Thinking Ahead

COVID, Climate and the Failure to Anticipate

By Simon Dalby

Looking back over the course of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that in many places warnings by health professionals and security planners were ignored until matters were out of hand. In the United States and the United Kingdom - supposedly among the countries best prepared to deal with pandemics - the death toll rose alarmingly through the latter part of 2020. Partial lockdowns, the policy decisions frequently influenced by business interests rather than epidemiological knowledge, failed to stifle the spread of a nastily infectious and lethal virus.

It is equally clear that notable successes in responding effectively to the virus in societies as diverse as New Zealand, Cuba, Vietnam and Taiwan, show that planning ahead matters in providing security for populations in the twenty first century. Thinking ahead to prepare for future contingencies is a crucial task of government; COVID-19 will not be the last major global health challenge. Anticipating future dangers involves a willingness to learn lessons from the past, take medical and other sciences seriously, and put basic public health measures in place in a timely way.

Thinking behind

Where governments failed to think ahead, COVID-19 death rates especially among the elderly and vulnerable spiked upwards dramatically. This represents a failure on the part of politicians and decision makers to clearly understand the context of the new world of the twenty first century. Their priorities were often driven by trying to maintain a status quo that was unravelling in front of their eyes. Looking back and trying to prevent change, rather than rapidly adapting to new circumstances, didn’t work very well!

Policymakers also operate on outdated geographical premises. They assume that we live in a world of relatively discrete spaces that function in a world where the environment is relatively stable and “nature” is mostly separate from important human matters.

Partly this problem of failing to think about future dangers is political; urgent matters repeatedly displace attention from important matters. Politicians frequently operate with a focus on short-term issues and crisis management; as the saying goes, a week is a long time in politics. On the other hand the hubris that modernity, technology and the practices of corporate style management can cope with whatever comes along has also constrained political vision. If we live in the best of all possible worlds, what need is there for careful planning, anticipation or preparation for future threats?

In the United States and elsewhere including Canada and Australia, agencies and warning systems had been drastically curtailed or eliminated in recent years. They were judged as surplus to requirements; global matters were of less importance than attending to national priorities, the future apparently simply didn’t matter. If problems arose apparently market solutions would suffice; government was an obstacle to this social model, not a social necessity. Conspicuous consumption triumphed over social wellbeing.

As 2021 began, the rapid production of vaccines offered the promise of a technical fix, and did so with commendable international cooperation in the scientific community, even if numerous questions remain about the efficacy of the corporate production model for the necessary doses. Early findings from the vaccines suggest that they may reduce death rates but not help much with limiting transmission, hence the need to continue hygiene measures, masks and social distancing. The future development of new mutations of the virus suggests that vaccines may need modifications for at least some time into the future; in some form this virus may become endemic. While this vaccine technical fix to the pandemic is clearly to be welcomed, the rapid roll out may yet obscure the more important lessons about the failure to prepare. The rush to “get back to normal” suggests that an opportunity to use government largesse for intelligent planning to deal with climate change impacts and other ecological threats to human wellbeing may be missed in many places.

In addition to the short-term thinking that bedevils health planning in many supposedly advanced economies, politicians and policy makers also operate on outdated geographical premises. They assume that we live in a world of relatively discrete spaces that function in a world where the environment is relatively stable and “nature” is mostly separate from important human matters. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, which jumped species and spread rapidly around the world, belies the first and third of these assumptions. The crisis of accelerating climate change gives the lie to the second.

 A new context: the Anthropocene

We now live in a globally interconnected economy operating in a rapidly changing ecological context, that of an increasingly artificial world. Thinking ahead about future dangers requires paying careful attention to these changing contexts. We live in an increasingly urbanized, technological and interconnected world where environments, and the climate too, are changing rapidly. The actions of the rich and powerful among us are increasingly shaping how the earth system operates even if their wealth and search for status allows them to mostly ignore the ecological consequences. We are, as the Earth system scientists say these days, living in new ecological circumstances. Hence the naming of a new geological period for our times called the Anthropocene.

As the pandemic should have taught us, preparation is better than frantic scrambling to try to regain control once disaster strikes. There is no vaccine for climate disruptions; only prevention will work.

The implications of this new recognition, one that is now beginning to find its way into policy making circles, is that the old assumptions that discrete spaces - those administrative conveniences we call states - are no longer the appropriate mode of governance for these new times. Policies of national security premised on “keeping the bad guys out” don’t work in a globally-connected economy where careful coordination of standards, financial arrangements and much else are needed to keep everything moving and people safe. Alas, the use of travel restrictions to try to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus may reinforce the impulse to use territorial solutions to global problems. 

This pandemic shows us, once again, that humanity is vulnerable to zoonotic disease, where some entity, in this case a very infectious virus, jumped from one species to another. This isn’t new a new phenomenon, but despite numerous warnings over the last few decades, politicians in many places were caught completely unprepared. Yet warnings existed: Laurie Garrett’s magnum opus The Coming Plague, a quarter of a century ago, was subtitled pointedly, “newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance”. Zoonotic diseases are not new, but both the spread of agriculture and the disruptions of relatively “wild” areas by the penetration of humans into remote regions increases the contacts of people and animals. Before COVID-19 were Ebola, SARS and MERS - ample warning of what was to come.

But there is an interesting and revealing twist in the human-animal transmission story this time round. In Denmark the COVID-19 virus jumped from humans to mink in the industrial farms there. (Mink farming!? Who knew? Just how many fur coats does global society need to satisfy the desires for conspicuous consumption and social status?) The resultant extermination of many million animals to try to prevent reinfection in humans by a new virus strain, drew attention to the links between the artificial environments of factory farming and human populations. We all live in increasingly artificial circumstances. Assumptions of a nature separate from humanity make no sense in how we shape our institutions.

Climate change too is an entirely predictable threat, one caused by industrial activity, land use change and the burning of fossil fuels. We know it is accelerating, but we are just not sure which of its symptoms will appear precisely when and where. As the pandemic should have taught us, preparation is better than frantic scrambling to try to regain control once disaster strikes. There is no vaccine for climate disruptions; only prevention will work. Likewise reducing the destruction of wild habitat and the use of wild animals as food sources, another aspect of conspicuous consumption in some places, may limit the emergence of new zoonotic diseases. Once again, prevention is easier than cure.

Thinking ahead

The appropriate contextualization for security and health policies is now the novel threats that the artificial environments of the Anthropocene present to their human inhabitants. Setting up institutions designed to survive short-term political attention and budget fluctuations, with a focus on the long term to prevent future global disasters, must now be an urgent policy priority for governments. And for other institutions too - cities, universities, and businesses. How to do so is now a key question for social scientists, activists, and indeed anyone interested in looking forward to a more sustainable human future.

Likewise tackling the unheeded consequences of conspicuous consumption, furs, exotic wild food sources, not to mention the climate impacts of endless recreational flying, need attention too in processes of cultural change to move towards more sustainable futures. Educating politicians to understand the complexity of global interconnections and the importance of anticipating the dangerous consequences of living in an increasingly artificial and fragile biosphere, may be even more difficult. But it is a very necessary task in thinking ahead to effectively address humanity’s new circumstances. 

This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0