 And welcome to East West Center Insights. Aloha, I'm Karina Lyons, Vice President and Director of Research at the East West Center. The Center is a cutting-edge research capacity building institution. We're based here in Hawaii and forging deeper understanding and connections between the East and the West. So every two weeks on this show, which is at Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Hawaii time, I had to think about that for a moment, it is Tuesday. I'll be having a conversation with an East West Center expert somewhere within our global network about the biggest challenges facing our society today and into the future. And today, I'm super excited to introduce Dr. Victoria Keener. She's a research fellow with the East West Center and she's here to talk to us about the coronavirus and climate change. So Dr. Keener is a specialist in hydroclimatology, gosh, I've practiced this beforehand. She's a specialist in hydroclimatological research. I'd like to see that on your business card. And she directs our federally funded Pacific Research and Integrated Sciences Assessment or the Pacific Research Program. And that focuses on climate-related impacts, adaptation, and mitigation policies in the Pacific Islands. Dr. Victoria Keener, welcome. Hi, thank you, Karina. Hi. Welcome to the coronavirus. It's so bizarre, but those of you who don't know, Victoria and I live 11 minutes walk away from each other. But we're trying to lead by example by talking to each other in our respective living rooms. I see you cleaned up a little. Hey, so let's chat about the coronavirus that we're currently in. So this global pandemic lockdown has been called a temporary breather for the planet. And that's because valet carbon is being burned, right? Because we're flying less and we're doing less in terms of commercial activities. And the government response has been dramatic. Many of the things that have been done kind of look like what needs to be done to mitigate the impacts of climate change. So what do you think we can learn about how to address the climate crisis by watching the COVID-19 pandemic response and how it's unfolded? Yeah, it's a great question because while not wanting to minimize the impact of the pandemic or any of the public health issues, there really are a lot of parallels between it and the climate crisis and kind of how it has evolved over decades really. So it's kind of a different temporal scale. We've seen in a matter of months what the climate crisis and community has been going through for decades. So there was a lack of coordinated response until this kind of disaster scale threshold was reached for the virus. So the virus was spreading kind of underground until it started community spread in several cities and then hospitals were under threat of being overwhelmed. That's kind of analogous to temperatures rising steadily around the world all of this time over the last century until suddenly we're seeing it detectable more and more that fingerprint and extreme rainfall wildfires and coral bleaching around the world. So really it's like a microcosm of that problem. So we went from denying that the virus was a problem in January to admitting it was there but blaming it on something else in February to saying the solutions were just too expensive in March and then finally saying we were willing to die and condemn others to death instead of just solving the problem by modifying our behavior. So this was really decades of the climate change debate in just three months. Right but for so many regular people climate change is so abstract. So when we look at these analogies we think okay that kind of makes sense but would the impact of climate change be as extreme as what we're experiencing now in terms of the global pandemic this crisis? Well the threat so the threat from climate change to people's future livelihoods and their children's livelihoods are just as severe or more severe than those from the coronavirus. But humans are very bad at planning for the future right we're much better at reacting in the moment cobbling together a solution or accepting and adapting to whatever our new normal is but really this is a chance for us for the sake of a more healthy equitable and ecologically functional future to come together and make sure that this is not just another disaster that we accept and adapt to really. Right but just to keep digging down and to try to make it real for people I mean do you think adapting to climate change will it be as devastating for our economy as it has been dealing with the coronavirus? Yeah so that's a very interesting question because we have seen these massive economic impacts right and so people are saying you know if this is what adapting to climate change looks like then how are we going to do this in a way where our systems our communities our businesses our governments are able to keep on functioning and we're able to live our lives. So what we've seen in the pandemic is that the crisis has triggered massive and mostly voluntary behavioral change on a scale that has been considered impossible to do for climate change impacts in the day before any of this happened not just in the United States but across the world and a lot of times that impossibility was really linked to the economy and market based looking through a market based lens so for example some of the analysis done on looking at different climate change adaptations and mitigations there have been different financial institutions that have said because there is a 1 drop projected in global GDP that would come out of these come out of these adaptations it's not worth doing and now what we see is there's been way more than a 1 drop and we're going to be recovering from this for years probably so in this crisis we've really seen what happens when we react instead of plan ahead so in this case the economic impacts are far more dire and faster than any of the adaptations that are being proposed for mitigating climate change and adapting to the impacts of climate change so for example in looking at green infrastructure and green jobs and instituting different energy systems those are much more carefully planned transitions in energy and agricultural systems than anything we've seen during this so it's really put it in context I think and given us a chance to think ahead and plan instead of just react to a disaster yeah I mean that's fascinating to me because it has put it in context but it really I like what you said about essentially what drives human behaviour right and it makes me think about the the wailing movement when there was a time not so long ago when we would kill these huge beautiful animals because they were so useful you could use them to light lamps they were tasty and you could make lipstick and basically right and what you know what was the cause of that that market decline it wasn't that we voluntarily decided that we weren't going to kill whales anymore not really it was that we discovered crude oil and that was a more effective way to lubricate things machines and to light things so yeah that's pretty telling um yeah I have been uh sorry before you um go on I have to remember that I should ask our audience that if you have a question to submit to uh Victoria Kena please submit them to think tech facebook page and uh I think that if you google think tech facebook you will find it and then you can ask Victoria some other questions and not this year from me so Victoria are we gonna um follow on yeah I was just going to um really talk about you know how we could uh how this this discussion with looking at the pandemic and thinking about it in relation to the climate crisis you know something that we've thought about a lot and has been something coming from a lot of the um kind of anti mitigation movements in the climate world are saying well you know we need to concentrate more on individual actions rather than these big systemic changes so um you know concentrate on things like driving less and flying less eating less meat changing out your appliances which are of course things that we should do to help this this economic transition take place however what this crisis I think has also really shown is that individual actions alone are not enough to fix the climate crisis so if we look at if we look at some of the the impacts that we're seeing with decreases in in carbon dioxide levels I think that since this has started we've seen our decrease in emissions go down by about 5.5 percent and so that's looking at when I say emissions I mean greenhouse gases so these are things that the the things in the atmosphere that are trapping heat so so we're we've seen about a five five point five percent decrease so far which is a whopping change it's bigger than anything we've seen in decades even compared to like the last the last recession in 2008 it didn't come close but even that is nowhere near what we would need to get our get our global temperature down to limiting it to 1.5 or two degrees C above above that the average temperatures that we're trying to time trying to keep the global temperature too right and just can I just translate for our non-scientist viewers like myself by C you mean Celsius yes sorry yeah and then in Fahrenheit Celsius is that is a 1.8 it is yeah but it's not like a direct conversion right okay and and what we're talking about direct conversions it's just it's is that right to say that two degrees Celsius is sort of a guess it's not you know like that's sort of an aspirational target I mean if we hit that will we be safe will we have fixed the climate change prices um well nobody really knows and it's interesting you should bring that up in relation to you know kind of why we don't know and why we use models to talk about these things so something that is another parallel between the climate world and the COVID pandemic is that we've seen a lot of models come into kind of public discourse and we're talking about if we do these things how will the temperature change in the future if we do these these mitigating things to control the spread of the virus how will that change how we see it grow in in cities and across the globe and these models are very uncertain and so as scientists people who work with these models and create them we're used to seeing those kinds of uncertainties and working within different scenarios of the future but I think a lot of times people are thrown when they see these projections and then they don't happen but one of the other parallels between both climate climate models and the virus models are that the future is very dependent upon what we do right so in the models our actions are very responsible for what scenario plays out in the future so if we see something happen that wasn't being predicted two weeks ago maybe it's because we changed our behavior for the better and change the future right so to translate that into a sort of a hawaii example we had some modeling coming out of well various universities in other countries as well and and then relevant to hawaii there was a prediction that on the 3rd of May we would be in a situation where we had a deficit of ICU beds by about 127 and the dates today is I'm going to say the 28th of April 2020 and that hasn't happened so does that mean that we've sorted out coronavirus and so can people keep going back onto the beaches like they want to that's definitely not what it means but I would say that the comparison of the projection with how we've done so far in controlling it in hawaii is a testimony to the effectiveness of a lot of the policies and how well they've been instituted at at local levels great thank you victoria and we're just going to go to a quick break and then we're back we're going to hear more from dr victoria kina talking about the coronavirus and the climate change connections aloha i'm john david and the host of history lens on think tech hawaii history lens deals with contemporary events and looks at them through a historical perspective or what we call a history lens the show is streamed live on think tech hawaii dot com thanks so much for watching our show we look forward to seeing you then mahalo and aloha hi we're back with east west center insights i'm karina liens and today i'm having a fascinating conversation with a hydro climatologist dr victoria kina welcome back victoria thanks so uh we were having fun geeking out before and uh i wanted to get straight back into it so um talking about the coronavirus and climate change this um keep hearing this idea of a silver lining um basically people equating air pollution to carbon dioxide and perhaps if we could look at uh slide one and then you can tell me um should i be relaxing about getting on that plane as soon as i'm allowed to yeah sure so something that um we've been seeing a lot of and if you follow like internet memes you've seen um i'm sure some that are you know like we are the virus the earth is healing and then you know pictures of um you know buffalo is wandering the street of buffalo buffalo new york a joke but um but really it says to bring up a question is is this a silver lining for climate change and what we're seeing um so this this figure that we have up is from iq air and it's really showing that um in some of the world's major cities uh so we're looking at particulate matter 2.5 levels which is a very damaging um type of air pollution um that's come from a lot of types of industries uh and we're seeing these huge decreases in major cities around the world compared to the same period in 2019 so um if you look at deli that's the climb of up to 60 percent which is huge um now this is this is good for lungs and air pollution in in general um but it's not really productive to think of the the pandemic as a silver lining for climate change in any way um and particulate matter and air pollution are not the same thing um as carbon dioxide emissions right so they're two different things and carbon dioxide emissions are actually largely driving global warming um and particulate matter ironically um can actually serve as uh something to bounce the heat away in the atmosphere if you have those particles um blocking uh blocking the the uh radiation from getting to the earth um but uh these changes are temporary and they're linked to a global disaster um people are getting sick dying and they're grieving for a life that they and their children might never see again so there's really no silver lining in this um we've already talked as well about how these decreases um which has been about five five point five percent decrease in carbon dioxide in the past couple months are not nearly what would be needed to show up in our record uh so I think that it's uh carbon brief and scripts have done studies that have showed we need to be reducing our emissions by about 10 per year um to get to a level where we're going to see that in our atmosphere and in the global temperature and I might just note now that we're not seeing changes in temperature currently because our actions 10 years ago uh from polluting are still being seen in our atmosphere today um so there's that time lag um of of what we do in terms of actions and when we see the rewards yeah that makes so much sense but it's I think it's the thing that's frequently forgotten that the time lag is real and so then that's that kind of goes back to that planning point that you said earlier we have to plan for the future and then um we'll see the results uh and while you're talking about particulates it made me think about um all of my time in um in China and you want to cough so I wanted to ask is there a direct link between climate change and um and human health and and pandemics in general yeah so um if we could put up the second slide on the screen it's actually a um a figure from the world health organization which you've seen a lot in the news lately um this is from a report that they did in 2015 which looks specifically at human health and climate change in specific island countries um and so this is from our regional WHO office um the head of the regional office actually named climate change is one of the top three threats to Pacific Island health in 2019 um sure in 2020 there would be one more um three top three threats to Pacific Island health with uh the COVID crisis um but we we often do see a relationship between things like drought uh extreme rainfall and other events associated with the El Nino southern oscillation which you might have heard of um in the region with the spread of things like vector-borne disease in the islands um things that uh so vectors meaning mosquitoes spreading things like dengue um chikagunya things like that um but what we also talk about is that climate change is really a threat multiplier um in the spread of the disease and in um uh disasters everywhere so a lot of time climate is not the reason why things are happening but it is making it much much worse so that multiplier can cause um illness in tens of thousands of additional people whether uh where there wouldn't have been um the other direct link between climate change and pandemics is that direct connection between the pressure that humans put encroaching on wild habitats so doing things like urban development um agriculture and reducing the habitat for uh additional biodiversity um so about 75 percent of new and infectious diseases each year are zoonotic which means that they come from animals and a lot of times it's those animals being in close proximity to humans um so really something that we should be looking at going forward is how can we create a more holistic way of living that integrates considerations of ecosystem services and conservation of land um and increased biodiversity and putting climate resilience into planning for our future how can we integrate that with human health and global security uh which human health is a big part um we know that the planet support system is declining faster than ever the IPCC the intergovernmental panel on climate change and the science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystems have services have shown that they're declining faster than ever um an increased biodiversity has been shown to inhibit the spread and introduction of pathogens in a lot of ways so we need to better understand how climate change and environmental stress affect those patterns of disease both hosts and vectors like mosquitoes and other animals um and things like improving biosecurity and health protocols within the pacific region and across the world can help with that hmm um gosh that's interesting no and there's a lot there and uh it's funny my immediate thought was do you know when you're thinking of humans and animals coming together I did initially think of tiger king but when I got past that um I was thinking about um one of my assignments um I used to be a New Zealand diplomat as you know and I was sent to um Colombo and Sri Lanka to negotiate for elephants um because of the convention on um against trade and dangerous species uh elephants have to be gifted and the reason that a country like Sri Lanka would want to gift elephants and they love them is because there's a real um crossover between the habitat where humans live and where elephants live and um it might seem pretty foreign to us here in beautiful sunny Hawaii by um all throughout Sri Lanka it's just really common because um humans and elephants have lived together for hundreds of years there uh and so yes for those of you and of course of the DMZ um uh and between that area between um the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea where there has been said to be um increased biodiversity and specifically I haven't I haven't actually no I don't know if this has been verified but um more sightings of white tigers um and so I digress because I think tigers did you see that the tiger in the Bronx Zoo actually got um COVID-19 it was like coughing yeah so the the zoonotic diseases are still are still spreading and changing but yeah yeah so so sorry you go I was just I was just going to go into to more issues about kind of like resilience of of um those periurban spaces and as you know the Swiss Center also does research on um you know kind of models of disease in these transitional areas between cities and forests and wild areas and um looks at their looks at their their capability of spreading disease and harboring um yeah hey so um I'm gonna go from tigers to you uh I was fascinated when I read your bio so at the beginning I described you as a hydroclimatologist um but you also have an engineering degree um and so um why why did you become a scientist as opposed to an engineer um well I would say I'm still I mean my PhD is in engineering I'm I I may not do functional um you know digging in the dirt putting pipes in or designing um you know wetland systems that filter um polluted water type of engineering um but really what I was always interested in was that practical application of scientific knowledge so doing the research and finding a way to make it applicable on the ground now which for climate changes um becoming more and more important um so the the research that we do in my research group the Pacific Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment or Pacific RISA program um is a NOAA funded uh research group that is interdisciplinary and it supports communities in Hawaii and the Pacific in adapting to the impacts of climate variability and change um so with social and physical scientists working together um as well as working with legal and policy scholars um and policy makers and natural resource managers we really want to produce climate research that is actionable at local and regional scales um and by working with the east west center we've been um you know very lucky to be allowed to work with all sorts of um managers and governments at different scales throughout the region to really translate this information into useful uh management and policy yeah thanks Victoria I mean as a as a former policy maker myself um I'm just really proud of your work because I just know how applicable it really is and as a daughter of the Pacific I'm grateful to you and your team for the work that you do to support the communities in the Pacific particularly here in the north Pacific and we've only got a couple of minutes to go so um I just wanted to ask the question I've always wanted to ask you what why climate change like why do you care um I actually it's it's interesting I um I don't think we talked about this before but um I used to actually be a biomedical engineer um so I worked with genetics and mutations and things like that but I changed because of the I wanted something that dealt with the environment um and which I was able to make a um make a difference now with what I saw as coming as you know this huge climate crisis um and I also didn't want an experimental organism that was going to feel pain so I was using mice before in my research and I just had enough of that and so now I use water and the planet and look at data from that um and I can I can do good and um help get the science into um informing policies which we see now as you know more more important than ever to create these relationships with policymakers where you're a trusted source of scientific information and data where I'm sorry I have to cut you off because we're about to go to the next step okay thanks everybody this has been east west center insights and we're going to get Victoria on again and we're going to listen to her and learn from her again but thanks for joining us and we'll be here in two weeks time Tuesday two o'clock where east west center insights I'm Karina Lyons aloha