Has the pandemic bought us any time to arrest climate change? If so, was the price we paid too high?

Covid-19 has shrunk the 10 years the world had to address climate change to no more than 18 months, according to the United Nations lead negotiator for the Paris Agreement.

Watch the video version of the episode here

Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate change response that led to the Paris Agreement in 2015, said the $10-20 trillion being spent on economic recovery packages around the world would not be repeated.

"We thought this was the decisive decade for climate change. No. Forget it. This is it," she said.

"Those 10 years that we thought we had have now been shrunk into basically anywhere between three to 18 months because by the end of those 18 months all the decisions, and in fact most of the allocations of the recovery packages, will have been made."

She made the comments in a new RNZ podcast After the Virus, speaking alongside the current head of the United Nations Development Programme Achim Steiner and New Zealand's Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton.

Both Upton and Steiner said rebuilding a post-pandemic economy in a way that addressed climate change would require profound change for industries vital to New Zealand: aviation and tourism.

Figueres said that because much of the world had gone into lockdown the planet had recorded the biggest carbon crash ever, with 2020 emissions likely to be 8 percent down on last year.

She said that while this was more than the 7.6 percent drop needed every year this decade in order to avoid dangerous tipping points - the result was not good news.

"It is not good news because the drop in emissions has come at a very, very high human cost. We have lost thousands of lives. We have lost millions of livelihoods. That is not the way we are planning on decarbonising the economy," she said.

"The responsible decarbonisation of the economy has to be a drop in emissions and an increase in the quality of life of the human population. So this is almost getting to the right destination with absolutely the wrong path."

The world will lock in rising emission levels if changes aren't made now, says Christiana Figueres

Figueres said the world was now at an "irreversible T junction" and if nations tried to return to the old normal they would lock in rising emission levels.

That would mean kissing goodbye targets of staying below 1.5-2°C warming - the level needed to prevent sea level rises, flooding, extreme weather conditions and other destructive effects of climate change…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details