Creative Writing
How to bring Greener Changes in our lives as the lessons learned from COVID-19?
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Answer:
The pressing need to develop a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine and make it available to everyone everywhere to bring an end to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic resulted in a rare collaboration between world governments, scientists and private drug manufacturers.
The economic and social devastation caused by this catastrophic global public health emergency not only underlined the importance of multilateral international collaboration, but also forced us to acknowledge the glaring social and economic inequalities that exist both in wealthy and poor countries.The pandemic showed us what happens when political leaders dismiss science and refuse to take the necessary steps to protect all their citizens, and the rest of humanity, from public health crises and other natural disasters. Hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods unnecessarily lost to this disease should serve as a warning to not repeat the mistakes of the recent past, and be prepared for similar threats that undoubtedly await us in the future.
While we do not know what disease outbreaks we may face in the coming years, there is one threat that we know is already at our doorstep: climate change.
Today, climate change is still the most significant threat to global economic and social stability. Scientists say we have a critical and rapidly closing window of opportunity to curb the devastating effects of climate change by limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
We know what happens when science is ignored – we have seen the consequences of not taking warnings from scientists seriously in the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic. And we are already paying the price for ignoring climate science – there are more fires, floods, droughts and other unpredictable weather events across the world today than ever before.
While climate change is undoubtedly a global problem, the African continent is expected to be the region hardest hit by its consequences.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently warned that 2016-2020 is expected to be the warmest five-year period in Africa on record, and rang the alarm bells for the fate of agriculture, public health systems, water resources and disaster management capabilities on the continent. A Greenpeace report published earlier this year, meanwhile, warned of extreme heat becoming the new normal in most countries on the continent if the temperature rise caused by global warming is not kept under 1.5 degrees Celsius. If global temperatures rise just 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report said, people living in the city of Lagos in Nigeria would experience heat stress for the first time, as would Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. If the rise in temperatures reach 4 degrees Celsius, Luanda in Angola and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo would also become heat stressed according to the report.
The weather disasters in Africa often get minimal media coverage. Television channels and newspapers report on any given disaster for a few days, publish the death toll and some statistics on the estimated economic damage, and move on to another story. Yet for those affected, the disaster itself is just the beginning. When their crops disappear under floodwaters or pastures burn up in flames, hunger becomes a daily reality for communities. The natural resources they relay on to survive start to dwindle, water becomes scarce and all this often leads to increased tensions and conflicts. Homes, schools and marketplaces destroyed by natural disasters remain in ruins for years, increasing homelessness. With the destruction of health and sanitation infrastructures, coupled with rising temperatures, diseases like malaria and typhoid become rife, devastating struggling communities further.
Answer:
Quiet Manhattan streets, visible Himalayan skies, clear Venetian canals, and dolphins in Italian ports. Just a few months of humanity at a standstill have impacted our environment in shocking ways. The global shutdown of cities and economies has fast-forwarded us into a future where we view bold actions in response to unprecedented events as increasingly possible. However, we can no longer rely on bold and disruptive actions in lieu of integrated and adaptive change.
With the largest drop in greenhouse gas emissions since World War II, cities must now take the opportunity presented by the pandemic to reshape our thinking on disaster preparedness. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are both recognizable “gray rhino” events: highly probable, high impact yet neglected threats. In contrast to unforeseeable and improbable “black swan” events, gray rhinos are obvious dangers that leaders choose to ignore, often because they are more afraid of doing the wrong thing than of doing nothing. But confronted with a global pandemic, we must now institute a paradigm shift in the way we view intergenerational emergencies. Out of sight can no longer mean out of mind.
In cities around the world, leaders have begun to apply lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to their climate crisis response, recognizing that in order to create a resilient society that can withstand shocks, we must prioritize a recovery plan with green strings attached.
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