Aside from a few die-hard sceptics, climate change is accepted as fact by everyone, from the pope to potato farmers. In one way, the coronavirus crisis is nothing like the problem of climate change. Climate change is not an abstraction if you are one of the 40 million people living in East Africa, where they face the triple threat of coronavirus, flooding and locusts. While locusts have swarmed for thousands of years and it is hard to attribute any one event to climate change, it focuses the mind. Putting off mitigation measures now on the grounds of a current crisis is not so much short-sighted as blind, given that action now prevents the need for even more drastic action later.

Source: The Irish Times June 20, 2020 00:00 UTC