The Environment is Benefitting from Quarantine. Where Do We Go From Here?

By Arhon Strauss

Columnist

“Quarantine” has become the latest buzzword in the COVID-19 pandemic. We all fixate on the inconvenience of our newly contained lives. We miss our friends and extended families, and some of us may even have jobs at stake. Yet, even during the coronavirus pandemic, there are valuable lessons to be learned. 

Perhaps, the most impactful benefit of this situation is how this dramatic decrease of human activity has substantially improved the environment in various ways. Across the globe, air pollution is reducing, environmental spaces are recovering and animals are increasing in number. Quarantine has even helped humanity. According to a report by Marshall Burke, a Stanford professor specializing in Earth-system science, a quarantine-related decrease in airborne particulate matter has likely saved 4,000 young children and 73,000 elderly in China in the past two months. To continue this eco-friendly trend, I propose that a long term, watered-down version of quarantine be implemented. 

This “quarantine” would remove all major restrictions, save travel bans, which would place limits on the cruises and nonessential flights each person can take per year. The primary focus of these restrictions would be cruise lines, given that cruises are one of the least essential forms of transport. By limiting the number of cruises that people can take each year, a huge drop in global emissions would be achieved.

This would provide a much-needed decrease in activity. For instance, the Carnival Corporation’s fleet of 47 ships emits ten times more sulfur oxide into the atmosphere than all of Europe’s cars combined. And that is just one cruise line. Additionally, the airline industry produces over 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a number expected to triple by 2050 if action is not taken now. All of that pollution harms the environment in significant ways.

Now, with all this in mind, and the positive impact quarantine has had on emissions, it would only make sense that we use some of our current quarantine strategies to continue to decrease emissions, even if those methods are watered down.

The other main part of this diluted “quarantine” would be to instruct businesses and employees to employ work-from-home strategies where they feasibly can. Working from home would decrease the number of people who have to drive to their jobs. As such, it would reduce transportation emissions and reduce transportation-based barriers to job access.

This plan would also come with a number of side benefits. For one thing, work-from-home would act to improve the mental health of employees—it would give them time away from the stressful workplace to be with their friends and family. I don’t think it would make our workers less productive; in fact, relaxation can improve work productivity. 

Better still, there would be little-to-no economic repercussions from this part of the plan. Increased work-from home would not reduce the number of jobs or negatively impact companies’ overall profits. Rather, it would change the location of this work (and maybe even increase productivity).

While some may argue that these policies seem authoritarian, I say that desperate times call for desperate measures. Neither of these actions truly infringe on basic human rights; they only minorly limit a specific set of privileges. We are living in a scary time—predictions show that the effects of climate change will be permanent in less than 15 years if we do not act now. We need to do everything we can to buy time until we can craft a real climate solution, so giving up creature comforts is a small price to pay. In fact, it is a price we must pay.

An important cost of this plan would be the economic repercussions from restrictions on travel. Airlines, cruise lines, hospitality businesses and tourist businesses would experience a drop in customers. However, we are already living through these repercussions. Instead of rebuilding a broken system after this pandemic, let’s create a sustainable one. 

As much as we may dread it, the current situation has helped the environment far too significantly to be ignored. It would be foolish of us to not take the lessons we have learned from this outbreak and use them in the future. Not only are we learning the best ways to deal with viral outbreaks—we are also being shown an efficient way to help the environment. 

That is why we must water-down our current limitations and maintain them in the future. Quarantine, the new and terrifying normal, holds the key to delaying the climate crisis.