COVID-19 is a name no one wants to hear about anymore. We have been terrorized by the virus that carries this name for almost a year and a half now and we all have lost someone due to this pandemic and global crisis.
People were getting sick, cities have been struck, whole nations have been suffering and in just a short period we had a global pandemic on our hands and no one was safe. Horrific scenes and news from all over the world made us all scared. We were forced to slow our life pace and to close ourselves inside to save our and the lives of others. Total silence roamed the earth for around two to four months, and depending on the place on earth silence is still present.
A lot of bad has happened during this pandemic and it is still happening in certain parts of the world but, believe it or not, in all of this chaos few things emerged as positive. Lockdown and people taking a break from their hectic and sped up lives resulted in us being more environment friendly, just like alternativi.fr. Thanks to the fact we were closed and unable to negatively impact our environment we got reports that air quality drastically improved while nature was coming back to life worldwide.
The lockdown
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire world was shut down. Some places still are but it is not as strict as it was from February to June 2024. This lockdown made us all scared and afraid for our closest but it also made us more environmentally friendly. You are probably wondering how is that exactly? Well, let’s look at air firstly. The factories still had to work and they still provided enough pollution and greenhouse gases that simply couldn’t be avoided. What was avoided is our need to move and thusly increase air pollution with our vehicle gasses and our other activities. Thanks to the entire world being under lockdown we reduced the amount of pollution that was caused by motor vehicles enough for the valid organization to measure and increase healthier air in places where it wasn’t present before.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 4.6 million people around the world die prematurely due to respiratory difficulties that can be closely tied to air pollution. China, which is probably the leading country when it comes to air pollution, in the first months of Pandemic and the lockdown managed to save around 77.000 lives by reducing CO2 emission from cars and factories due to the said lockdown.
The lockdown showed us all that there is a tight link between our economy and the health of our planet. If there was ever doubt about that then the pandemic stopped it once and for all and showed that if we manage to take a break in our lives even for a few months, the planet starts to rebuild itself and tries to stand back on its legs once again.
Climate change
Our economy is causing climate changes that are currently not that felt in wealthier societies. So far the climate changes mostly took their toll on people who live on the brink of the developing world and the lowest income groups in rich economies. What we need to do is become more aware and react more to the problem that is our environment, and which is suffering badly. We all need to focus our attention on this problem as we did in the pandemic that hit us and that is still with us. If we all raised the same amount of awareness and if we reported about environmental problems as we did with the Coronavirus outbreak then we would have a fully recovered planet in the next 20 years.
If we managed to reduce our bad way of life half as we did during the lockdown we would stop much of our negative impact on our environment that is causing all the problems such as climate change. We would reduce the air and water pollution and we would reduce the greenhouse effect which leads to climate changes and our planet’ sickness. It takes just a little bit from us, and the saddest thing is that we really wouldn’t feel that little at all, just as we didn’t during the lockdown.
Hope
There is hope though. The fact that many governments reacted swiftly and drastically during the Coronavirus outbreak showed us that they have all the necessary structural, financial and political ability to react to the life-threatening crisis. It also proves that our societies have enough empathy to make sacrifices that are needed to achieve the common good. This is hope for our environment as well. This is how we and our governments can and should react to the fact that our planet is slowly but surely dying by our hand, and that there is something to be done, and it should be done as fast as possible.
Now that we know that certain things can be done, the COVID-19 gave us a unique opportunity to make all the structural changes we can to transition to a fair and ecologically sustainable economic system. This is the time where we must be cautious about any relaxation of environmental standards to keep afloat whatever is left of certain economies.
We shouldn’t allow for industries that are fossil fuel-hungry to go “business as usual”. We have to make sure that these are helped but we can’t just allow them to do what they want. If they require financial aid then there should be some obligations to the governments aiding them to reduce the bad environmental effects that these industries have on our planet. If governments are to help, and they should, coal, aviation, car industries and the rest then they should ask something in return like a carbon tax, social funds, investments into renewable energy and so on.
These all seem a bit drastic measures but they are all necessary steps we must take if we want to keep living on this planet. It would be rude and drastically to dictate something like this immediately, but we all propose a slow transition and increase in awareness, which would lead to our planet improvement in a decade or two tops.