In responding to Covid-19, our government must not lose sight of the importance of building resilience to extreme weather.
Last year has been marked by the threat of coronavirus and society’s sacrifices to combat it with a determination and political will that has been missing in the fight against climate change.
Though invisible, Covid-19 has been seen by most people as a clear and present danger to the entire world population. Our strong human instinct for survival and to protect our loved ones convinced most of us to immediately adopt the necessary precautions and accept government-issued lockdown measures requiring personal sacrifice and limiting individual freedoms.
The effective implementation of social distancing and other measures has helped flatten the curve in our country but substantially impacted on economic activity in SA and around the globe. Factories, farms, fisheries, stores, restaurants, trucks, ships and planes ground to a halt for more than three months, causing unprecedented job losses and dramatic decline in output and trade.
Today, our government is taking actions to restart the economy by cautiously and progressively bringing people back to factories, offices and schools, yet asking everyone to remain vigilant against a threat that is still among us.
With all our attention focused on the coronavirus battle, we paid considerably less attention last year to the ongoing changes in our planet’s climate. Like the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis is an existential threat. And like the virus, greenhouse gases are invisible and remain ever present in our natural surroundings. Yet unlike for Covid-19, we cannot place hope in finding a vaccine against climate change.
The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that countries can take a common stance against a threat to our collective well-being. Why have global leaders been less determined in the fight against climate change? Why are governments not detailing in emergency press briefings the urgent actions they are taking to save the planet?
The reason is because of a fundamental difference: the coronavirus could immediately infect and potentially kill anyone exposed to it, whereas greenhouse gases are slowly destroying the planet and are gradually threatening our survival over decades.
Whereas most of us were conscious of the dangers posed by Covid-19 as soon as we stepped out of the front door, few of us today feel immediately threatened by climate change. Whatever the impact may be, depending on where we live, it may only marginally affect our daily lives.
Put simply, climate change is not seen as a “clear and present danger” but as a “diffuse and future danger”. It’s a python that threatens to slowly strangle us, not a cobra that could kill with one bite.
For example, tropical storm Eloise caused havoc in parts of Limpopo recently, with several roads and bridges flooded, while trees were uprooted. It had already caused flooding in Mozambique's coastal city of Beira..
These climate hazards keep reminding us that we do not live in a single-hazard world. The world is dynamic and interconnected, and the biggest threats to societies do not emerge one at a time. They materialise in parallel, reach across national borders and compound each other.
Though immediate steps can be taken with humanitarian aid to minimise loss of life from individual hazards, our government requires longer-term strategies and systems to adapt to the realities of a riskier world.
While a vaccine may be found for Covid-19, there is no vaccine for runaway climate change. Long after the pandemic is brought under control, smallholder farmers will keep pointing to dried-out fields and empty silos as climatic conditions become ever more extreme and unpredictable.
As a society, we seem willing to accept that fighting the climate crisis requires too much sacrifice at a national, local and personal level. Hopefully, our response to the coronavirus has opened our eyes to what is possible and to what really matters.
Combating the coronavirus pandemic required each one of us to do our part, change our habits and daily routines and make personal sacrifices. If we can convince ourselves to do the same in the fight against the climate crisis, we will finally start to see real progress.
• Ngcobo is a communicator at the department of water & sanitation
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