Large-scale decrease in the social salience of climate change during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are concerns that climate change attention is waning as competing global threats intensify. To investigate this possibility, we analyzed all link shares and reshares on Meta's Facebook platform (e.g., shares and reshares of news articles) in the United States from August 2019 to December 2020 (containing billions of aggregated and de-identified shares and reshares). We then identified all link shares and reshares on "climate change" and "global warming" from this repository to develop a social media salience index-the Climate SMSI score-and found an 80% decrease in climate change content sharing and resharing as COVID-19 spread during the spring of 2020. Climate change salience then briefly rebounded in the autumn of 2020 during a period of record-setting wildfires and droughts in the United States before returning to low content sharing and resharing levels. This fluctuating pattern suggests new climate communication strategies-focused on "systemic sustainability"-are necessary in an age of competing global crises.

Resilience of countries to COVID-19 correlated with trust.

We characterized > 150 countries' resilience to COVID-19 as the nationwide decay rate of daily cases or deaths from peak levels. Resilience to COVID-19 varies by a factor of ~ 40 between countries for cases/capita and ~ 25 for deaths/capita. Trust within society is positively correlated with country-level resilience to COVID-19, as is the adaptive increase in stringency of government interventions when epidemic waves occur. By contrast, countries where governments maintain greater background stringency tend to have lower trust within society and tend to be less resilient. All countries where > 40% agree "most people can be trusted" achieve a near complete reduction of new cases and deaths, but so do several less-trusting societies. As the pandemic progressed, resilience tended to decline, as adaptive increases in stringency also declined. These results add to evidence that trust can improve resilience to epidemics and other unexpected disruptions, of which COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last.

Historical effects of shocks on inequality: the great leveler revisited

Inequality of wealth and its associated power has varied greatly over human history. It is often thought that the main levelers of inequality were natural disasters such as epidemics or earthquakes, and social turmoil such as wars and revolutions. Here we critically review evidence of the effects of such events on inequality from medieval times till the present. We show that in spite of the marked differences in character and direct impact of the shocks we consider, most historical disasters were rather followed by a widening of wealth gaps. This can be understood from the wealth distribution and institutional outlay of these societies at the moment of the shock, which to a large extent shaped both the impact and the institutional measures chosen in response to the crisis. As most societies were characterized by economic and political skewness, the result mostly was a further widening of disparities. Over the centuries, exceptions to this rule have occurred in situations where the ordinary people had strong leverage in shaping the response to the crisis through organizations such as guilds, fraternities, trade unions, cooperatives, and political movements. Our results provide empirical support for the view that in nations where such leverage of ordinary people is weak, the responses to novel crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic may boost inequality.

Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality-of rising system-wide turbulence-calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.