08 Dec 5 Things COVID-19 Did and Didn’t Do for Nature
Posted at 11:45h
in Our planet
The pandemic of 2020 saw nearly two-thirds of the human population go into lockdown. Covid-19 crammed hospitals, hampered our economies and left many without jobs. It also gave nature a welcome break from human activity. How did the natural world fare under the ‘anthropause’? Here are 5 things the pandemic did and didn’t do for nature.
1. Covid-19 caused a drop in energy demand and carbon emissions
Our cities, cars, and computers are powered by finite resources that we extract from nature. We read about the consequences in the news and our social feeds on a daily basis––air pollution, oil spills, and carbon emissions, to name a few. With Covid-19 taking our foot off the gas last year, global energy demand dropped by 4% over the whole year. It was the largest decrease in energy demand ever (1).
Not all energy sources were hit equal, either. The oil industry was down by 9% overall and transport fuel even by 14%. Remember oil prices crashing last year? At the time of writing you pay $80 for a barrel of crude oil, but in April 2020 you could get 4 barrels for the same price. While you can’t just shut off an oil well, such low prices meant that ambitious oil projects, like deep-sea drilling in the Antarctic, were put on hold.
What other number plummeted with the decrease in energy demand? That’s right, CO2 emissions. Daily emissions went down 17% in early April 2020, while the whole year saw a decline of 5.8% in CO2 emissions. By the way, that’s five times as much as the decline that followed the global financial crisis in 2008 (2).
2. Covid-19 gave wildlife a break from human activity
We humans take up a lot of space. Think of our cities, infrastructure, and agriculture. In fact, we’ve modified between 50 and 70 percent of the planet’s available land––and we’re not good at sharing that space either. Mammals living in human-altered habitats move two to three times less than when in untouched nature (3). It’s no surprise then that animals gladly made use of our real estate while we were in lockdown. Surely you’ve seen photos of deer grazing on lawns, seabirds navigating Venetian canals, and mountain goats popping into town.
The statistics, too, show that animals benefit from a pause in human activity. During the height of the first lockdown, roadkills in countries like Spain, Czech, and Estonia were down by 40%. Given that we run into an estimated 194 million birds and 29 million mammals on European roads annually, that’s a lot of wildlife collisions averted (4).
Marine life also benefited from a steep drop in fishing activity. Like in the US, where seafood exports dropped by 18% in the first half of 2020 (5). And with over 80% of world trade happens via marine transport, 2020 saw fewer cargo ships traversing the high seas and even fewer cruise ships. Underwater noise pollution nearly halved at some point, giving marine animals that rely on sound a chance to communicate, find food, and reproduce (6). Blue whales, for instance, once communicated over entire oceans, but now find the distance over which they can hear decreased by 90% due to noise pollution (7).
3. Covid-19 did not reduce our use of plastics
In fact, we increased our consumption of single-use plastics. Take face masks: we produced 52 billion of them last year, 3% of which is estimated to have ended up in our oceans (8). That’s 5.6 megatons (Mt) of featherlight masks floating around, or the weight of 40 blue whales.
Ocean pollution isn’t the only problem that surgical masks pose. Made of composite materials, they’re impossible to recycle and so become plastic waste after a single use. Up till 2019, we were producing about 400 Mt of plastic waste per year. With Covid-19 kicking in, we got to 530 Mt in 7 months (9). And that is not just due to masks and gloves.
Our staying home also meant we were ordering out more––and it showed in our waste production. During early 2020’s two-month lockdown, takeout and delivery services in Singapore generated an extra 1.21 Mt of plastic waste. Singapore counts a little over 5.5 million inhabitants––imagine how much plastic waste a planetary wide increase in delivery order must have generated.
Ironically, plastic became cheaper to produce than to recycle around this time due to the plummeting oil prices (10). This decreased the profit margin and demand for recycled plastics and, in turn, increased the environmental footprint of plastics.
4. Covid-19 did not keep some from illegally exploiting nature
While the economy took a downturn during the pandemic, many people in poorer regions were forced to find alternative means of income. Illegal hunting and fishing became a way to compensate for lost income or food, especially while the lockdowns put a halt on conservation efforts. In India, reports of poaching more than doubled during six weeks of lockdown (11).
Loggers increased illegal logging activity in an opportunistic spur that doubled the deforestation in tropical countries during the first month of lockdown––and that while many countries decreased their official logging activities (12). Overall, the year 2020 saw a 12% increase in deforestation compared to the year before (13).
What made matters worse is that, during the lockdowns, good-doers couldn’t run the NGOs and grassroots organizations that protect the natural kingdom.
5. Covid-19 did not keep things from going back to normal
People are out and about, economies up and running as the world settles into a new kind of normal. The global economy will grow about 6% in 2021 compared to a 3.5% decrease in 2020 (14). That means we’ve surpassed pre-pandemic demands for energy and natural resources. If it weren’t for the consumption of transport fuel still lagging, our carbon dioxide emissions would be higher than before the pandemic too. Unsurprisingly, we’re back to business as usual.
The thing is, business as usual is not an option if we want to keep a healthy and biodiverse natural world. We saw a 6.4% dip in CO2 emissions only because countries worldwide forced their economies to a standstill. Meanwhile, the UN estimates we need to cut these emissions by 7.6% per year to keep the globe from warming more than 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels (15).
We’re not preventing fish stocks from collapsing just because our trawlers were docked for a few months. With 85% of fish stocks depleted, studies suggest that our oceans need 10-15 years of reduced fishing for stocks to recover from overfishing (16). Nor are we saving our wildlife or forests. Not if we keep going at it the way we have.
Yet Covid-19 did more for nature than just give it a much needed break. The back-to-back lockdowns gave scientists unique data to discover just in what ways we affect our planet. And there’s a valuable lesson to learn from research on the anthropause.
What all these data show, is that we, humans, are both serious disruptors and important protectors. And when you begin to see the many complex ways we’re actually interlinked with plants, animals, and the earth (17), it would be silly to think we’re not a part of nature ourselves.