Between January and April, 464 square miles of the rainforest were razed, 55 percent more area than was destroyed in the same period in 2019. Now as Brazil, hard hit by COVID-19, is focused on controlling the virus, illegal loggers and miners are taking advantage of the situation to cut down large swaths of the Amazon. Deforestation in the Amazonīrazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has been calling for more commercial development in the Amazon rainforest, which absorbs two billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year. These delays could allow some countries to shift their priorities away from the environment. And a meeting to finalize the High Seas Treaty to establish agreements for conservation and sustainable development for ocean biodiversity in international waters - a meeting that took years of negotiations to arrange- has been pushed to 2021. Ocean Conference scheduled for June to plan for sustainable solutions to manage the oceans has been delayed but no new date has been set. The Convention on Biological Diversity, which would have established new global rules to protect wildlife and plants from climate change and other threats, has been postponed until next year. The World Conservation Congress to evaluate global conservation measures has been postponed to January 2021. International negotiations delayedĪ variety of international negotiations to protect the environment have also been delayed. The delay, however, could enable countries to enact stimulus plans that do not incorporate climate change strategies. If the conference occurred this fall, countries would likely be more compelled to introduce economic recovery plans for COVID-19 that also further their climate change goals. The countries were to announce plans to ratchet up climate actions, since the plans they submitted in 2015 could still allow global temperatures to rise by a potentially catastrophic 3☌. The Paris climate accord of 2015, adopted by every country, all of which pledged to take action to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2° C beyond preindustrial levels, was set to reconvene in November this year at COP26. While it’s unclear how these factors will balance out in the end, one thing is certain: more large-scale actions will be essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Many of these will make matters worse, while others could make them better. This is because the carbon dioxide humans have already emitted can remain in the atmosphere for a hundred years some of it could last tens of thousands of years.īeyond carbon emissions, however, COVID-19 is resulting in changes in individual behavior and social attitudes, and in responses by governments that will have impacts on the environment and on our ability to combat climate change. Nonetheless, CO2 levels in the atmosphere reached their highest monthly average ever recorded in May - 417.1 parts per million. As a result of the lockdowns around the world to control COVID-19, huge decreases in transportation and industrial activity resulted in a drop in daily global carbon emissions of 17 percent in April.
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