Does the coronavirus pandemic have anything to do with climate change? From the first months of last year, we remember uplifting stories about how economic freezing had positive effects on the environment. Many Chinese saw the peaks of the Himalayas for the first time in their lives because air pollution over large cities has decreased. Dolphins flooded into cleared channels in Venice, Italy. Such pretty pictures, however, are a misunderstanding of the relationship between the spread of the Covid-19 virus and climate phenomena. True, they connect with each other, but in a completely different way.

"The World Meteorological Organization's annual report on CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions leaves no doubt that 2020 will be another year with record emissions. So Covid has not helped us reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental pollution. It only helped us understand that we are not indestructible, and zoonotic viruses are an increasing threat to humanity," Kamil Wyszkowski, general director of the UN Global Compact in Poland, told eNewsroom.

"Here we touch the connection between the pandemic and climate change. Animal viruses do not come out of anywhere. They appear when humans interfere with ecosystems more and more. With each successive square kilometer of the Amazon rainforest cut out, we are exposed to isolated, isolated pathogens in these ecosystems. The same is the case with thawing permafrost and mass industrial livestock farming. That's where Covid-19 came from. In the early 1950s, the World Health Organization talked about 8 zoonotic viruses. Now we know that there are over 70. This number is still growing,"  Wyszkowski emphasized.

(eNewsroom)