New Research: Covid-19 lessons for fighting global heating and extinction

Among the shared characteristics described, one is that each new Covid-19 case can spawn others and so lead to escalating infection rates — just as hotter climates alter ecosystems, increasing emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause warming. “Both are dangerous feedback loops,” the scientists argue.

The team also compares “lagged impacts”. For coronavirus, the duration or lag before symptoms materialise means that infected people spread the disease before they feel effects and change behaviour. The researchers equate this with the lag between our destruction of habitat and eventual species extinction, as well as lags between the emissions we pump out and the full effects of global heating, such as sea-level rise. As with viral infection, behaviour change may come too late, they note. —Source: University of Cambridge