If we can change our behaviour to fight this emergency, could we also do it to avert a climate emergency?
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A long time ago, at the beginning of this month, Radio 4 looked at the fallout from the current crisis on politics:
The political fallout from the coronavirus crisis
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Last night it looked at the fallout on the environment:
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The Future for the Environment
How will COVID-19 affect how we think about risk?
If we can change our behaviour to fight this emergency, could we also do it to avert a climate emergency?
Or will we be even less willing to do so, as we’ll be more concerned about putting food on the table?
Will governments also be less interested in tackling climate change when climbing out of a recession is a higher priority?
Will we see more global co-operation to tackle global problems or the opposite: a more nationalist and divided world?
And what about relations between the young and old: will this bring the generations together or push them apart?
To answer all of this and more, Mary Ann Sieghart is be joined by the experimental cognitive psychologist and popular writer Professor Steven Pinker, Christiana Figueres who, as the then Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, helped secure the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge Diane Coyle, and the environmentalist and writer George Monbiot.