Local Investments for the Long-Term: Earth Day and COVID-19
By Vincenzo Bollettino and Ariana Marnicio | Program on Resilient Communities at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
This past Earth Day, global attention was turned to coping with COVID-19 and its deleterious health and economic impacts. As we witness the unfolding events, we are shocked by the speed of the spread of the virus and its ability to upend our lives. The losses are felt acutely and broadly across the globe. The virus is cruel and devastating, but there will be an end to the crisis — it may take many months, even several years, but treatments and vaccines will invariably be found.
Regarding the climate crisis, sadly the fixes for what we, as a human family, have done to harm the Earth will not be quickly discovered, nor will the damage we have already inflicted vanish in a few months or years.
Rather, we will be spending decades looking to adapt to and recover from the years of damage to our forests, oceans, and other natural resources. The cumulative global impact of climate change on health and the world economy will be far greater, albeit spread over time, than what we are currently witnessing with COVID-19.
Our response to COVID-19 is evidence of our ability to come together as a global family to innovate, protect the vulnerable, and make change. These same skills will be required to combat and reverse the damage to our environment.
The Big Picture: A Multidisciplinary Approach
The challenges posed by anthropogenic changes to the Earth require not only a sustained shift in the way we use the Earth’s resources, but an immediate and long-term move to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. These challenges require a multi-disciplinary approach. No one set of stakeholders, nor single discipline, has the answers.
Rather, we will have to reach across disciplines to ensure that our actions do more good than harm, that they are coordinated, that knowledge and research is shared, and that economic livelihoods are supported across the globe. Future generations deserve to inherit an Earth able to provide resources that will ensure all its people are capable of thriving. This means taking measures to protect the Earth’s resources over the long-term, and adapting to changes that have already begun as a result of our actions.
In the near to mid-term, this means adapting to rising sea levels, increased temperatures, and changes in weather patterns that will put pressure on communities across the globe. We can expect and must prepare for increased frequency and severity of storms, droughts, flooding, glacial melting, and the resulting threat to human lives and strain on livelihoods.
Humanitarian Challenges
These changes to the environment and our climate increase the likelihood that we will witness growing humanitarian needs of populations exposed to natural hazards and limited economic opportunities, which will precipitate forced migration and exacerbate conflict.
These humanitarian challenges demand a multidisciplinary approach. This means that groups normally working separately to address humanitarian needs (peace and security actors, development agencies, humanitarian agencies, environmental groups) must work together to understand how varied approaches complement, or potentially miss opportunities to work in concert toward common objectives.
Including Local Voices in International Action
This kind of mutual understanding and coordination of effort is made difficult by these actors’ different institutional cultures, disciplinary backgrounds and varied programmatic objectives. These challenges can be met by ensuring that local communities play the leading role in international responses to humanitarian crises.
Global environmental and climate-related changes are always experienced locally, and adaptation to new local realities must be led by local communities. It is the role of the broader international community, and specifically the most resource and technologically rich states, to support these local initiatives, to demand a multidisciplinary and coordinated response to environmental and climate related disasters, and to begin moving the world toward more sustainable and ecologically viable solutions.
The world’s current struggle with COVID-19 is offering many lessons about the high costs of being unprepared, as well as people's ability to adapt to change, even on short notice. We can avoid some of the most extreme costs of climate change and environmental degradation by following the science and making the societal changes necessary to preserve the Earth for future generations.
Vincenzo Bollettino, PhD, is the Director of the Program on Resilient Communities at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Ariana Marnicio, MPH, is Program Manager for the Program on Resilient Communities at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
The Program on Resilient Communities at HHI produces evidence and learning to support communities, organizations, and governments in developing lasting solutions to the varied threats posed by natural hazards.
