Tag: pandemic

Life after COVID: most people don’t want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

Posted on by janet.crompton
Jacob Lund/Shutterstock

We are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?

In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “build back better” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.

Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research, we aimed to find out.

Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation.

We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.

Four possible futures

Back to normal – strong government
“Collective safety”

    • We don’t want any big changes to how the world works.
    • We are happy for the government to keep its powers to keep us safe and get back on economic track.

 

 Back to normal – individual autonomy
“For freedom”

  • We don’t want any big changes to how the world works; our priority is business as usual and safety.
  • We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.
Progressive – strong government
“Fairer future”

  • What we want is for governments to take strong action to deal with economic unfairness and the problem of climate change.
  • We are happy for the government to keep its powers if it protects economic fairness, health and the environment.
 Progressive – individual autonomy
“Grassroots leadership”

  • What we want is for communities, not governments, to work together to build a fair and environmentally friendly world.
  • We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.

People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.

Our findings are consistent with other recent research, which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.

The misperceptions of the majority

This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.

In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.

We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.

This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “pluralistic ignorance”.

This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination, for example.

In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

Two people talking on a bench
We think we know what other people think – but often we’re wrong.
dekazigzag/Shutterstock

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.

To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.The Conversation

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This blog is written by Caboteer Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and Ullrich Ecker, Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Airport towns like Luton and Hounslow are suffering as people fly less often – here’s how to help them

Posted on by janet.crompton
Thousands of aircraft were grounded during the pandemic. Now research is showing people might fly less.
JetKat/Shutterstock

Tens of thousands of aircraft have been grounded for well over a year due to the pandemic. In April 2020 air travel around the world was cut by 94% from April 2019. By June 2021 it was still 60% down on June 2019 thanks to holidays being cancelled, work trips shelved, and long-planned journeys to see family and friends moved to another time.

Never has any global industry collapsed with such speed. In climate terms, this has been a cause for celebration. It has represented a chance for reducing emissions that contribute significantly to climate change and pollute our air.

Some people who live close to an airport may also have welcomed the drop in noise. But many others will be worrying about the effect the long-term reduction in air travel may have on their community’s economy.

Will the industry bounce back?

Industrial bodies estimate that it might take five years for passenger demand to return to pre-pandemic levels. That’s a longer expected recovery than any other mode of transport. Globally, an estimated 46 million jobs have been deemed at risk. This isn’t just pilots or cabin crew; it’s also those who screen your baggage or make your lunch.

But will the air industry even bounce back in five years? Research our team conducted in early 2021 in Bristol, an English city with an airport and a century-old aviation industry, found that close to 60% of those surveyed expect to fly less in the future. Many of our respondents gave climate change and the pandemic as equally important reasons. Other polling has shown that many elsewhere remain wary of flying in the future too.

Businesses may also operate differently. Polling has found that four in ten business travellers are likely to fly less in the future. Business-class seats are an important part of airline income – on some flights corporate travel can represent 75% of revenue.

Setting aside ideas about electric planes for now, it seems obvious that we will need to fly less to move to a zero-carbon economy. Two-thirds of people want a post-pandemic economic recovery to prioritise climate change. This means fewer planes, and fewer jobs for crew and baggage handlers and so on.

Rebuilding communities

The decline of older industries such as mining, textiles or pottery resulted in high unemployment in towns which were massively dependent on one of them. We are all familiar with how the closure of a local pit or car plant caused the decline of once vibrant towns, leaving a generation to struggle with unemployment and the need to retrain.

Steel mills were nestled deep in the fabric of nearby communities. Their closure removed the pivot around which lives, work and leisure were based. So with the pandemic, whole communities are at risk of a similar economic decline.

In summer 2020 the rate of those jobless (be it unemployed or on furlough) was higher in areas near UK airports. In Hounslow (near London Heathrow) this was 40% of the population – with an estimated £1 billion loss to the borough’s economy. At Gatwick airport in 2020, there were job losses for 40% of its workforce, many of whom live in nearby towns such as Crawley.

Hounslow in west London
Towns like Hounslow are highly dependent on the nearby airport for employment.
BasPhoto/Shutterstock

Many towns and communities are economically dependent on nearby airports. Luton Airport is estimated to have sustained over 27,000 jobs (directly and indirectly) and is a major employer in the region. The decline of the sector has broader effects on subsidiary industries too, such as taxis, maintenance, catering and hotels.

So what is to be done? The Green Jobs Taskforce, an industry and government initiative set up in 2020 to look at future employment, has called on the UK government to invest in jobs related to wind turbines, electric trains and replacing gas boilers.

Any version of a green new deal is necessarily a job-heavy economy, with a great deal of work needed to alter the infrastructure that powers our current lifestyle. The UK government’s Ten Point Plan for Green Industrial Revolution pledges 250,000 green jobs. The political question here is whether politicians and policymakers will be brave enough to resist a bounce back for aviation and invest in a longer term future for these airport towns, to avoid them suffering a decade of decline.

This is likely to see aviation jobs lost, and will require very targeted support for cities or regions reliant on airport employment. To build back better, a green recovery must seek to support these communities and provide them with new opportunities and livelihoods.The Conversation

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute for the Environment members Dr Ed Atkins, Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol and Professor Martin Parker, Professor of Organisation Studies, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Martin Parker
Ed Atkins

Global trading: the good, the bad and the essential

Posted on by janet.crompton

In our last post, we began our journey considering food supply chains in times of pandemic and we touched upon their history. Here, we further consider some of the flaws in our globalised food systems and the historical trading patterns upon which they are based, which have remained largely unquestioned for centuries. Food is essential but the way consumer demands have shaped our food systems through overproduction and consumption is not.

We find ourselves dependent on socially unequitable and environmentally degrading global supply chains. Not all supply chains are created equal and there is no denying that in this crisis we need to pull together to meet ventilator demand and that staying global could be vital. Yet when it comes to food supply chains we need to think differently. How did we get to system where a banana costs 15p? And why do those who labour the most receive the least?

Source: Fairtrade Foundation 2014; Banana Link 2015

The figure below shows how small-scale farmers and workers have been squeezed within food value chains in the last 24 years

Source: Oxfam Ripe for Change report, 2018 p. 18
Despite this clear inequality, we often justify these practices and prices to ourselves by considering them outside their context, disregarding their very real costs. Economically, these inequalities are justified by ‘free trade’. Socially, we like to think that our consumption provides jobs. As Unilever describes it, by purchasing their products, they ‘feed the farmers that feed us’. We are creating jobs, but what do we say to the 8 year olds that are picking our cocoa? Environmentally, our consumption patterns in the global North are changing the landscape for food producers globally. For instance, coffee growers are finding it increasingly difficult to grow their crops as global temperatures fluctuate. Those who can, move to find the ‘right’ conditions, those who cannot experience the first wave of climate apartheid and poverty.

Poverty is both a macro-economic and a micro-economic problem. Poverty in ‘developing’ countries cannot be understood without reference to the global political economy that is controlled by ‘developed’ countries. The exploitative relationship between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries is a major driver of poverty and hazard for the people of the ‘developing’ countries. The global supply chains of multinational companies are often the mechanisms through which this exploitation is organised. Our quests for new foods and superfoods, such as quinoa, has priced these developing nations out of their own staples.

Surely though, it must be better for local food producers in the UK? But increasingly, only large-scale producers are able to compete. And despite Brexit, and the push for local people doing local jobs, we are lacking essential food workers. This pandemic has highlighted our shortage of ‘local’ people to do manual jobs and the likelihood is we will once again have to import workers to do this essential work – we are even having to turn to volunteers for this essential work. And this isn’t unique to the UK. The French government, for example, has officially called upon unemployed people to join the “army of agriculture” to feed the nation.

UK farmers are no strangers to exploitation either

Now, more than ever, is the time to reflect on our consumption patterns and think about what we are eating. We need to consider the real cost of food, and as food poverty spreads, we call for more inclusionary food systems for all, which we believe will help us to avoid future pandemics.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Lucy McCarthy and Lee Matthews and Anne Touboulic from the University of Nottingham Future Food Beacon. This blog post first appeared on the University of Nottingham Future Food Beacon blog. View the original blog.

Dr Lucy McCarthy

 

 

Global food supply chains in times of pandemic

Posted on by janet.crompton

The public health crisis unfolding before us is unprecedented, unimaginable and catastrophic. It will profoundly impact our values and lifestyles as it exposes the implications of national austerity measures on public services and the precariousness of our globalised production and consumption systems. Food supply chains are no exception. Public awareness of the interconnectedness our food supply chains has soared in recent weeks; despite being largely disregarded throughout Brexit debates. It is imperative we interrogate the global connections that our food supply chains rely upon and create, especially as the current global pandemic is but one of the threats to humanity as we know it.

The “globalisation” of food is not a new phenomenon and our global food supply chains have their roots in historical trading patterns. These trading patterns and our organisation of global food chains can be understood from the perspective of traditional (and flawed) economic models that underpin capitalism and are a product of colonial history.

Whilst this legacy must be challenged, one must recognise that the mass availability of food and spread of food culture emerged from this global food system and the advent of the supermarket model in the 20th Century. In fact, we take for granted that we can consume anything, anytime and cheaply. The average consumer has little to no sense of seasonality or the real value of food. The socio-environmental costs – but also the economic ones to the least powerful players (e.g. growers/small-scale producers) – are seldom considered as our choices and lifestyles seem resolute.

Yet as COVID-19 spreads and supermarket shelves are left empty, the fragility and unsustainability of global food chains is exposed. We depend on complex and extended networks to provide goods to our table. As a result of the pandemic, one can expect global freight to decrease, especially for less essential goods, leading to the slow disappearance of tropical or out-of-season fruits on UK shelves but also to impact the import of key ingredients for our manufactured food products (for instance stock cubes and soups). We must question how to transform our food system into a resilient and equitable one. Promoting local and seasonal as the new normal seems like a step in the right direction.

We must acknowledge the unsustainability of our current model as it promotes the exploitation of natural resources and people to satisfy the insatiable consumers in the global North. Some argue this is a key reason for the outbreak, as our production and consumption systems infringe on nature and other species’ natural habitats. There is increasing recognition that human health cannot be understood independently of the health of the ecosystems, this relationship is being studied in a field of science called ‘Planetary Health’. The destruction of ecosystems is leading to an increase of human exposure to previously unknown pathogens. This is being wrought through land-system change, driven by the expansion of global food systems, and the consumption of bushmeat by millions of the world’s poor who are locked out of these food systems.

Will Covid-19 bring changes to our global food systems? This seems inevitable. But only if we become more informed about how supply chains work, the distribution of power within the system, and the alternative models for change.

To understand more about supply chains, we have pulled together the following resources:

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Lucy McCarthy and Lee Matthews and Anne Touboulic from the University of Nottingham Future Food Beacon. This blog post first appeared on the University of Nottingham Future Food Beacon blog. View the original blog.

Coronavirus: flying in fruit pickers from countries in lockdown is dangerous for everyone

Posted on by janet.crompton
Affordable and plentiful fruit and veg will come at the price of violating the strict national lockdowns in Bulgaria and Romania. epic_images/Shutterstock

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, major agricultural companies and charities have chartered flights to urgently bring in tens of thousands of Bulgarian and Romanian agricultural workers. Flights have headed to places like Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf in Germany, along with Essex and the Midlands in the UK.

This comes after farmers in both countries warned there is a real risk that thousands of tons of produce might be left to rot – further affecting food supply chains – if vacancies for agricultural workers go unfilled.

The excessive demand for food during lockdown has meant that farm labourers are classed as key workers, which is why they are being flown to the UK and other Western European countries.

In the UK, up to 90,000 temporary positions need to be filled within weeks. A national campaign has been launched appealing to students and those who have lost their jobs in bars, cafes and shops to help with the harvest. But so far the scheme only has around 10,000 applicants with even fewer having accepted work contracts due to low pay and demanding terms. This is nowhere near enough to ensure the sustainability of food supply chains.

That means that affordable and plentiful fruit and veg in UK supermarkets will come at the price of violating the strict national lockdowns in Bulgaria and Romania.

From ‘go back’ to ‘come back’

As of last year, nearly 98% of fruit pickers in the UK were foreign nationals. The vast majority come from Bulgaria and Romania. Both countries went into full lockdowns earlier in March, banning international travel. Chartering flights when borders are closed and planes grounded is effectively undermining the efforts of the Bulgarian and Romanian governments to manage the current health crisis.

The European Commission has banned non-essential travel while speeding up the mobility of key workers – a recognition of Western European dependency on Eastern European labour. The Bulgarian and Romanian governments have also been lax and have not insisted that Western European employers provide comprehensive health insurance for agricultural workers.

Farmers have said that without the workforce, crops may be left in the ground to rot and be wasted. Ververidis Vasilis/Shutterstock

There were promises of social distancing on planes and hand sanitiser was to be handed out. But photos of overcrowded airport lounges have demonstrated a complete disregard of health and safety. Workers will also not be paid for the mandatory 14 day quarantine period upon arrival.

Key workers to key spreaders

The reason why the lockdowns in Bulgaria and Romania are particularly strict is because both countries have fast-growing ageing populations.

The share of the population above the age of 65 between 2008 and 2018 is 2.8% for Romania and 3.2% for Bulgaria – both higher than the EU average of 2.6%. Many families also live in multi-generational households, which could put older family members at risk when the younger members return back home.

The exodus of doctors, nurses and care workers from Bulgaria and Romania also means access to medical care in smaller towns and rural areas – where most of these workers come from – will be all but impossible.

If returning migrant workers retrigger the pandemic, the consequences for both countries will be disastrous.

Economic dependency

But herein lies another part of the problem, because the national economies of both countries are heavily dependent on remittances – money sent back home from migrant workers.

For most of these people, seasonal work abroad is the only source of income and there is no safety net. They either stay home unemployed, or risk their (and their families’) health by boarding flights to the UK or Germany.

The financial incentive may be great. But so too are the public health risks. A 57-year old Romanian seasonal worker has already died from COVID-19 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany – begging the question of how many more will follow.

Food for thought

For the most part, the British public has long been disassociated from the realities of low-paid manual labour and has grown accustomed to fresh and inexpensive products produced by a disposable army of migrant workers.

And despite Brexit anxieties about EU migrants stealing British jobs, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded the public that such labour is essential and won’t be automated anytime soon.

Ultimately though, it shouldn’t be down to migrant workers to fix supply chains during a pandemic – especially when evidence indicates that international mobility is contributing to the spread of the virus. Chartering flights during travel bans and national lockdowns is a dangerous reminder of how exploitative labour overrides political and public health responsibility.

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This blog is written by Dr Denny Pencheva, Senior Teaching Associate, Migration Studies and Politics, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dr Denny Pencheva

Coronavirus conspiracy theories are dangerous – here’s how to stop them spreading

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

Conspiracy theories increase the likelihood that people won’t follow expert advice. Shutterstock

The number of coronavirus infections and deaths continues to rise at an alarming rate, reminding us that this crisis is far from over. In response, the global scientific community has thrown itself at the problem and research is unfolding at an unprecedented rate.

The new virus was identified, along with its natural origins, and tests for it were rapidly developed. Labs across the world are racing to develop a vaccine, which is estimated to be still around 12 to 18 months away.

At the same time, the pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of nonsense, disinformation, half-truths and conspiracy theories that have spread virally through social networks. This damages society in a variety of ways. For example, the myth that COVID-19 is less dangerous than the seasonal flu was deployed by US president Donald Trump as justification for delaying mitigation policies.

The recent downgrading of COVID-19 death projections, which reveal the success of social-distancing policies, has been falsely used to justify premature relaxing of social distancing measures. This is the logical equivalent of throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because it’s kept you dry until then.

The new conspiracy theory that blames COVID-19 on the 5G broadband system is one of the most bizarre pieces of misinformation. There are several strains of this theory, ranging from the claims that 5G alters people’s immune systems to the idea that 5G changes people’s DNA, making them more susceptible to infection. Then there’s the idea that secret messages about 5G and coronavirus were hidden in the design of the new £20 note in the UK. In reality, 5G relates to viruses and bank notes as much as the tooth fairy relates to zoology – not at all.

The 5G conspiracy theory originated in early March when an American physician, Thomas Cowan, proposed it in a YouTube video (which has since been taken down by YouTube according to their new policy). Some people have taken this conspiracy theory so seriously that it led to people setting 5G towers in the UK on fire and threatening broadband engineers.

The conspiracy theory has begun to penetrate mainstream society. Among other celebrities, UK TV personality Eamonn Holmes and US actor Woody Harrelson have given fuel to the idea.

Inoculating against conspiracy theories

As we document in our recent Conspiracy Theory Handbook, there is a great deal of scientific research into why people might be susceptible to conspiracy theories. When people suffer loss of control or feel threatened, it makes them more vulnerable to believing conspiracies. Unfortunately, this means that pandemics have always been breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, from antisemitic hysteria during the Black Death to today’s 5G craze.

An effective strategy for preventing conspiracy theories from spreading through social networks is, appropriately enough, inoculation. As we document in the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, if we inoculate the public by pre-emptively warning them of misleading misinformation, they develop resilience and are less likely to be negatively influenced. Inoculating messages can take several forms. As well as giving people the right facts, inoculation can also be logic-based and source-based.

Questioning the sources

The source-based approach focuses on analysing the people who push the conspiracy theory and the cultural infrastructure from which they emerged.

For example, the 5G theory began with Thomas Cowan, a physician whose medical licence is on a five-year probation. He is currently prohibited from providing cancer treatment to patients and supervising physician assistants and advanced practice nurses. So we can question his credentials.

His 5G video was from a talk he presented at a pseudo-scientific conference featuring a who’s who of science deniers. One of the headliners was Andrew Wakefield, a debarred former physician and seminal figure in the anti-vaccination movement who promotes highly damaging misinformation about vaccination based on data that he is known to have falsified.

Another attendee of this meeting was the president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, an organisation famous for bestowing awards onto fossil-fuel funded climate deniers and for giving a platform to a speaker who denied the link between HIV and AIDS, claiming that the link was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”

For the public to be protected against the 5G conspiracy theory, it is important to understand its emergence from the same infrastructure that also supports AIDS denial, anti-vaccination conspiracies and climate denial.

It is therefore unsurprising that the rhetorical techniques that are deployed against the seriousness of climate change are similar to those used to mismanage the COVID-19 crisis.

Yale Climate Connections, Author provided

 

Questioning the logic

Another way to neutralise conspiracy theories is through logic-based inoculation. This involves explaining the rhetorical techniques and tell-tale traits to be found in misinformation, so that people can flag it before it has a chance to mislead them. In the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, we document seven traits of conspiratorial thinking. Spotting these can help people identify a baseless theory.

Conspiracy Theory Handbook, Author provided

One trait that is particularly salient in the 5G conspiracy theory is re-interpreting randomness. With this thought pattern, random events are re-interpreted as being causally connected and woven into a broader, interconnected pattern.

For example, the introduction of 5G in 2019 coincided with the origin of COVID-19 and hence is interpreted to be causally related. But by that logic, other factors that were introduced in 2019 – say, the global phenomenon of Baby Yoda – could also be interpreted as a possible cause of COVID-19.

Correlation does not equal causation. The 5G conspiracy theory is also immune to evidence, despite having been debunked extensively. To illustrate, some of the countries worst affected by the pandemic (such as Iran) do not have any 5G technology.

Of course, 5G has nothing to do with a virus. In the US, T-Mobile’s low-band 5G data is transmitted using old UHF TV channels. UHF TV did not cause coronavirus and neither does 5G.

John Cook, Author provided

 

The crucial role of social media platforms

Social media platforms contribute to the problem of misinformation by providing the means for it to quickly and freely disseminate to the general public. Given that 330,000 lives were lost in relation to AIDS in South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, when denying the disease’s link to HIV was official state policy. Given that people in the UK are now vandalizing potentially life-saving communication infrastructure, social media companies should not aid and abet the life-threatening disinformation that is spewed by a nexus of science deniers and conspiracy theorists.

To their credit, these firms are making an effort to be part of the solution to the problem of misinformation. For example, YouTube has announced that it will take down any video that espouses the 5G conspiracy theory. This is a move in the right direction.

There is considerable room for improvement, however. A recent test by the non-profit Disinfo.eu laboratory found much conspiratorial content on various social media platforms, and we were able to find hundreds of YouTube videos promulgating the 5G nonsense with a few keystrokes.

Much remains to be done.The Conversation

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and John Cook, Research Assistant Professor, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky
Dr John Cook
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