Looking through the Lens of Complexity Theory: An Evaluation of Climate Change and Coronavirus 2019 Outbreak

Abstract

When world leaders and delegates convened in Madrid, Spain in December 2019 for the 25th Congress of Parties (COP-25) to re-evaluate their obligations to the Paris Agreement on climate change, they could not prefigure coronavirus was about to overrun humanity. Virtually everyone describes climate change as the most complex ecological and social crisis confronting society in this century. When coronavirus outbreak struck humanity in December 2019, virtually everyone also describes it as the most complex crisis that had struck mankind since the end of Second World War. Both crises have also attracted significant response from policymakers; yet no research has weighed these two common challenges of our time side-by-side in a single study to establish whether they have equivalent level of complexity. This is crucial because confronting a problem without first understanding its complexity would culminate in a waste of resources and or failure to find a permanent solution to it. To address this concern, this paper evaluates global climate change and corona-virus 2019 outbreak using complexity theory as a conceptual framework, and makes recommendations for policy and research based on the outcomes.