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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.
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