Abstract
This chapter outlines the essentials of COVID-19 and its relation to environmental mitigation. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the ranking concern of climate change distress, and it is ranking as the first global priority to be adequately tackled. However, the pandemic demonstrates with economic, social, and cultural constraints. Still, climate change and environmental pollution have been ignored as the utmost precaution while their impact is more severe in the long run. This chapter evaluates available opportunities for environmental sustainability in the pandemic era. At the same time, the most significant aspect of solid waste, especially clinical waste, is critical for limiting pandemics and preventing future consequences of improper waste management. Sustainable production relies on criteria that ensure affordability, accessibility, use efficiency, safety, disparity, and other factors of production, supply, distribution, and consumption that are efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly.
TopIntroduction
In January 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) was announced Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2 virus), a pandemic affecting the respiratory tract, which was first reported in Wuhan city in China (Zhu et al., 2020). Currently, COVID-19 poses a threat to the human race, similar to how environmental changes threaten the extinction of all living organisms. Because of continued environmental changes driven by human activities and natural ecological processes that bring about risk in COVID-19 infection, evidence-based research should be cultivated to look at the global relationship between the two. COVID-19 is caused by a novel coronavirus previously in animals whose occurrence and progression worldwide have been driven by human activities.
To fight the spreading coronavirus, governments worldwide imposed lockdown measures and curfews on their citizens. This influenced a short-term positive shift in sustaining clean environment (El Keshky et al., 2020). For example, states have adopted a lockdown policy to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, causing a reduction in economic activities and a fall in transport industrial emissions, improving air quality (Geneva Environment Network, 2022). Prior research have indicated that persons constantly exposed to increased air pollution are severely affected by infections of the respiratory tract in comparison to those breathing clean air. Such persons usually require greater medical attention and support when infected with coronavirus since their health is already compromised. Regions worldwide experiencing warmer weather are more likely to curtail COVID-19 transmission than regions experiencing cold weather.
The lack of proper waste management has created ideal conditions for the spread of zoonotic infections like coronavirus. During pandemic health emergencies, weak healthcare waste management systems will cost lives, putting healthcare workers and patients at significant risk of infection invasion. Clinical and other wastes generated from medical care are preferably disposed of by burying in a sanitary landfill or waste-burning to produce usable energy (Singh et al., 2020). Evaluating the impact of COVID-19 leads to a contradictory outlook mitigating atmospheric pollutions and increasing organic and nonorganic waste generation that consequences in social, technical, technological, political, and environmental concerns in communities. This phenomenon has caused a significant change in economic circulation balance and climate change mitigation with ignorable impact. Its physiological and cultural impacts are the turning point that could change habits and influence social relations with unknown timelines to overcome this pandemic. Infectious diseases are prone to happen through human interactions and from animals to humans. Managing COVID-19 waste from hospitals, healthcare facilities and individuals require maximizing the use of available waste solution circumventing each possible prolonged influence against the earth. Responding to COVID-19 emergency has had countries producing more waste volume than usual, such as personal protective equipment, masks, gloves, testing kits, empty pharmaceutical products and other wastes that could be infected with the virus. Countries will require more diverse systems and current waste solution technologies to deal with massive surge waste for waste collection and management. Global participation in segregation, timely collection, and effective coronavirus waste disposal are essential elements of appropriate handling of healthcare waste. Environmental decline due to human activity is one of the factors blamed for the emergence of zoonoses. Continued deforestation has certainly escalated global pandemics (Hub, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Human Development Index (HDI): Measures the average achievement in the three primary aspects of human development; knowledge, longevity, and improved living standards. Life expectancy defines longevity, enrollment in schools, and adult literacy provides awareness, and the GDP per capita defines the living standard. The UN development program published it.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP): Gives the total value of goods and services produced in a specific time frame, usually a year. It is a popular indicator in the economic sphere but does not apply in the social sphere.
Disaster: Is an unexpected event whose occurrence results in extensive damage, including properties, the environment, animals, and humans inhabiting the affected region. Since disasters occur unexpectedly, there is a need to understand and determine strategies to minimize the effects caused by such disasters.
Sustainability Pillars: Have counted the parameters to be analyzed to balance the proposed system or solution in accordance with resiliency and sustainability pillars within these criteria: technical sustainability, economic sustainability, institutional sustainability, environmental sustainability, social sustainability, etc. (Danish et al., 2019a).
Hazard: Is the potential for a sudden event to occur and whose occurrence can lead to unforeseen consequences and emergencies.
Ecological Footprint (EF): Is the area of productive land needed to maintain its current consumption ratio while using the prevailing technology to absorb wastes and calculated for a specific population.
Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI): Measures overall progress towards environmental sustainability for 142 countries measured by the World Economic Forum. It provides a more analytical approach to environmental decision-making and allows comparison of the progress among the nations.
Mitigation: Is measures taken before a disaster happens to neutralize or decrease its impact on society or the environment.
Pandemic: Is a disease outbreak that spreads across countries or continents that affects more people and takes more lives than an epidemic (Robinson, 2020).
Direct Material Consumption (DMC): Measures the total sum of the domestic extraction flows, including imported but excludes exported.
Sustainability in Terms of Energy and Environment: Defines developing affordable and sustainable protocols for various applications of clean and green energy aligned with environmental requirements with minimum greenhouse gas emission over time with contemplating some indicators such as deployment diversity, policy developments, technology costs, and investment in renewable energy (Danish et al., 2016).
Living Planet Index (LPI): Assesses the overall global state of the ecosystem using national and international data on the impact of human activities on the environment.
Dashboard of Sustainability (DS): Is software developed by the European Union's Joint Research Centre at Ispra and represents the complicated relationship between environmental, economic, and social issues. Moreover, it provides information in a way palatable to decision-makers and the general public.
Well-Being Index (WI): Is called stress index, combines two types of indicators then combines them. The first type has thirty-six pointers for health, population, wealth, freedom, peace, crime, equity, communication, and education. The other type has fifty-one land, water, air, and energy.
Risk: Is the probability, depending on how high or low a hazard will cause harm. Risk is determined by vulnerable conditions associated with physical surroundings, social setup, environmental factors, or economic factors.
Salience, Credibility, and Legitimacy of GDP and HDI: Salience means that the indicators are useful, applicable, and attractive to the user. Credibility means that the pointers are valid and make scientific sense. Finally, legitimacy touches pointers' perception from the perspectives of users, stakeholders, businesses, trade unions, and environmental non-governmental organizations.