“A YEAR of tackling great challenges.” In the title of our review of the year, “tackling” is the operative word. Two great challenges have dominated the past 12 months: the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, and efforts to address climate change, as embodied by the COP26 summit held in Glasgow, UK, in November. Both have seen significant progress – but only the most irrational optimist could claim that what we have achieved so far amounts to solutions.
Our retrospective leader of 2020 was devoted to the promise that vaccines might bring a swift end to covid-19. At the time, more than 70 million people had fallen ill with the virus, and according to (undoubtedly conservative) quasi-official estimates, 1.5 million had died. Today, those figures stand at almost 270 million and over 5 million. The world looks to be entering a significant fourth wave.
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It could have been so much worse. Vaccines have indeed been a triumph in terms of lives saved and serious health consequences averted, for those who have received them. Looking to the future, the success of mRNA vaccines should lead to many more jabs against other diseases, and also to a whole new kind of treatment for all sorts of conditions that uses mRNA technology to get our bodies to make therapeutic proteins.
That justifies the three rousing cheers for science that we allowed ourselves last year. But in terms of ending the pandemic, the vaccine-boosted optimism of the early part of the year has been undone by many factors, not least evolution doing what evolution does. The predictable emergence of new, more transmissible variants has complicated things, and new variants could well keep emerging indefinitely, although as the world’s collective immune system builds strength against SARS-CoV-2 over the years to come, new emergences should cause less disruption.
What remains true is that vaccination is our best protection. This makes tackling sources of vaccine scepticism and hesitancy more vital than ever. It also means that a great failure of the past year, to distribute doses equitably across the globe based on need rather than nationality, must be addressed with urgency.
Global inequities also made for an uncomfortable backdrop to COP26. The failure of higher-income countries to come up with $100 billion of finance a year for lower-income nations to mitigate the effects of climate change was a source of bad blood in the run-up to and during the summit.
And yet the political penny seems – finally – to have dropped on climate. That was driven in no small measure by extreme weather events, from the “heat dome” over the western US and Canada to wildfires in Greece and Turkey to flooding in Germany and China, hammering home that climate change is here and its effects are real. All the talk from leaders in Glasgow was of “following the science”. While a huge gulf remains between political action and what science says is needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C, COP26 at least provided progress on issues such as “phasing down” fossil fuels, getting to grips with methane emissions and financing not just mitigation of climate change, but adaptation to its impacts.
Climate change is admittedly only one of three great environmental challenges we face, alongside biodiversity loss, and chemical waste and pollution. All three are interlinked – and appear to be connected to the emergence of pandemics, if, as seems likely, it was our exploitation of wildlife that left the door open to covid-19.
The momentum that now exists for addressing climate change must be leveraged to acknowledge and tackle a general crisis of nature. One big omission at COP26 was to recognise the importance of “nature-based solutions”, chief among them protecting and expanding forests and seagrass fields – in mitigating climate change. The COP15 summit on biodiversity, the second phase of which is to be held in Kunming, China, in April and May 2022, provides an opportunity to address that omission and to start finding joined-up solutions.
Of course, it hasn’t all been pandemic and environmental crisis. Another headline-grabbing story, the space race between billionaires, drew mixed feelings. For some, it was a feat of derring-do; for others, it highlighted inequalities here on Earth.
“The momentum for addressing climate change must be leveraged to tackle a general crisis of nature”
Space exploration remains a great frontier for human ambition, and as ever we can salute the ingenuity that brought three missions to Mars this year or indeed launched (successfully, we hope, as these words pass for press) the world’s most powerful space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, into orbit.
Here, too, we shouldn’t allow hubris to become our nemesis. With a view to the challenges we have created on Earth, we should be mindful not just of the advances, but of the challenges that the commercial exploration and exploitation of space bring – for example in the light pollution and dangers of space junk that planned megaconstellations of satellites may cause.
The world and what lies in it and beyond it remain sources of great wonder. If there is anything that the past year has taught us, it is that there are grounds for rational optimism. Solutions to our problems exist, and a better, healthier world that works for one and all is possible – but only if we work together to find common solutions, guided by science.
