Write a short paragraph in your own on how to bring Greener Changes in our lives as the lessons learned from COVID-19
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Lesson 1: Delay is Costly, So Make Mitigation a Priority, Now
The current pandemic shows that political leaders have a tendency to react slowly in the face of unprecedented threats. Few countries reacted quickly and slowed the progress of SARS-CoV-2 in its early stages: while Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan drew from experience with epidemics in recent decades, some countries without this experience such as Czechia or Greece also managed to slow the progress of the virus early on.Footnote4 A majority of countries, especially those lacking recent experience with viral outbreaks, acted decisively only after local virus transmission had occurred and a large number of cases were reported, despite evidence of the gravity of the situation from other countries.Footnote5 On 2 March the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control released recommendations to cancel mass gatherings in countries with locally transmitted cases (ECDC 2020) and the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak officially a pandemic on 11 March (WHO 2020a). However, in the first 2 weeks of March, there were still a large number of mass gatherings in many European countries, including soccer matches and demonstrations. Even after witnessing the dynamics of the pandemic in China and Europe, there was a delay in the introduction of nationwide measures such as school closures and social distancing guidelines in the US, which were eventually implemented on March 16 (New York Times 2020a). At the time of writing, the US is the country with the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases as well as deaths worldwide.
Delays in containment measures during global crises are all the more tragic as earlier action reduces costs and damages dramatically. In the case of COVID-19, acting early has made the difference between a prolonged full-scale lockdown and a high number of casualties, and much less dramatic measures such increased health screening at borders, contact tracing, public information campaigns and almost business-as-usual as for example in Taiwan (see Wang et al. 2020). In the early stages of the pandemic, it has been estimated that delaying some form of lockdown by a single day increases the numbers of cumulative cases by 40% (Pueyo 2020). For the United States, Pei et al. (2020) estimate that starting social distancing 1 week earlier could have avoided 55% of deaths (36,000) between mid-March and early May. Once a lockdown is implemented after a delay, it has to be maintained for longer, increasing not only casualties but also economic losses. Figure 1 compares the evolution of COVID-19 cases per capita in different countries.
ted that intuitive perceptions, such as concerning the imminence of a threat, matter for political responses.
Third, when people need to decide under uncertainty whether to respond to a threat, they rely on certain heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). While this is often an effective strategy, it might lead to biased outcomes. When assessing the probability of a pandemic in their region, humans rely on their own past experiences and determine the probability by the ease with which similar past events come to mind. This effect is called availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1973) and leads to an underestimation of the dangers of a COVID-19 pandemic in the early stages in countries without experience of pandemics in recent decades and hence to a lack of support for policy measures and to slow policy action.
In the case of climate change, similar mechanisms are at work that make its danger to human well-being difficult to grasp. It has been shown that the relationship between warming and damages is non-linear, due to tipping points and feedback effects in the system (Burke et al. 2015; Lenton 2020). This makes the dynamics of climate change especially hard to grasp and leads to an underappreciation of goals like limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Regarding the perceived imminence of the threat, climate change gives the illusion that it could be controlled to some extent, and that it does not impact one’s life in an immediate way. Judging from respective societal responses, dying from SARS-CoV-2 is apparently worse than dying from consequences of environmental pollution: an outcome that can hardly be justified from moral principles (Sunstein 1997).