rC3 hacc preroll music Herald [DE]: Ja, einen wunderschönen guten Tag. Herzlich willkommen zu Tag 4 auf der XHain Bühne. Unserem letzten Live Talk hier. Der Talk wird in Englisch sein. Darum wechsele ich jetzt auch mal auf Englisch. Herald [EN]: So. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to day 4 of the remote chasos experience. Our last live talk here on our XHain stage, which is as was the talk about self-driving cars yesterday, a production we do for the Munich channel. I kind of forgot to mention that yesterday. Sorry. Thank you Munich for choosing nice talks and we are happy to produce them. And yeah, so today our guest is Dr. Kira Vinke. She is from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and she is going to tell us a little bit about Corona and the climate crisis. And is going to compare those emergencies. And yeah, without further ado, the stage is yours. Kira: Thanks, so much, Felix. And it's a pleasure to be here and talk to you today about the parallels of the Corona pandemic and the climate crisis. This talk builds upon a research paper that we released over the summer, and it will follow its structure more or less. At the end we'll have time for discussion. So let me just start by giving you a quick run through what I will go through. We structured our talk into several sections called diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, rehabilitation, and of course, the conclusion. And on the right hand side, you can see the paper. So during the Covid-19 pandemic, institutional deficits surfaced, one could see there was a lack of preparedness. Risks that could have been averted were not. And there are significant parallels between this global health emergency and the climate emergency, which have become apparent over the past years. And the questions that arose were, how can global society manage the shared risks and avert emergencies and what can we learn for emergency prevention and management? So what is an emergency? This is the first thing we started out with. And we rely upon a paper that was published before this on on the climate emergency. And here already the parallels unfold. It is called the emergency formula, and it basically defines emergency as risk multiplied by urgency. But what is risk? Risk is the probability times the damage and the urgency is the reaction time over the intervention time. So here you can see a picture of what is supposed to be the Titanic and the iceberg. And this is exactly the situation that that provides a metaphor for what an emergency is. As I said before, emergency is identified by risk times urgency, which is the probability times damage for multiplied by reaction time over intervention time. And I will go more into detail of what this means in terms of the climate crisis and the Corona crisis. Basically, what is important to realize that, is that if reaction time and intervention time converge, so the time to avoid damages and the time that is available to do so, we have lost control. So it's very important to to avoid this and we will go structure the talk with this emergency formula. So let's first look at the diagnosis, which is providing scientific understanding. If we do a risk assessment of the SARS-CoV-2 and climate change. There are several factors that you need to look at. For example, in the case of Covid-19, the contagiousness, the duration of infections, the transmission pathways, the mortality, which groups are more at risk and why? What are the options available for therapy? This, of course, changed throughout the duration of the pandemic. How is immunity structured? Does it, are you immune after the infection, so on, so forth. In the case of climate change, of course, one very important variable are greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but also how the climate system reacts to it. So what is the climate sensitivity here? Then temperature rise, the resulting climate impacts, sea level rise, extreme events such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts, et cetera, and also our adaptive capacity, how how we are able to respond and adapt to these different changes. So this risk assessment, this diagnosis is the basis for all further steps that we're looking at. One example here, and that became quite clear early on in the Covid-19 pandemic is the Case Fatality Rate of Covid-19. This is basically, this graph is basically showing you that the older the age groups are, the higher the mortality rate is. So this means that elderly people are much more likely to develop severe symptoms and are also much more likely to die from those symptoms than younger people. In, in the case of climate change, the projections are also quite clear. Here you can see two different graphs on climate change projections. On the left hand side, you can see how greenhouse gas emissions would drive temperature change over time. So you can see the change until 2100. And you can see that it strongly depends on the emissions pathway we take. So the blue, the blue areas that you see here is the pathway that would be in line with the Paris Agreement that would require rapid emissions reductions. And the red pathway is what would happen if we do not stop growing the emissions and would lead us to what we call a business as usual scenario, which could lead to 4 degrees plus by the end of the century. On the right hand side, you see the so-called Burning Ember graphic also from the IPCC, where you can see the different levels of risks associated with different temperature levels on the right hand side. So, for example, unique and threatened systems such as coral reef systems are already under pressure right now as we are around above 1° Celsius, above industrial levels of average temperature. So when you look at pandemics, when you look at climate change, in the case of Germany, these threats to global security are already mentioned in certain documents. So you can see it here and the guidelines on Civilian Crisis Prevention and also in the Whitebook of the German military, the German Bundeswehr. I posted 2 quotes for you here. For example, health risks can have destabilizing effects on whole regions and can undo long standing development gains. So these aspects are mentioned, climate impacts and pandemics are mentioned as challenges for German security, but there's no concrete strategy of what to do with this risk. So looking at the next step, the prognosis, we can see here, how we define urgency again. So urgency is a reaction time over intervention time and intervention time is a time span from the point that a risk identified to the point of impact. Reaction time is a time span needed to change course and avoid impact. And the reaction time depends both on hard factors. So what type of infrastructure you have or what type of technology you have? And also on soft factors such as information networks, political leadership and willingness to act. So it's not only, only the system that defines how we are able to react, but also the choices by society and political leaders. So again, urgent action is required if the risk of damage is high and the reaction time and intervention time converge. So we know that control is lost if the reaction time is longer than the intervention time available. Then basically, the impacts cannot be avoided any longer. When we look at the urgency in the case of SARS-CoV-2 the coronavirus that has caused the pandemic over the past year, there are critical time points after which a certain level of damage can no longer be avoided. And this critical time spans encompass, for example, national outbreaks. So it could have been contained locally or, or to certain regions within one state. It could have been that a pandemic could have been avoided and just limited to an endemic so that the virus would not have spread beyond China. And another critical time span is that the number of intensive care patients is not larger than the number of intensive care beds. And even small delays in testing and tracing can have large and deadly consequences. So this means that even if you then invest in adaptation, meaning you start buying intensive care units, ventilators, trained staff, etc., if you are already on this exponential curve, this will not suffice to prevent the damage which you could have prevented if you had started to to act earlier. And a similar situation on a much larger scale we are facing with the climate crisis. We know for intervention time that at the current levels of CO2 emissions, the carbon budget, so the amount of CO2 that we can still release into the atmosphere will be exceeded in less than 8 years under the current emissions pathway. And this would mean that, as I showed earlier, some graphs that certain risks would materialize. For example, tipping elements could occur in the Earth's system as early as 1.5 degrees. And this could mean that there's potential points of no return after which these these risks and these changes can no longer be undone. The reaction time herein is the decarbonization of the global economy. So if you imagine that we have to go to net zero emissions globally, this requires also time to do so. We cannot just simply switch from one day to another and it's time to decarbonize energy system, to build new structures to, for example, change the way we practice agriculture, the way we construct buildings, etc. All of this requires certain times until we have both the technology available, but also the system infrastructure available to us so that we can transform all of this. And yeah, the control is lost when the time left for intervention to avoid harm is smaller than the time needed for reaction. So this is the point at which the Titanic sunk. Then... even though the iceberg was visible relatively early on. There were only a few seconds in which the captain could have turned the ship and avoided the impact. After that, it was no longer possible and the fate was sealed, basically. So what you here sees is that tipping points in the Earth's system can start as early as around 1.5°s for some systems. And the tipping elements are connected potentially in somewhat of a domino effect, meaning that they can start influencing each other when one system tips it affects the tipping probability of the others. So, for example, one element here is the Amazon rainforest. It can tip, change it's its character from a tropical rainforest to more of a savannah type of forest when the temperatures rise above 4° or when deforestation reaches a quarter of the of the forest cover. So this is very worrisome because right now deforestation rates are very high and also warming is is increasing. So this tipping point is approaching sooner than is comfortable for our risk assessment. What is the role of science in this prognosis? So what is interesting about the role of science and here is that we learned in the Corona pandemic that science can help us to understand risk before they arrive at our doorstep. So before we can see the effects of these risks. So long before the impact occurs, we can, through science, for example, through epidemiological models, through climate models, anticipate the risk and therefore act very early on and so to say, increase our perceived intervention time. So we need to assess the risk. What is the probability and what type of damages could could occur and what is the urgency? What is intervention time? What are critical point that we really need to avoid? And what is the reaction time when how can we still intervene? And we know for both Corona and the climate, that cascading impacts could overwhelm our capacity. In the case of Corona, of course, is mostly refers to our health systems capacity. And we know that immediate action is required to avoid damages such as deaths. And what is the therapy, our headline for the therapy is avoiding the unmanageable and managing the unavoidable. So the unmanageable in this case is health system overload or collapse because of extreme demand for intensive care. And in climate change, it would be more than 2° global warming. And to avoid really this tipping cascade and potential ecosystem collapses that would follow. This would require mitigation and prevention of infections in the case of Covid and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in the case of climate change. The unavoidable is in the case of Covid-19 disease outbreaks and deaths from infections that have already occurred and in climate change, warming and impacts from already released greenhouse gas emissions, which we are already witnessing today. And throughout this entire year, it has become abundantly clear that wildfires are destroying habitats of both humans and animals. And the unavoidable requires us also to invest into adaptation so that we can limit the experience of damages that are occurring. Yeah, what can we learn from the pandemic, it is that people can and are willing to change their behavior if they perceive a crisis and that the sum of many individual actions matter. So it does matter if I the way I behave personally, it does matter. It can change the course of a global and national crisis. So this insight is very, very important for for both crises, actually. But it also requires strategic and coordinated action. So we need this government regulations in order to coordinate our collective action that rests on individual efforts. So these are all insights that are in that sense encouraging in the sense that we are able to cope and to overcome very complex crises. And when we look at how to transition to carbon neutrality and how to reach climate stability, we can look at two approaches. One is a bottom-up approach, people changing their habits, and one is this coordinated top-down approach where we redefine how we want to govern global commons. And one important insight is this solidarity that this is based on. For the climate crisis, it is clear that we need to change the course of global emissions here you can see the so- called carbon staircase up on which a paper was built that shows that there are several steps that are required in the next decades in order to reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century worldwide. And there are several low hanging fruits that could be tackled very early on. But for this, we need rehabilitation, we need healing of body and soul across the generations, because it is a really interesting situation that in the Covid-19 pandemic, the elderly generations are much more at risk than the younger generations. I remind you of the slide that I had shown earlier where you see the case fatality rate going up as you as the age increases. Whereas in the climate crisis, the younger generations are the most affected because in the future, like the the heap of the mass of climate impacts. So it is important to to unite behind the science and to have a kind of constellation of actors that seeks to protect the weakest. And this has worked to some degree at least, and in different constellations. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, the different actors who are less affected by the pandemic moved to protect the elderly generations. And in the case of the climate crisis, we need the same thing. We need a coalition of actors who is willing to change course in order to protect the youth. And this is the ethical dilemma, of course, of weighing economic, cultural and societal sacrifices against the direct protection of lives from the infection or against severe future climate risk unfolding only in maybe decades, although we can obviously see already very severe climate impacts emerge. So one key ingredient for this is intergenerational justice. And we demand in this in this paper, so-called climate and Corona contract. Where young generations would pledge to protect the elderly and other at risk groups by adhering to infection protection measures. As has been the case over the past year. Most young people have adhered to to the infection protection measures, although they themselves were not at high risk. And at the same time, older generations would uphold and strengthen commitments on climate protection, such as the Paris Agreement, such as the European Green Deal to protect the future of the youth. At the end, I would like to remind you that already all future crises will happen against the background, against, of the climate crisis. So we have seen, for example, in the case of the Corona pandemic, that island nations like Vanuatu had to battle on two fronts, basically trying to uphold infection protection measures while also being extremely affected by tropical cyclones. And in other cases, this was also the case like with droughts, with floods, with heat waves. It's very difficult to address multiple crises, which is why we need to address the climate crisis urgently. The conclusion here is it's time to act and the different variables of the emergency formula can be influenced by mitigation, which lowers the probability for damage to occur at the beginning. Adaptation, limiting the experience of adverse effects of damages. Governance to be able to efficiently use our reaction, time. And science, which can increase the human perception of the remaining intervention time. So based on this going back through, to our emergency formula, we have built a kind of contingency plan because we know some damages can no longer be avoided, both for climate change and the Corona pandemic. But there are certain things that we can do to limit the damages and limit the experience of the damages. With this, I look forward to our discussion and I close the talk. Thank you very much. H: There are already some questions in the pad. If the audience wants to add more questions, now it's the time for that. The 1. question is, what do we know about people, groups spreading misinformation to make climate change and the pandemic worse? Is there evidence for my impression that they are mostly the same for both topics? K: Now, that's a very interesting question. For the case of climate change. It has been proven many a time that there are companies, especially fossil fuel companies, other lobbyist groups, who are investing in spreading and the spread of misinformation, basically. So this is often very well done. It's concealed behind very fancy looking graphics and for the layperson, very difficult to distinguish what is information provided by scientists and what is information provided by somebody who can make nice graphs, basically. So this is this is a very crucial element why action has been delayed over decades. I mean, a lot of this knowledge about climate change was already available decades ago. We knew about the risk. Now we even know more about the risks. Yet people are hesitant to act. And the spread of misinformation for the Covid-19 pandemic also goes into the direction of science denial, basically. And I think it comes from the same sort of mindset sometimes, not from exactly the same sources. Exactly. But one element is, of course, the the availability or non availability of reliable news formats. So in Germany, we have news formats that I trusted by the public that everybody can rely on in order to receive information. But this kind of publicly funded news is not available in every country. And this has led to news channels being more or less on one political spectrum or the other. And it has led to the politicization of issues like climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, which is very problematic because. It's fine to have an opinion about which policies should be made. But the facts should be the same in our discussion, even if we have different opinions about the policies and such. And I see here also a lot of danger in the spread of misinformation over social media networks from which a lot of people are now relying on for their news source. So this is also problematic because there's no real fact checking going on there. H: Thank you for that answer. The 2. question would be, given that our CO2 budget will be used up within 8 years while mainstream politics reject the very concept of a CO2 budget and fossil lobby groups seem to be as influential as ever. Do you think that we already crossed the point of losing control? K: Um, I mean, it's it's difficult to say. For once, there are still a lot that we can save by our actions. So I personally have a lot of hope that the transformation will be more rapid than what from what we can foresee from this current standpoint. And there's still a lot that a lot of systems that are stable for a lot more time, a lot more emissions. So it's very important that we keep those safe. However, we have already lost a lot as well. So it's really, it really depends on your standpoint. So if you live on the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific, which are 2 meters above sea level. Yeah, it's it's we are at a very critical point. And also, if you're in Bangladesh, if your child has died from a tropical cyclone, that would have normally not occurred in that strength, the point of no return has been crossed for that child. Right? So it's it's very it's very dependent on your your standpoint here in Germany. Here in Europe, we have the money to fortify our housing et cetera. We can we can adapt to some degree of climate change, we are also not as exposed as other countries because of our geography. But it's important to emphasize that it's worth the fight to to limit emissions now. And I also see some positive indications that it is now being taken more more seriously. H: Thank you, all the good things are 3. So a 3. question. Especially if I see the picture in your slide there. Do you think that the Corona pandemic made the climate change ignorance worse in the last year? So that it was more in the background and people are thinking about like more threatening problems because that's, they happen faster than climate change? K: I don't think so. I think it has still, it has still been in the media. Still, I'm able to talk here to you. There are still people who are interested in this. So I think it was not completely forgotten. But of course, the urgency of the Corona pandemic demanded the attention of policymakers, etc.. So I it is my hope that through the experience of the adverse effects also in industrialized countries of this pandemic, we realized that we are not exempt in Germany or in Europe or in the United States or wherever from global shocks. It matters to us if there's a wildlife trade in China. We have to be concerned about, as should be the people in Bangladesh should be concerned about coal mines and Brandenburg. So I think this recognition that we are connected and we can lose control even in modern societies like in Italy, for example, capacities of the health system were overwhelmed. So even then, I think we have come to the realization that we are actually fragile and we need to take risk assessment seriously and not just rely on our good fortune. H: OK, thank you very much for the answer and there's another question. If we see Corona as the speedrun, can we learn something from our response to the pandemic, from our response to climate change? K: I didn't hear the 1. word. H: If we see Corona, as the speedrun. So like that was the fast to react to a worldwide crisis. What can we learn from our response to the pandemic for the fight against climate change? K: Yeah, yeah. The speedrun. Sorry I didn't catch it the first time. Yeah. I think it shows that if we intervene early enough, we really have a chance to avoid later damages. So we really need to use this scientific means of risk and dissipation in order to to avoid exponentially rising damages. So I think this is this is one very happy realization. And the second is, and I mentioned this in the talk, is that everything we do matters. It's not that we are just helpless in this situation, but everybody can do something and does contribute to a larger thing. So in the case of Covid-19, it's whether I will have a party with 10 people or not, whether I will choose to meet several friends after another or not. In the case of climate change, it does matter if you are taking the flights, if you're voting for a Green Party or for for a party that doesn't take anything seriously. So these individual decisions accumulate to something bigger and they can change the course of a global and national crisis. H: OK, thank you very much, and I don't see any more questions, so thank you for your talk and hope to see you soon. K: Thank you as well. Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2021. Join, and help us!