 Ja, einen wunderschönen guten Tag. Herzlich willkommen zu Tag 4 auf der X-Sign-Bühne, unserem letzten Live-Talk hier. Der Talk wird in Englisch sein, darum wechsle ich jetzt auch mal auf Englisch. So, good afternoon everybody, welcome to day 4 of the remote chaos experience, our last live talk here on our X-Sign-Stage, which is, as I was to 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, today our guest is Dr. Kira Finke. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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? Are you immune after reinfection and so on and 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 impact sea level rise, extreme events such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts etc. And also our adaptive capacity 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 are looking at. One example herein that became quite clear early on in the COVID-19 pandemic is the case fatality rate of COVID-19. 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 also much more likely to die from those symptoms than younger people. In the case of climate change the projections are also quite clear. Here you can see two different graphs on climate change projections so 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 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 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° plus by the end of the century. On the right hand side you see the so-called burning amber graphic also from the IPCC where you can see the different levels of risks such as 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°C above industrial levels of average temperature. So when you look at pandemics global security are already mentioned in certain documents so you can see it here in the guidelines on Soviet crisis prevention and also in the white book of the German military the German Bundeswehr. I posted two quotes for you here for example, health risks can have destabilising effects on whole regions and can undo long standing development gains. So these aspects are mentioned climate impacts and pandemics are mentioned for German security but there is 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 is identified to the point of impact. The time is a time span needed to change course and avoid impact. And the reaction time depends both on heart 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 the system that defines how we are able to react 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 of the past year there are critical time points after which a certain level of damage can no longer be avoided. And these critical time spans and COMPAS for example national outbreaks so it could have been contained locally 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. 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 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 as I showed earlier some graphs that certain risks would materialize, for example tipping elements could occur in the earth system as early as 1.5 degrees and this could mean that there is potential points of no return after which these risks and these changes can no longer be undone. The reaction time herein is the decarbonisation of the global economy so 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 it's time to decarbonise 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 and the system infrastructure available to us so that we can transform all of this and 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 hear sees that tipping points in the earth system can start as early as around 1.5 degrees for some systems and the tipping elements are connected potentially in somewhat of a domino effect 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 its change its character from a tropical rainforest to more of a savannah type of forest when the temperatures rise above 4 degrees or when deforestation reaches a quarter of the forest cover so this is very worrisome because right now deforestation rates are very high and also warming is increasing so the 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 in 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 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 occur and what is the urgency, what is the intervention time what are critical points that we really need to avoid and what is the reaction time and 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 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 a health system overload or collapse and in climate change it would be more than 2 degrees 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 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 of the diseases that are occurring 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 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 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 the bottom up approach, people changing the 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 can change the course of global emissions here you can see the so called carbon staircase upon 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 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 the age increases but the older generations are the most affected because in their future lie the heap of the mass of climate impacts so it is important 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 in different constellations in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic where different actors who were 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 paper a 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 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 at the end I would like to remind you that already all future crisis 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 by 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 of 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 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 there are already some questions in the pad if the audience wants to add more questions now it's the time for that the first question is what do we know about people 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 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 so and this is often very well done it's concealed behind very fancy looking graphics and for the lay person 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 a very crucial element why action has been delayed over decades a lot of this knowledge about climate change was already available decades ago we knew about the risk, now we know more about the risks yet people are hesitant to act and the spread of misinformation for the Covid-19 pandemic also goes into this direction of science denial basically and I think it comes from the same sort of mindset sometimes not from exactly the same sources one element is of course the availability or non availability of reliable news formats so in Germany we have news formats that are 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 has led to the politicization of issues like climate change in 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 and 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 is no real fact checking going on there the second 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 also lobby groups seem to be as influential as ever do you think that we already crossed the point of losing control I mean it's difficult to say for once there is still a lot we can save by our actions so I personally have a lot of hope that the transformation from what we can foresee from this current standpoint and there is still 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 really depends on your standpoint so if you live on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific sea level, we are at a very critical point and also if you are 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 so it's very dependent on your new standpoint here in Germany, here in Europe we have the money to fortify our housing etc 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 limit emissions now and I also see some positive indications that it's now being taken more seriously thank you, all the good things are free so a third question 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 more threatening problems because they happen faster than climate change? I don't think so I think it has still been in the media still I am able to talk 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 policy makers etc so it is my hope that through the experience of the adverse effects also 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 is 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 where the health system is overwhelmed so even then 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 thank you very much for the answer there is another question if we see corona as the speedrun so like that was the fast react to a worldwide crisis what can we learn from our response to the pandemic for the fight against climate change 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 the scientific means of risk anticipation in order to avoid exponentially rising damages so I think this is one very heavy realization and the second is and I mentioned this in the talk everything we do matters it's not that we are just helpless in the 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 are voting for a green party so these individual decisions accumulate to something bigger and they can change the course of a global and national crisis thank you very much I don't see any more questions so thank you for your talk and hope to see you soon thank you as well