By Cassandra West

A few weeks after much of the world locked down to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the environmental picture looked pretty rosy.

Automobile traffic plummeted, causing a big drop in emissions, and images from NASA showed a dramatic drop in air pollution.

The Royal Observatory of Belgium detected lower anthropogenic noise, or sounds produced by humans.

Animals returned to their natural habitats.

For the first time in decades, people in India could see the Himalayas. And with reduced human activity, beaches became cleaner and the surrounding waters clearer.

With all the other hardships that the pandemic created for people, there seemed to be hope for the planet. Cities were exploring ways to make more space for people and less room for automobiles. A March 18 Data for Progress survey of likely voters showed that 74 percent supported public investment in renewable energy.

For environmentalists everywhere, this was good news. Sadly, it was too good to last.

It didn’t take long before we started noticing surgical masks and plastic gloves littering the ground. The use of plastic packaging began to tick up. And think about how much more water was flowing down the drain from all of the increased handwashing.

Marketplace reported that “climate change initiatives could be another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The audio story went on to say that experts are warning that without concerted efforts, the coronavirus could “lead to reduced investment in environmental initiatives, as corporations and governments look to close the gaping holes left in budgets by falling profits and revenues.”

Furthermore, the political consultancy firm, Eurasia group, predicted that “coronavirus will shift global attention and resources away from addressing climate change, putting the issue on the backburner,” according to the “Top Risk Report.”

For example, facing a budget squeeze related to the pandemic, New York City suspended its curbside compost and food waste collection program through June 2021. Going forward, the city’s food and yard waste now must be thrown out with regular trash.

Rajat Panwar, associate professor of sustainable business management at Appalachian State University, expects waste management spending to increase, according to Marketplace. As part of efforts to sanitize work environments, companies are generating more waste from disposable wipes and gloves and single-use plastic bags.

“Covid waste”— gloves, masks and bottles of hand sanitizer, mixed in with the usual litter of disposable cups and aluminum cans— is now showing up on Mediterranean shorelines and littering the seabed, according to a report by The Guardian.

Satellite data released by the Brazilian Space Agency’s deforestation monitoring system showed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rising more than 50 percent in the first three months of 2020 compared to the same three-month period last year, ABC News reports. Some of the most pristine sections of the rainforest in the world are within the indigenous reserves in Brazil. Since the outbreak started, however, the South American country’s environmental agency has scaled back more enforcement measures, leaving the rainforest even more vulnerable to environmental threats.

As millions stayed home and drove less, the price of oil fell during the pandemic, making it cheaper for companies to buy virgin plastic bottles rather than recycled ones. At the same time that many recycling facilities shut down to protect their workers, what little was recycled before was no longer getting recycled at all, Wired magazine reports. All the while, people were stocking up on soap and hand sanitizer, and Amazon was hiring thousands of extra workers to keep up demand, packing individually wrapped products into boxes.

Our environmentally unfriendly behavior continues. Restaurants that pivoted to takeout are sending customers home with plastic-sheathed containers that will go to landfills. “Disposability is going like crazy,” Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of the recycling company TerraCycle, told WIRED. “And during COVID, we saw that the recycling equation that was bad anyway and trending down is even worse.”

Now comes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraging people to drive alone — reversing what environmental advocates have urged people to do for years, NPR reported on June 16. “The new guidelines raised concerns over what could be unbearable traffic congestion and a surge in carbon emissions if people turn to cars in order to avoid exposure to the virus,” CNBC reports.

And on top of all of this, the pandemic is keeping scientists who collect and study data from actually getting out into the world—because many are stuck at home, too. They can’t collect data on how the oceans are warming and acidifying, nor monitor the effects of climate change on wildlife, nor study how permafrost is thawing in the Arctic.

At a time when everything feels so fragile, this is all so disappointing. The COVID-19 crisis has shown that our commitment to fighting climate change is tenuous. These two global events, however, should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.

In fact, Harvard’s H.T. Chan School of Public Health, in a Q&A on the coronavirus and climate change, asserts: “Climate change has already made conditions more favorable to the spread of some infectious diseases, including Lyme disease, waterborne diseases … Future risks are not easy to foretell, but climate change hits hard on several fronts that matter to when and where pathogens appear, including temperature and rainfall patterns. To help limit the risk of infectious diseases, we should do all we can to vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.”

It's incumbent on all of us to remain mindful of the climate emergency and continue to do all we can to lessen our carbon footprint. Even during the time of a pandemic.