al., 2020), a threatening crisis that moved down the
top global agenda because of the pressing urgency to deal with COVID-19
(Lancet, 2021).
Delayed action on both climate change and COVID-19 is threatening.
Therefore, policymakers and the global community concerned about such
global crises must be able to make informed decisions, based on sound
scientific findings (Baldwin and Lenton, 2020; Jin, 2020; Manzanedo and
Manning, 2020). The current pandemic outbreak offers an exceptional
window into a global crisis and provides invaluable insights and
profound lessons into how this crisis may be addressed and which policy
approaches are considered favorable(8). Reflecting from the COVID-19
pandemic, these lessons can be of political, social, economic, and
policy nature, among others. Examples of such lessons that can be found
in the literature stress the importance of global solidarity and
international cooperation (Cole and Dodds, 2021; Klenert et al., 2020),
emphasize how costly a delayed intervention can be (Fan et al., 2020;
Fuentes et al., 2020; Heyd, 2021; Jin, 2020), underline the importance
of crisis prevention (Cole and Dodds, 2021; Manzanedo and Manning,
2020), highlight how inequality can be exacerbated without timely action
(Klenert et al., 2020; Salas et al., 2020), and draw attention to the
centrality of research and innovation in facing new challenges (Ching
and Kajino, 2020; Jin, 2020). The term lesson used in the current
research, thus, refers to the insights that can be drawn from the
COVID-19 pandemic and potentially applied to climate change policy
making and implementation. Given the wide-spectrum of potential lessons,
we are aiming mainly to provide policy-makers at different levels with
up-to-date and evidence-based knowledge that can help in making the
right decisions regarding climate change, reflecting from the ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic.
Although several previous studies have contributed to collecting and
analyzing such lessons (Andrieu et al., 2021; Baldwin and Lenton, 2020;
Botzen et al., 2021; El Zowalaty et al., 2020; Herrero and Thornton,
2020; Hochachka, 2020; Howarth et al., 2020; Kakderi et al., 2021;
Manzanedo and Manning, 2020; Negev et al., 2021; Perkins et al., 2021;
Prideaux et al., 2020; Ruiu et al., 2020; Salas, 2020; Sarkis et al.,
2020; Sheehan and Fox, 2020), no systematic review of these lessons has
been conducted. In addition, the number of collected lessons in these
studies was limited and, in many cases, confined to limited thematic
areas. Employing the Horizon Scanning (HS) approach enables a more
comprehensive overview by expanding the information sources across
regions, disciplines, and professions, which can be quite helpful to
inform and support decision-making (Hines et al., 2019). Enlarging the
information sources through the HS has the potential to allow
investigating opportunities, threats signs, and outlooks of phenomena.
Concerning the aim of the current research, it allows identifying
important lessons that might be missed if a single source of information
(e.g., literature) is used. As of the date of writing this paper, this
is the first research with this scale to collect a magnitude of lessons
from COVID-19 that addresses a wide spectrum of thematic areas from
published literature, the public, and experts. Therefore, the ultimate
goal is to gather, analyze, rank, and reflect on the most critical
lessons that, if addressed, would advance climate change action. This
research provides recent, useful information for successfully navigating
the challenges of climate change reflecting from the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic.