The COVID-19 outbreak and its global spread through human-to-human contact have made it even more important to analyze the environmental effects. The higher the population, the higher the energy usage, the higher amount of carbon emissions, and the faster the environmental degradation. Having a high-quality environment is important for people to protect themselves from infection. During the lockdowns, city residents could benefit from the environment. Shutdowns contributed not only to break the chain of infections but also to the development of the environment and ecosystems. Due to the great cuts in transportation and industrial sectors, air and water pollution levels have come down, and nature has started to reassert itself. In this process, governments have a great role to fight the pandemic and protect the environment. In this chapter, environmental sustainability and the role of governments during the pandemic will be analyzed. Also, the viable solutions for environmental sustainability that can be provided by the governments will be put forth.
TopIntroduction
For many developing countries, development stands for urbanization and industrialization. Nevertheless, during the industrialization and urbanization processes, environment quality has been ignored and environmental degradation is thought as the trade-off of development. Air pollution, sanitation and hygiene, inadequate water supply, and hazardous wastes lead to harmful living conditions, fatal illnesses, and destroy ecosystems. Furthermore, increasing pollution exacerbates poverty and inequality, and slows down economic growth in both urban and rural areas. Environmental degradation may negatively impact the development process and competitiveness of developing countries. Particularly the countries that are highly dependent on their natural resources are at greater risk of environmental pollution. Degradation of forests, fisheries, contaminating freshwater, and air, and water pollution are the factors of poor human health ecosystem that affects both economic and daily life activities (Nazeer, Tabassum, and Alam, 2016:590).
Moreover, poor people suffer more from environmental degradation since they cannot afford to protect themselves from the negative impacts of air, land, and water pollution. Due to environmental pollution, there are 9 million premature deaths (16% of all deaths) which represent three times more deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than the deaths from all wars and other types of violence. The current researches found a close linkage between air pollution and the number of cases and deaths due to Covid-19. These dramatic data are highlighted during the pandemic period and pointed to the urgency to fight environmental problems (The World Bank, 2021).
The World Bank declared that the cost associated with health damage from air pollution is approximately $5,7 trillion and 4,8% of global GDP. Many developing countries such as China, Argentina, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Brazil suffer from the cost of pollution-related diseases due to noise pollution, inadequate water supply, and air pollution (The World Bank, 2021). Communities realized that climate change, water pollution, deforestation, and uncontrolled wildlife trade may increase the severity of the pandemics. Statistics showed that air pollution leads reduction in the environmental health of communities and 4,2 million premature deaths a year. Furthermore, poor sanitation systems and lack of access to clean water may increase the spread and exacerbate the impact of pandemics in many developing countries. These environmental factors impact the less well-off segment of societies. (OECD, 2020a:1-2).
Thus, it is crucial to address pollution as it has irreversible impacts on human health, human capital, and GDP losses. Due to the pandemic, global production, employment, and consumption levels shrunk that caused substantial economic and social shocks. Surprisingly, while lockdowns caused economic hibernations, they also caused short-term environmental quality improvements such as declines in air pollution and greenhouse. While people stayed home, air quality levels in big cities improved because of the reduction in factory and transport emissions of CO2, nitrogen oxides, ozone formation, and particulate matter. CO2 emission reduction encouraged the governments to hope to mitigate greenhouse emissions and climate change in the long term (Hamwey, 2020). The fast spread of the outbreak has also increased public awareness for the environmental quality and preparedness to deal with such unexpected diseases.