Restrictions to reduce human interaction have helped to avoid greater suffering and death from the COVID-19 pandemic, but have also created socioeconomic hardship. This disruption is unprecedented in the modern era of global observing networks, pervasive sensing and large-scale tracking of human mobility and behaviour, creating a unique test bed for understanding the Earth System. In this Perspective, we hypothesize the immediate and long-term Earth System responses to COVID-19 along two multidisciplinary cascades: energy, emissions, climate and air quality; and poverty, globalization, food and biodiversity. While short-term impacts are dominated by direct effects arising from reduced human activity, longer-lasting impacts are likely to result from cascading effects of the economic recession on global poverty, green investment and human behaviour. These impacts offer the opportunity for novel insight, particularly with the careful deployment of targeted data collection, coordinated model experiments and solution-oriented randomized controlled trials, during and after the pandemic.

COVID-19 is disrupting lives and livelihoods around the world. The most important consequences are the public health crisis and associated economic and humanitarian disasters, which are having historic impacts on human well-being. In addition, after more than four months of widespread sheltering and other restrictions, it is clear that the scale and persistence of socioeconomic disruption represent an unprecedented modification of human interactions with the Earth System, the impacts of which will be long-lasting, widespread and varying across space and time

In this Perspective, we examine the impacts of COVID-19-related social disruption on two multidisciplinary pathways: energy, emissions, climate and air quality; and poverty, globalization, food and biodiversity. We first consider hypotheses about how the COVID-19 disruption could influence the Earth System along these pathways and then explore the potential for rapid advances in understanding if we are able to carefully observe, test and characterize Earth System processes during and after the COVID-19 event.

By amplifying underlying inequities in the distribution of resources, the socioeconomic disruption caused by the response to COVID-19 will almost certainly have negative long-term impacts on human health and well-being. In particular, the economic shock is likely to increase the extent and severity of global poverty50, both from direct impacts on health, employment and incomes and through disruptions of supply chains and global trade51. The severe impacts on poverty rates and food security that are already emerging50 are indicative of these disruptions and are a sign of how tightly many of the world’s poorest households are now interwoven into the global economy. The unwinding of these relationships in the wake of restrictions on human mobility and associated economic shocks will provide insight into the role of economic integration in supporting livelihoods around the world. A severe and prolonged deepening of global poverty is also likely to reduce available resources for climate mitigation and adaptation, increasing climate risks and exacerbating climate-related inequities.

The global agriculture sector is a key sentinel for the response of poverty to the pandemic. Primary near-term questions centre around how food security and agriculture-dependent incomes might be affected by unprecedented shocks to local labour supply and global supply chains. A first-order impact has been the income shock associated with widespread sheltering8. Loss of wages in both low-income and high-income countries with limited social safety-nets will drive food insecurity and poverty50.

It is possible that agricultural production in rural areas will proceed largely unaffected, particularly for larger producers of field crops that tend to be heavily mechanized. However, in many locations and for many specialty crops, agriculture still relies heavily on field labour; sufficient labour supply during the key planting and harvest periods is crucial, and there are frequently labour shortages at these critical times.