 of COVID-19 on top of climate change is a spiraling crisis. Most of us are familiar with the issues of climate change and its causes and consequences. And more recently, we've been living through the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. How has climate change affected the spread of diseases like coronavirus? And conversely, how has the virus affected climate change or the work we need to do to deal with it? And how do these two crises interact and feed on each other? These issues are the subject of our story. The underlying causes of pandemics, says a recent UN report, are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change. The report argues that human damage to biodiversity is leading us into what is called a pandemic era. Let's look at a really good example of how climate change spreads disease. It's about warming oceans and their effect on cholera in both Europe and Bangladesh. Some 40 years ago, the British Marine Station in Southampton, England wanted to track the effects of the warming oceans on marine life. They recruited yachtsmen, sailors, ferry boat captains and boaters of all kind to collect plankton samples and provide longitude and latitude of various marine locations. With the samples in England, we extracted the DNA and then with very elegant gene probes, a mechanism by which we could determine the presence and the numbers of a group of bacteria that cause disease in humans. These are called Vibrios. Vibrio cholera is the cause of division of Asiatic cholera. So we were able to determine the increase over the past 40 years in the increased numbers of Vibrios with the water temperature going up with climate change and then linking it, associating it with the increased infections of these different diseases occurring in England, Europe and the North Atlantic of the US. So this is, I think, probably the first demonstration of a infectious disease linked to climate change. I had been studying cholera for the last 40 years and we had developed the data that showed that plankton carried the Vibrios. You think of malaria with a mosquito as a host, but it's hard to think of Vibrios as having the host, which they do. It doesn't fly, it swims. We've seen how warmer oceans can spread a disease like cholera. What about the other nasty stuff? Diseases like Ebola, SARS, the plague and the coronavirus. What do they have to do with climate change? A lot, as it turns out, especially when you're talking about zoonotic diseases. Let's define what a zoonotic disease is. It's a disease that jumps species. It jumps from animals to people. These are called spillover events, spillover events of diseases that are not only transmissible from animals to humans, but then from human to human that have pandemic potential. Zika, Ebola, Enga, Huntivirus, malaria, encephalitis, anthrax, various strains of bird flu. These are diseases that are very transmissible person to person and also from animals to humans, where we come in contact with animals or with the vectors, the carriers of these diseases is where humans will catch them. So the question is how climate change is involved in the spread of these diseases? As it warms up, we see creatures big and small running to the poles to get out of the heat. And as these organisms move, they may run into other organisms that they've never rubbed shoulders with. They may run into people. And that creates the potential that the pathogens that they might have in them could spill over into another animal, including us. We see mosquitoes, ticks, sand flies, various types of insects that can be vectors, snails, these sorts of carriers of zoonotic disease found in new locations. The places that we see climate change mattering to disease emergence most are diseases transmitted by insects, particularly mosquitoes, and the diseases that are transmitted through water because climate change is driving more intense downfall of rain. And when that happens, we see outbreaks of water borne diseases. So climate change affects the spread of disease because as temperatures rise in the course of global warming, these disease vectors are likely to expand their geographical territories. So those vectors can take any different, a lot of different forms, they can be mosquitoes, they can be flies, they can be ticks, also the bats. Bats are probably the most dangerous of all of them. Bats can carry a number of viruses in particular that don't seem to bother them much but cause immense problems for people. I mean, rabies is a good example. Ebola is another good example. So-called Nipah viruses, which first emerged in Malaysia, very dangerous disease in bats. And then of course, the coronavirus is SARS and MERS and now COVID-19. All have bats species as reservoirs. So that has been an intriguing question. Why are bats so bad? One of the speculations is that when they fly, their body gets overheated. As a result, the heating of their body works like a fever. So as a result, they filter a lot of pathogens that come their way, they can be filtered by this overheating of the flying, right? Like a war there between the pathogens and the bats trying to survive, right? So they get hotter and then the viruses get even more resistant to heat. They start selecting for viruses that are potentially more lethal over time. Every time that you get one of those viruses into us humans, we suffer a lot because we, the way that we deal with these pathogens is via the fever. But now you just got infected with a virus that can tolerate an incredible amount of heat. So the only weapon that we had to deal with these viruses doesn't work with these viruses that come from bats. So everybody wants to know where the virus came from and the smoking gun is certainly smoking. I'm not sure, it depends on how you look at it, how much smoke is coming out of it in terms of which bats this virus came out of. You know, having watched other coronaviruses, including MERS and SARS, in recent years emerged from very specific species of bats in the people and having done research that shows that there are thousands of coronaviruses in bats in Asia where the disease emerged. Everyone's expectation is that this virus started in a bat and got into a person, maybe through another animal, maybe not. Can we say exactly which species it is right now? Probably not. Do we know exactly where it happened? Not really. But there's every reason to believe that this virus, like the other coronaviruses that have emerged, is in a bat and particularly a fruit eating bat that doesn't live in caves like we see in the United States but lives in trees in Asia. There's been a controversy over whether there was somehow a leak of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WHO largely dismissed that suggestion, but there have been calls for a more thorough investigation. But the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab or even a deliberate release doesn't change the underlying reality. The transmission of diseases from the wild where they originate into human populations is the common pathway for pandemics. Climate change and the human actions that cause climate change play a huge and often unrecognized role in the process. So how are we getting these diseases from the wild? One way is extreme weather. We also have an increase in extreme weather events, right, flooding especially, which throws human communities in contact with very dirty water, very dirty conditions even after the water has drained away. You have sanitary problems, standing pools of water tend to attract insects. Water itself is a vector. It carries disease with it, both in the form of insects and other types of animals. We see climate change, driving species to live in ways and in places they've never had to do before. And then of course we also realize that people are growing in number, going into places and living in places that were more or less not inhabited by people for, you know, more or less ever. One direct way is the wet markets. The bush means, if you will, hunting. Even though you might think it's a rather limited activity, you know, one animal at a time, it actually is a profoundly important source of nutrition for a lot of populations in a lot of areas of the world. That is one way where humans come directly in contact with environments where these diseases perhaps had resided in equilibrium with the local animal population. It turns out that anthropogenic or human activity, which follows climate change, also causes the spread of disease. Humanity is causing two problems that threaten our economy and our society. One is we are changing the climate, right? Global warming continues to increase. We are also driving a pervasive decline of life on this planet. So our economy is extractive. It's not regenerative. It's not cyclical. We have affected massive amounts of land surface on this planet. We're the root cause of all this. Ecosystems were put under pressure by us. We expand our populations. We chop down forests. We run roads through forests. We bring livestock into new regions, trade animals globally, and we spread these new diseases. So through deforestation, we're moving closer to the disease bearing vectors, and at the same time, those vectors are moving closer to us. The part of the same thing. Deforestation is part of climate change. There's no question that climate change is connected to COVID. Not necessarily in the sense that climate change led directly to the emergence of disease, but in the sense that emerging infections that we've seen in the past have occurred as a result of land use changes, particularly deforestation. And those land use changes are major contributors to climate change travel. And so it's important to recognize that climate solutions, namely in this case, preventing deforestation, are also pandemic prevention solutions. We see this also with vector-borne diseases like malaria, where deforestation, chopping down trees, creates an interface between people and mosquitoes and other potentially infected populations that creates outbreaks of all kinds of vector-borne diseases. And as a key component of addressing the risk of the next pandemic, we really have to think carefully about how we manage forests, particularly in the tropics, where most of these diseases erupt. Deforestation is a source of climate change. We are cutting down the forest and we are taking all of that carbon that is on those trees, and now we are just releasing it into the air. So that's adding to the climate change. Now, the other problem for deforestation is that those trees are supposed to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The whole reason that we must protect the tropical forest and diversity is to protect us. The forest absorbs greenhouse gases. It produces oxygen. It's a protective layer, and it has kept us alive for centuries and centuries. So we're too much destroying the only mechanism that God and nature gave us to deal with this problem. We're destroying it. And how does deforestation lead to the spread of diseases like coronavirus? Think of palm oil, a vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of the palm tree and used in an astonishing number of products. Cosmetics, animal feed, biofuel, snacks, even ice cream. So let me explain to you a couple of things that we're doing. One is destroying habitats via deforestation and things like that. So we are taking land that belongs to the bats for us to have our crops, for us to have our food. So every time that you have ice cream, think about the fact that the ice cream has something there that was taken out of a palm that was planted on a place where the bat was used to have history. So indirectly, through our consumption, we are destroying the habitats of these bats via deforestation. So they go and move around to find a place where they can live. And unfortunately, again, those places where people live. So people say, oh, bats, we don't like bats because they're the reservoirs for stars and mers and Ebola. It turns out that if we wiped out bats, we would wipe out ourselves. Bats are enormously important to the survival of the human species because they have huge effects on insect populations that matter a lot to people. They have huge effects on pollination services that are very important to people. The solution is we need to protect the bats and protect their habitats to protect ourselves as just one example. So some of the same factors that are causing climate change are causing the spread of disease. But now let's turn things around. How is the coronavirus affecting climate change directly? Let's acknowledge that it's not all bad news. Global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4% in 2020, probably because the pandemic reduced human activity. But then these emissions started to bounce back. The big upsides, if you can call them that, of COVID is huge recovery on the natural ecosystem side, whether in the ocean, with the corals, trails, forests, just not having the heavy impact of 10 million visitors a year has just changed the dynamic and the ability for those ecosystems to rebound is really quite amazing when you can see it in real time. So just yesterday I was working, I was hiking with my family and I was thinking how sad it is that our planet now is healing at a moment when we were kind of removed from the equation. You know, like that is the saddest thing to me is that the only moments that nature has healed has been those moments when we are not part of the question. But the benefits are likely to be temporary. Some economies may recover, but there is no sign that global warming has slowed. During COVID, there were periods of time when greenhouse gas emissions were lower during any given point in the year than they have been years past. The air pollution fell dramatically in many parts of the world that people obviously were traveling less. These are all true, but in the context of climate change, they're essentially irrelevant. At first, the thought was that by staying home, people would be driving less, using less energy. But now there have been more deliveries. Also, air conditioning and heating individual homes is a lot less efficient than heating office buildings. Turns out that maybe instead of reducing energy, we just shifted it around. Maybe just as important, the coronavirus is slowing down research on climate change. So I'm an oceanographer and a lot of my work centers in the polar regions. In the Arctic, much of my work has been focused on the retreat of the seasonal sea ice and what that means for the overall system. The hypothesis is that sea ice protects the coastline. So it's important to study how the Arctic is changing. But because of coronavirus, their work on this hit a snag in 2020. For a while, ocean research vessels were confined to port. That meant that they couldn't pick up the buoys that measure the wind, waves and ice, which captured the data necessary to understand what's happening in the ocean. So without recovering them, all that data would be lost. Fortunately, the National Science Foundation came up with a series of protocols for research and Jim Thompson's project went forward, but with significant limitations. There were coronavirus tests for the scientists and the crew members. There were quarantines going out and coming back, and instead of using the port at Nome, which was closed, they had to use the one at Seward and that added 20 days to their trips. That in turn meant money. The National Science Foundation helped us absorb some of those costs and the ship operator helped us absorb some of those costs. But it also just took the part of the grant that's allocated for data analysis and really chewed a big hole in that. Thousands of miles south in Hawaii, oceanographic scientist Angelique White found herself in the same predicament. The reason for coming here was to work with this program called the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series. This was begun by Dave Carl and others 30 plus years ago. So it's this really just incredible community resource where we have this long time series record of ocean biology, ocean chemistry, ocean physics at a site about just to the north of Oahu, a place called Station Aloha. But this research was delayed in 2020 because many ships were confined to port in the early part of the pandemic. So for the entire research fleet around the United States and even globally, there was a significant reduction in ship days. Fortunately, like Dr. Thompson's research, Dr. White's trip was given the green light. But because of quarantines and social distancing, other scientists who often go on these trips weren't able to come along. And that's important because understanding what's happening to our oceans is critical to our survival. But there is another more insidious way that coronavirus threatens to thwart our efforts to fight climate change is by pushing climate change off the urgent agenda. Of course, when a pandemic comes along, people rightly say, let's fix this pandemic, we'll worry about climate change later. There's going to be something, a stock market collapse, a sadly a terrorist attack, a hack of our networks, there will be more crises of various forms, and they will always push climate change off. So the problem isn't just that climate change is a prime factor in the spread of disease, or that coronavirus can accelerate climate change and obstruct the research necessary to deal with it, it's that these two crises are related, they both stem from many of the same causes. And together, they have significant compounding effects. So there's a myriad of ways that they intertwine together. There's sort of the root causes of climate, you know, the climate crisis and COVID are in the same, you know, exploitation of resources that really have been previously out of bounds for the human populations and away from them. But obviously now, they've sort of intersected again. And they feed on each other, magnifying the risk. When you have these two monsters coming together, man, there's a reason for us to be terrified of how bad this is. I mean, I don't have to, don't believe anything that I say. Look at what's happening with the COVID, and look at what's happening with the wildfires and the hurricanes in the United States alone in the last year. Well, so there's going to be a lot of twin disasters, like a heat wave with a flood event that's dumped on top of it, or a hurricane transposed on a drought, right? I mean, you have these kind of compounding events, but pandemics are going to be one of those. We're going to have to fight two front wars against multiple cascading, you know, disaster events at once. And COVID has just been a year long sort of run up to that. It's sort of provided a postcard from the future. There's a couple of different ways I think that these two things interact. And the biggest one for me is that climate change has continued to put stress on on all kinds of social systems and exacerbate inequalities within societies, both in the developed world and in the developing world. That overlaps with the way that COVID also affects marginalized and minoritized communities disproportionately to the larger population. The same structures that make climate change disproportionately bad for the poor and marginalized make COVID disproportionately bad for the poor and the marginalized. COVID really stripped bare all of the inequalities, all of the different economic dynamics, you know, the differences between the haves and the have nots. Around climate, COVID really accelerated trends that we were already seeing. Are we seeing an increase in the denial, disregard, and politicization of science? Climate change, poor science, like almost no other issue in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. If you can draw a straight line from the campaign for climate denial that the oil corporations manufactured over decades, right? The sort of skepticism, don't trust the science, you know, these scientists don't know what they're talking about. Here's some alternative information between that and the distrust around COVID and the vaccine and science. Because you've laid this groundwork for almost a half a century now. I think there's baked into the polarization of science, a distrust of expertise. And honestly, I think that there's a certain amount of elitism. And there's also been a failure, I think, not just on the left, but in the scientific community more broadly, to acknowledge some of the past mistakes or missteps, even as the scientific community continues to ask the public to trust them. These are not infallible institutions. And I think there's a sense in which the presentation of infallibility really can be pretty damaging. COVID has not only sort of written the coattails of the science, you know, skepticism and denial around climate, but it's also accelerated it. Climate change and climate denial, because of the way that it's run down party lines in the past 10 to 12 years, really laid a framework for the response to COVID. It's a really long-standing strain of American anti-intellectualism. We've always fallen victim to false ideologies that have been espoused by very charismatic people for political or personal gain. I don't know, man. Like I'm telling you, one of the things that blows my mind is how blind we are. You know, like how is it that we still deny some of these climatic changes where they are just killing you right now? I've long felt that if people were able to go to the Arctic and experience it in person the way I've been, that it would really change some minds. And so to see all of that and yet know there are people out there who still refute and deny climate change is really frustrating. I imagine some healthcare workers have felt the same thing. If you can't acknowledge a problem, it's really hard to come up with a solution. No individual can fix climate change. No town can fix climate change. No state can fix climate change. No country can fix climate change. That's the reality. But that doesn't mean that individual actions aren't essential parts of what needs to happen at a global scale. There is no shortage of ideas on how to battle climate change and the spread of disease. Whether you see these as separate or related crises. There are macro solutions that require societal, even global changes. There are actions and ideas to consider in our attempts to address specific problems. And there are adaptations and strategies we need for survival. And there are also individual changes in behavior that are ethically important in any event. I do think we'll find a way out of it. And we will be changed. And hopefully, we will be more attuned to practicing science as it should be. Simply because it's survival. It's a pity to have to be driven to the point of living or dying in order to make the change that we could have made under circumstances that were much more beneficial and easier to accept and to work with. It's a complete order of magnitude redo on every sector of our economy. The whole idea of resilience is this ability to survive, adapt and thrive, regardless of what shocks and stresses come your way. So whether that shock or stress is a pandemic or it's a natural disaster or it's an economic downturn, a lot of the same muscles need to be strong in order to respond to that. As a scientist, Dr. Mora is deeply involved in research on climate change and its relation to the coronavirus. He has an intense focus on practical solutions, but worries about focusing too much on adaptation as a strategy. No, I'm not a big fan of adaptation. You know, like the analogy that I give to adaptation is like imagine that I'm friends with Mike Tyson, okay? And Mike Tyson is super friendly guy, a good friend of mine. I'm just saying that, right? Now imagine that every now and then he just punched me in the face, you know, like, oh, dude. So, okay, that's my problem. My friend, I love hanging out with him, but every now and then he just threw me a punch. And I don't like that. Now my adaptation is I put a helmet. I put a helmet. So now everything that I hang out with my friend Mike Tyson, I wear a helmet so that every time that he punched me, I don't feel the pain. Is that really the solution? Accepting adaptation is accepting that we fail. Future generations are going to be looking back at us and are going to say, those guys adapted and look at what they left to us. So we are in the middle of a battle right now that we can win. Adapting to it is saying we just gave up. Whether it's global change to attack root causes or developing survival strategies, and that's not an either or proposition. The issue is not technology. It's fair to characterize this as having moved from the realm of technology development into the realm of social change. Really, what needs to take place now is social change. With social change that recognizes the need for us to live in a way that does not continuously damage the planet, we will be taking the first steps to avoiding future pandemics. Many argue that scientists need to stand up and speak out. There's a deep discomfort within the scientific community. This is part of the kind of structural problem of having scientists on the front line of climate change politics. But they have to be because they understand it the best. You think that maybe scientists buried their noses in the data and did great science, but didn't do outreach and explain why their work was important? Yeah. Yeah. And I can understand that we're not trained as to communicate in that particular way. We are trained and we learn this language and this vernacular that's very specific to our individual fields. So often we don't have the language that is going to effectively communicate the data that we're so close to our hearts. This is not a political act to observe the world around you. This is an act of care and love for this one planet that we share. We are in for a rough right when it comes down to climate change because the fact that this COVID is killing us and we're still denied just an indication that the road ahead when it comes down to climate change is going to be very hard to ride because it's an uphill battle to change people's minds on this thing. If you don't appreciate the problem, you're never going to fix it. My mind has been changing about how to fix this. For the longest of times, I thought that it was about as a scientist producing the information that was required to fix this. That was my naive thinking since I was a child coming from Colombia realizing that if I study for something, I can figure out the problem. But nowadays my mind is changing to the fact that one silver bullet to fix all of these problems is education. If we do have better education right now or lack of critical thinking, it's allowing this misinformation to take control over what we do. You see that at all levels, unfortunately. Together when we act as a global collective, we can reduce our impact. We can embrace resilience and we cannot ignore the changes that we're inflicting upon the natural world. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that there are consequences for ignoring the problems. Assuming it'll just go away. You'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be gone. That doesn't pan out very well for a response to viruses and it certainly won't pan out very well as a response to climate change. One day I'm going to die. I'm going to be standing at the doors of heaven and God is going to ask me, what do you did with your life that you think you deserve to come in? I made it my goal that I'm going to plan a million trees before I die and I want to get into the doors of heaven and say, you know what, God, I did the best I could as a scientist but as a human being I planted a million trees and I think that has been so hard to do that I believe that's my key to getting to heaven. In the end, maybe there's a chance that coronavirus, this devastating disease, will focus us. Make us see the immediacy, the urgency, the danger that climate change presents. What we see in Hawaii might be just as applicable for the whole planet. Uumauka ea, oka aina, i kapono. The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.