THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
Photo: ©stock.adobe.com, C. Schüßler
There is glory in prevention Why boosting climate policy must be at the heart of our coronavirus pandemic recovery
by Dr Anton Hofreiter MdB, Co-chair of the parliamentary group Alliance 90 / The Greens in the German Bundestag, Berlin
T
he coronavirus has shed a light on a new type of security threat. Everyone became aware that no border and no weapon on the planet can protect us from the deadly virus. The same applies to the climate crisis, the biggest threat of our time. We must take the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, rethink security, and end short-sighted policies by using the recovery to invest in forward-thinking, coherent, and strong climate policies. This would give us a chance to tackle the climate crisis and rebuild a greener, safer, and more secure world.
Lessons learned from the pandemic It makes sense to learn from the Covid-19 crisis because it has several factors in common with the climate crisis: firstly, both require scientific evidence to inform sound decision making and they require preventive and decisive action. Our goal is to flatten the curve of the pandemic and to prevent the virus from spreading exponentially. The same is true for the climate crisis: now is the time for more ambitious climate action as the impacts of the climate crisis will intensify with the global temperature rise. A second commonality is that they are borderless. We must therefore address these threats across borders in a spirit of multilateral cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity. The Global North bears a special responsibility to support the Global South in coping with both crises. Thirdly, the two crises disproportionately affect the most vulnerable groups – a fact that should be taken into account when drafting policies.
22
Fourthly, once the threats materialise, they undermine critical systems including public health, food supply, finance, as well as national and human security.
Climate crisis: ever worsening extremes The climate crisis differs however from the Covid-19 pandemic in one very fundamental aspect: it brings ever worsening extremes. Despite the pandemic lockdown, followed by an economic slowdown, we only had a short-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, while the dangerous concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere continued to rise. In 2020, CO2 emissions reached the highest level in human history. While there is no vaccine in the literal sense for the climate crisis, we know fairly accurately what needs to be done to tackle the biggest threat of our time: limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C. In order to save our future, we have to finally listen to science, and policy makers worldwide have to communicate the unprecedented threat of the climate crisis which could be further exacerbated once we pass climate tipping points. According to a recent climate study, up to 3.5 billion people could be living in extreme heat conditions in 2070, well outside the human comfort range, if we fail to implement the Paris Agreement. Only if we keep climate change high on the political agenda do we have a chance to combat the crisis and to mitigate the most devastating impacts. Secondly, we need to plan because there is glory in prevention! Thirdly, this leads to the need for governments worldwide to put climate policies at the heart of their national Covid-19 recovery programmes to transit into a green future. Currently, that is not the case. Countries around the globe are not doing
