Sitting down to write this blog post, I wanted to begin by contrasting the end of 2019 with the start of 2020. However, hard as I try, I quite honestly can’t seem to remember what life was like before March this year when COVID-19 dove head-first into our reality and changed - well, literally everything. 

2020 so far feels like the start of a Maragret Atwood novel, or whatever spooky dystopia Rihanna was referring to when she wrote her 2007 smash hit ‘Disturbia’. Unfortunately, 2020’s grand debut into our global calendar has been pretty grim so far (apart from the release of Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album which I truly believe single-handedly saved the sanity of 20-something-year-old pop music lovers worldwide). 

Reality feels a little warped right now - I nearly passed out when I saw a life-sized poster for social distancing on my way to the post office the other day, and I truly never thought I would be the kind of person to glare menacingly at anyone with more than two packs of toilet paper in their shopping trolley. I even flinch when I hear my neighbours cough.

Certainly, the media’s relentless coverage of COVID-19 hasn’t been helping. My social media feeds are jam-packed full of Corona updates and my news apps ping me every two seconds, bringing me tidbits from the latest press conferences - (Scott Morrison, if you’re reading this, “use your common sense” is one of the most complicated directives I have ever received - please give me more to work with, I’m begging you). 

With global attention so acutely concentrated on COVID-19 right now, I can’t help but mourn the loss of climate change coverage. I know that sounds bizarre, but hear me out. While the influx of COVID-19 content is incredibly needed, relevant and helpful, it is taking up ginormous space within the media landscape, and we can’t seem to look away.

This has got me thinking - what does it take for something to capture and sustain our undivided attention the way COVID-19 has? Interestingly, the way we’re responding to the coronavirus actually reveals some pretty significant things about the way we aren’t responding to climate change. Namely, COVID-19 shows us what happens when a global phenomenon breaks down psychological distance, overrides the news cycle and, quite simply, demands that we take notice.

As human beings, we can only ever directly experience our present situation - that is, the further something is from our immediate circumstances, the harder it is for us to understand. When it comes to climate change, this means that huge amounts of people (particularly in Western industrialised nations) find it extremely difficult to comprehend, as its impacts are essentially invisible. 

One of the easiest ways to ignore climate change is simply to say that it is happening to strangers, in far away places, in a future too remote to wrap our heads around. And in fact, adopting this exact thought pattern is one of the biggest psychological barriers currently inhibiting meaningful action on climate change in Australia.

COVID-19, on the other hand, is happening right now, to those we love, in our own backyard. It’s impossible to ignore. As a result, we know that action is an imperative because we can compute a sense of urgency. No such luck with climate change, which we still perceive as abstract, intangible, and slow-moving.

Another key difference between COVID-19 and climate change lies in the media. Maintaining public interest in an issue is vital to developing solutions around it, however, the mass media usually cycles very quickly through stories and competing interests in an effort to keep our short attention spans satisfied. 

This makes it immensely tricky for an environmental issue like climate change to get a firm grasp on our focus, as it is constantly battling other economic and social problems for the spotlight. Just take right now as an example; with coronavirus on the scene, climate change is definitely not dominating the fight for air time. 

So, what can we learn from this? Will climate change ever demand our attention in the way COVID-19 has? Or will we have to wait for the water to lap at our front doors before we start caring about things like sea-level rise? 

I don’t have the answers, but I do have hope. Researchers are currently working on ways to bring the reality of climate change closer to Western audiences. They are suggesting that fostering emotional connections to nature and nurturing community closeness might help. 

And the media hasn’t entirely abandoned environmental topics - in fact, the positive news out of all this is that our forced lifestyle change has decreased carbon emissions, giving mother earth some much-needed room to breathe. If nothing else, COVID-19 has kindly highlighted some challenges, and emerging paths to their solutions. 

While my mind might still be firmly planted in Rihanna’s ‘Disturbia’, my heart finds comfort in the lessons that COVID-19 has taught us about how we ought to respond to a global crisis. When climate change coverage finally returns from its hiatus, I sure as hell hope the world sits up and listens. 

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​[Cover Image by Roman Kraft on Unsplash]