Besides the disastrous effects of the pandemic on the economy, work, and social life across the world. Covid-19 has also affected the environment globally both positively and negatively. Restrictions on traveling have left the roads empty. The shutdown of factories, offices, and schools has reduced the noise and greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), related Ozone (O3) formulation, and particulate matter (PM).
This reduction in emissions improved air quality.
Before the pandemic, the CO2 emission was increasing 1% a year with no increase in 2019 but the consumption level of energy has changed during 2020 due to the government policies in response to covid-19. During the great lockdown, the daily emission of CO2 was decreased by 17%.
The precautionary measures taken by the government for preventing the spread of covid-19 has indirectly affected the environment. The great lockdown has restricted the transport and encouraged the staying at home activity that in turn reduced the Carbon dioxide emissions that improved the quality of air and reduced the noise pollution too.
Along with these positive aspects the lockdown has negative footprints too on the environment.
All things are not positive for the environment during the covid-19 crisis. There was an increase in waste, especially unrecyclable waste and the broken recycling process. The local waste levels had increased due to the restrictions on imports because many producers produced large quantities of agriculture and fishery products for the purpose of export. But these remain wasted for decaying because of lockdown that has increased methane (CH4) gas emission. The usage of unrecyclable packaging was increased for the selling of take-away food that mounted the volume of waste.
Although, the covid-19 crisis has improved the quality of air, will it have a long-lasting effect on earth? The answer is ambiguous.
According to BBC writer Maratha “The fall in emissions is not new it happened in 2009 recession too.”
History has revealed that after recovering from the crisis the emissions increased sharply that vanished the temporary fall in emissions.
The overall environmental condition taught some lessons to the world. however, we cannot reduce the level of emissions as low as the level during the crisis, but we can control the increase in the usage of energy level by taking some policy measures such as remote working and less transport usage, shifting towards zero-carbon technology and continuously finding new ways, tools, and techniques to achieve the global environment target of limiting the increase in temperature to less than 2 oC.