Both climate change and the coronavirus pandemic are global crises that require thoughtful and significant action on the part of government, individuals, and businesses.
Viruses have been around for at least 300 million years and are abundant on Earth as well as in the bodies of all living things. The vast majority of these don’t infect humans though there are 320,000 known types of viruses that do including Ebola, influenza, Zika, malaria, and coronavirus, which is responsible for a large family of viruses that infect both humans and animals. According to the CDC, on rare occasions, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread among people.
So, what does this have to do with climate change?
As humans destabilize the environment, we are damaging ecosystems and causing viruses to find new hosts whose immune systems are not evolving as quickly as the virus. As my colleague Dr. Dawn Wright, Chief Scientist at Esri, told me in our podcast, the COVID-19 pandemic is an undesired side effect of human encroachment into animal habitats.
“The novel coronavirus was very likely to have originated in bats,” Wright said. “Through our activities, through our urbanization, through the ways that we treat wildlife, we are disrupting or destroying their habitats. Species such bats have to shift their distribution accordingly. As they move to get away from what is disrupting them or killing them, sometimes it brings them and their diseases closer to where people are.”
Warming Planet, New Threats
NASA’s climate scientists say the five warmest years on record have all taken place since 2010, the rate of Antarctica ice mass loss has tripled in the last decade, and global sea levels have risen eight inches in the last century.
Arctic ice holds many ancient viruses that modern humans have little to no immunity against. In Alaska, for example, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 influenza (known as the Spanish Flu) that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million right after World War I—about 3 percent of the world’s population.
Climate change is scrambling ecosystems and allowing diseases to move beyond their invisible borders, as with mosquito-borne illnesses. As the tropics expand at a current rate of 30 miles per decade, diseases like malaria and Zika virus will become a threat in novel locations. At the global level, the WHO estimates that increases of 2°C or 3°C could raise the number of people at risk for malaria by up to 5 percent—affecting more than 150 million people.
Exacerbating the situation is the fact that humans move around a lot more than they used to, spreading diseases faster and to more places. Before globalization, a virus couldn’t travel much farther than its victims, which wasn’t very far at all by modern standards. The Antonine Plague killed 5 million people and was responsible for the eventual fall of the Roman Empire. But, consider how big its impact might have been in today’s globalized world.
Everything is Connected
The global impact of COVID-19 is teaching us something scientists have known for centuries. “We are part of the biodiversity of this planet. And it's an integrated system. We know that now, right?” says Sean O’ Brien, NatureServe president and CEO. “We do not stand apart from the rest of the biota and the rest of the chemistry and physics of the planet.”
In other words, when humans destroy ecosystems, and encroach on animal habitats, it affects everything else on the planet, including ourselves. “According to the UN, we may lose a million species in the next couple of decades. And we don't actually know the impact that we're having by causing species to go extinct,” says O’Brien. “We don't really know as we cause a million species to go extinct in our lifetimes, what impact that's going to have on our lifestyle and on the economies of this planet.”
If everything on our planet is connected, then the better we understand those connections, the more we can understand our impact on them. A geographic information system (GIS) is one powerful technology used to illuminate and clarify those relationships. GIS works by relating seemingly unrelated data on a map, to help individuals and organizations better understand spatial patterns and model future events.
GIS make it possible to track the origin and spread of disease, monitor the impacts of climate change, and help experts identify real measurable solutions.
In the case of COVID-19, smart maps and dashboards are critical tools being used on the front lines. In addition to the well-known Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard, geospatial analysis is allowing users to explore hospital capacity forecasts, identify the most vulnerable populations, measure hospital workforce readiness, and gauge viability of various facilities for emergency use.
Scientists fighting climate change are using GIS to layer external data such as ocean warming from NOAA, surface temperature fluctuations from NASA, and weather pattern predictions from Geodata.gov onto smart maps. They can then analyze the causes and effects of various human activities on climate change and make intelligent predictions about the future of the planet.
After decades of research and modeling, we now understand that climate change is not just affecting our physical world, it’s also affecting the economics of our society.
“There are many people who are surprised at how very closely linked everything is,” explains Wright. “Climate change is a business cost in terms of disruption to employee health due to greenhouse gases, and maybe consumer health and buying habits as well. So, you have decreased productivity on the part of your employees, fewer business transactions on the part of your customers and less consumer spending.”
A Healthier Planet is Everyone’s Business
Companies that have made the connection between the health of the environment and the health of their business are already relying on location intelligence, achieved through GIS, to make smarter decisions. One example is the use of smart maps to select the healthiest, most viable places for opening new facilities. Smart maps can help companies pull together and analyze air quality data to create air quality indexes, including the history of that location down to an hour-by-hour basis. They can then layer internal and external data about urbanization, workforce demographics, and supply chain logistics to determine whether the location makes sense from an operational standpoint.
Intelligent mapping tools like GIS can also help organizations better coexist with nature, rather than destroy or threaten it. O’Brien believes, “mapping is really the key to this whole thing. If you don't know where those vulnerable environments are, and if you don't know what they are, then you can't save them.”
We know for certain that no aspect of life on this planet has been untouched by climate change — viruses included. And while COVID-19 wasn’t, to our current knowledge, directly caused by global warming, scientists say it’s illustrative of the side effects of the destabilization of our world’s ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity.
Powerful technologies like GIS make it possible to understand the origin and spread of disease, track the impact of climate change, and help experts identify real measurable solutions. Going forward, intelligent growth can help prevent epidemics, preserve biodiversity, and ultimately support sustainability for our planet.
To learn more, visit esri.com
