For those who have been directly affected by COVID-19 through the loss of loved ones or livelihoods, or even those who find themselves part of a ghastly daily ritual checking the graphs and the statistics, it may be impossible to believe that anything good can come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I would argue that we desperately need some positives amongst all of the bad news for our mental well-being and to help engender hope, so here goes.

From the biodiversity perspective, China’s action to ban the consumption, farming and sale of wild animals looks as though it could become permanent, and if this could be scaled up globally (HIV, Ebola, SARS etc. have come from similar sources in other places) then there could be huge benefits for wildlife. Suddenly, we conservationists are not alone on this; we have public health officials with us, and the economic case is overwhelming. There may also be other benefits for biodiversity, such as increased breeding of species sensitive to human activity, reduced roadkill, less hunting and greatly reduced pressure on fisheries. Time (and research) will tell whether such benefits outweigh the impacts of reduced protection for wildlife in some places.

I wonder, also, if this pandemic might cause policymakers and decision-makers to re-think our relationship with nature and the environment. Those who had forgotten that we are part of nature, and don’t control it, have had a shocking wake up call. It turns out that we don’t own nature after all – and we aren’t at the top of the pyramid. Does this create a conundrum for the Convention on Biological Diversity? Who owns COVID-19 and its Digital Sequence Information? Is ‘sovereignty’ a useful concept in this or any other context to do with nature? Quite clearly, human society, built on an economically driven and self-serving ideology is not as resilient as it needs to be. Will this result in the realisation that we need to work with nature rather than against it? I hope so.

Another positive has been the impacts of lockdown on air pollution, sound pollution and green house gas emissions. The satellite images and data are striking, and anecdotally colleagues and friends who live near BGCI HQ at Kew Gardens are revelling in the silence created by the absence of jumbo jets passing overhead every 30 seconds. Of course these effects are temporary but it is just possible that people who have had a glimpse of a better quality of life, might become converts to the cause, helping to create new impetus for the Paris Agreement. One apparently very tangible example of this already happening was Google’s apology for funding climate change deniers (and naming and shaming them – see https://agreenergoogle.com/). As it turns out, this was a fake posting from Extinction Rebellion (see https://www.protocol.com/fake-google-website-climate-change) but as they are more representative of civil society, we’ll take this as a positive!

Perhaps the biggest positive emerging from this crisis, though, is the realization that we humans are capable of global, collective action. If the stakes are high enough, we can take on these challenges together and, most importantly of all, rapidly abandon business as usual.