Inside Out | How the coronavirus pandemic can help us prepare for the next predictable surprise – the climate crisis

Our chaotic global management of the Covid-19 pandemic is a warning that we must better prepare for the coming climate crisis. But will our political and business leaders listen?

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People walk past a mask and eyes stapled to a tree in Melbourne on April 20. While governments are being faulted for not preparing adequately for a pandemic, despite warnings, the climate change crisis is hiding in plain sight. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:00pm, 10 May 2020Updated: 9:40pm, 10 May 2020

Stepping back for a moment from the daily pandemic-related horror stories, with angry blame games fuelling what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called “a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”, let us recognise a simple truth: Covid-19 is a perfectly predictable surprise.

After severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003, H5N1 in 2006, H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2013 and Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2015, Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave a 2015 TED Talk, titled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready”, that has been watched by over 28 million people. In September last year, the World Bank’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board published a report calling for better preparation to manage “the fallout of a high-impact respiratory pathogen”. It warned a pandemic could cost us US$3 trillion. Perhaps it can now revisit that estimate.

Recall Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as governor of California in 2006 invested hundreds of millions of dollars in medical supplies and mobile hospitals in anticipation of the inevitable earthquakes, fires and pandemics that he and his team knew would come. The Los Angeles Times reported that his stockpile included 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits for 21,000 extra patient beds.

“But after a brutal recession, Schwarzenegger’s successor Jerry Brown cut the funding for the scheme, and the stockpile is nowhere to be found,” the Financial Times’ Tim Harford noted.

Harford patiently walked through the many predictable catastrophes that we have reliably failed to prepare for over the past two decades, examining what drives this inaction and whether we are likely to change. The depressing answer seems to be no.