BOUNCE BACK TIME FOR NATURE

May 03, 2020

Post By: Ganesh C L

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With pandemic crisis creating chaos all over the world, natures on a bounce back. News all around is reporting about the animals having a peacetime and water getting crystal clear making the aquatic animals enjoy their new freedom as humans retreat from the oceans. The reason that every nation has gone into a strict lockdown has made its economic activities topple down. This pretty much has impacted on the carbon emission, NO₂ and the greenhouse gases.So, we can say that we have a greener environment.

How was it in the previous pandemic?

When the previous pandemic (Swine flu-2009) hit, I was just a kid who went to a primary school. I didn't have any idea of what it was. Now, all the information I could hold about it is from the internet.

Talking about the previous pandemic, not much of a change was observed from the data I got from the internet. As it wasn’t this severe, in the sense as to how the lockdowns have been implemented. There wasn’t much of an impact on the environment by it. I looked up for a crisis where an economic activity level was as low as the present crisis. I found that the financial crisis of 2007 had similarities. Hence, I looked at the emission data on the internet and found some satellite images from GIOVANNI website of NASA. From these, we can even find out the country which had high emissions back then and how they were hit by the crisis. But I won't be analyzing much as it doesn't concern this blog.

Let's first compare the carbon emissions during the financial crisis. As we can see, there has been a worldwide decrease in carbon emissions. Most of the south-east Asian countries, Europe and the USA which had a higher level of emissions had come down.

Then going for the emission of one of the main greenhouse gases which is methane. The same trend was observed.

Coming to the nitrogen dioxide, western parts of the Europe and Eastern part of the china had high emissions during the previous economic crisis. They had come severely down.

How it’s happening now…

NITROGEN DIOXIDE

CARBON MONOXIDE

METHANE

SULPHUR DIOXIDE

Looking at the emission record in the present Covid-19 crisis, I again took the satellite images from GIOVANNI of NASA which is an open-source database for emission records for data analysis. When I compared out the emission records of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane and Carbon monoxide I came to know that majority of the leading emission sites regions like Central-west part of Russia, Central-east part of China, some parts of India, most of Europe have come down in a very high decreasing rate due to the lockdown which was positively imposed by their respective governments. Observing the satellite images, USA hasn't changed much in terms of emissions.

According to an article in Carbon Brief, China's carbon emissions have fallen by 25%. Major sources of its carbon emissions were the thermal power plants. The fall in its economic activities has led to these downfalls.

But here are some of the questions…

In my opinion, these changes are positively impacting on the earth's atmosphere too. Global warming rate has for sure comedown.

Will these affect the organisms on earth?

Organisms have evolved to sustain the changes in the atmosphere for a long time. Will they be able to adapt the sudden changes in the atmospheric composition?

Are there any backdrops in these atmosphere bounce backs?

Also, in my opinion, this will lead to change in the climate which may result in a change in rainfall, snowfall and other weather conditions. They may have worst cases too. If there is high rainfall, studies are saying that these may induce a higher rate of spreading of the virus.