Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19

During lockdown in 2020, I co-authored a paper with my father, published in the journal Nature Climate Change. We evaluated the impact the pandemic had on the atmosphere in order to discover if there was any effect on the Earth's global temperature. We found that the result was negligible, with a temperature change reduction of less than 0.2%. However, we did see large changes in emissions, and predicted that if the lockdown conditions were maintained, we would see much larger effects on the environment.

I discussed this work in an interview for the BBC World Service and presented our findings at COP26 in Glasgow.