['Is there a doctor on board?' Reducing air travel associated with international medical conferences]

International medical conferences aim to improve health outcomes, but the associated air travel-related carbon emissions are a significant contributor to the environmental impact of medical scientific activities. The COVID-19 pandemic has urged the medical world to shift towards virtual conferences, decreasing associated carbon emissions by 94% to 99%. However, virtual conferences are still not the norm and doctors are returning to business as usual. Various stakeholders need to be mobilized to minimize carbon-intensive flights to conferences. Doctors, (academic) hospitals, conference organizers and universities all hold a responsibility to incorporate every effort to decarbonize and build climate mitigation into their decisions. These efforts include sustainable travel policies, selecting accessible venues, decentralizing host locations, encouraging low carbon alternatives to air travel, increasing virtual attendance and increasing awareness.

CO2 in indoor environments: From environmental and health risk to potential renewable carbon source

In the developed world, individuals spend most of their time indoors. Poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has a wide range of effects on human health. The burden of disease associated with indoor air accounts for millions of premature deaths related to exposure to Indoor Air Pollutants (IAPs). Among them, CO2 is the most common one, and is commonly used as a metric of IAQ. Indoor CO2 concentrations can be significantly higher than outdoors due to human metabolism and activities. Even in presence of ventilation, controlling the CO2 concentration below the Indoor Air Guideline Values (IAGVs) is a challenge, and many indoor environments including schools, offices and transportation exceed the recommended value of 1000 ppmv. This is often accompanied by high concentration of other pollutants, including bio-effluents such as viruses, and the importance of mitigating the transmission of airborne diseases has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the relatively high CO2 concentration of indoor environments presents a thermodynamic advantage for direct air capture (DAC) in comparison to atmospheric CO2 concentration. This review aims to describe the issues associated with poor IAQ, and to demonstrate the potential of indoor CO2 DAC to purify indoor air while generating a renewable carbon stream that can replace conventional carbon sources as a building block for chemical production, contributing to the circular economy.

Scenario analysis on carbon emissions of Hubei Province in 14th five-year plan under epidemic situation

This paper discussed the current hot topics regarding whether Hubei Province can attain the target of carbon emission reduction in the wake of the impacts of novel coronavirus epidemic(COVID-19). To address the issue, analysis was made based on the total energy consumption and structural status of the Province, and the methods of Co integration regression and the Markov chain analysis were used to predict the growths of GDP, energy consumption and carbon emissions in Hubei Province over the coming period of 2020 to 2025. In addition, according to the different impacts of the epidemic on regional economy, three scenarios--the baseline scenario, low-speed scenario and high-speed scenario, were divided, and the carbon emission intensity and carbon emission peak were analyzed, respectively. The analysis concluded that under different scenarios, the total carbon emission of Hubei Province at the end of the 14th Five Year Plan period must be controlled within the range of 46 178.99 to 49 346.39 million tons, and in this way, the cumulative declining rate of carbon emission intensity can reach 19.62%-32.60%;and only through the active action taken by the government, with the scenario of medium to high speed economic development and optimizing the industrial structure can the Province attain the target of reducing carbon emission intensity by 20% in the 14th Five Year Plan period. In conclusion, under any of the above three scenarios, COVID-19 will not negatively affect attaining the target of the peak per capita carbon emission in Hubei Province, and the target is expected to reach prior to the year 2030.

Bhutan's foresighted resilience in the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic: through the Lens of gross national happiness

When COVID-19 first emerged in late-2019 in Wuhan, China, without adequate containment, the virus and the economic shock waves that followed quickly spread across the world, leaving few countries unaffected by the contagion. COVID-19 quickly escalated into an ongoing and widespread global crisis, placing acute pressure on prevailing economic systems, governance structures, development institutions and health systems not experienced since the Spanish flu of 1918. In doing so, it crippled economies and ruptured trajectories of globalization and development, with a myriad of negative impacts as well as unintended positive effects such as reduced carbon emissions. As the pandemic continues to unfold, the responses of individual nation-states and sub-national regions have been both varied and divergent.