To what extent has COVID affected our carbon footprint?

March 10th, 2021

As a reminder from my last post, and as you can clearly see from the title of this post, my current essential question is "To what extent has COVID affected our carbon footprint?" I don't think I need to clarify that it's specifically COVID-19 but in case you were wondering or confused, the answer is that yes. COVID-19 has caused a global pandemic where traveling, gathering, and interacting has been reduced to amounts that seemed unachievable pre-COVID. Ignoring all the mental health effects this situation has had, it's also had beneficial impacts on the environment. I'll begin explaining some of these effects in this post, while I will provide more in-depth research on the impact COVID-19 had on emissions in my next post.

All of the impacts that the lockdowns of COVID-19 had are likely to temporary since it's a state that won't be maintained. We'll eventually begin commuting to work and traveling as we did before the pandemic, which is what makes these effects temporary. During these times, there have been significant drops in concentrations of nitrogen dioxide globally. Nitrogen dioxide is typically emitted due to the burning of fossil fuels, 80% of it coming from motor vehicle exhaust. In cities in Europe, the measured concentrations of nitrogen dioxide were 20% to 61% lower than expectations. This is largely due to the number of people driving or commuting to work has more than halved. Similar results have been found when comparing levels of air pollution in New York from 2019 to 2020. As seen in the photo below, air quality has also drastically increased in China.

Why are lower levels of nitrogen dioxide so beneficial? Nitrogen dioxide is shown to have caused acid rain which has detrimental effects on the environment. Additionally, NO2 can trigger various respiratory diseases that humans suffer.

Since vehicles make up 72% of the transportation sector, the huge decrease in driving due to travel restrictions, working from home, and shut-down of places of gather inevitably reduced the effects of the transportation sector. Globally, about 14% of greenhouse gas emissions are created from the transportation sector. On top of that, industrial uses cause about 21% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Although industries experienced only a slight pause, this temporary stop accompanied by the reduction in transportation was what caused the large decrease in carbon dioxide levels.

There wasn't solely a decrease in air pollution. COVID-19 has also caused an increase in demand for personal protective equipment, demand for plastic containers (used by food services to provide delivery services), and online shopping (where products are delivered in single-use plastic). The creation of single-use packaging and products requires the increased use of burning fossil fuels, more than the creation of reusable products. Additionally, waste generation (which consequently generates more greenhouse gas emissions) has also increased with the larger use of single-use products. In the next post, I'll analyze whether these effects are more perverse than they appear.

This brings me to my claim. This claim will fuel my next post, as I'll create an argument with evidence that supports it. I believe that travel restrictions similar to the ones placed during times of COVID-19 should be re-implemented in the future because they decrease gas emissions and increase air quality. I will argue and defend this in the next post!

Sources

1. Callaway, Ewen, et al. "The coronavirus pandemic in five powerful charts." Nature, vol. 579, no. 7800, 2020, p. 482+. Gale In Context: Science, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A618606603/SCIC?u=nysl_ca_guild&sid=SCIC&xid=02ad5b95. Accessed 9 Mar. 2021.

2. COVID-19 and Europe's Environment: Impacts of a Global Pandemic. 3 Dec. 2020, www.eea.europa.eu/post-corona-planet/covid-19-and-europes-environment.

3. “Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 10 Sept. 2020, www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.

4. Rume, Tanjena, and S.M. Didar-Ul Islam. “Environmental Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic and Potential Strategies of Sustainability.” Heliyon, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 17 Sept. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498239/#:~:text=The%20global%20disruption%20caused%20by,different%20parts%20of%20the%20world.