Indirect effects of COVID-19 on the environment

Manuel A Zambrano-Monserrate¹, María Alejandra Ruano², Luis Sanchez-Alcalde³

Affiliations

¹ Universidad Espíritu Santo, Ecuador. Electronic address: manuelzambranom@uees.edu.ec.
² Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, ESPOL, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanísticas, Campus Gustavo Galindo Km 30.5 Vía Perimetral, P.O. Box 09-01-5863, Guayaquil, Ecuador.
³ Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mexico.

PMID: 32334159
PMCID: PMC7169883
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138813

Indirect effects of COVID-19 on the environment

Manuel A Zambrano-Monserrate et al. Sci Total Environ. 2020.

. 2020 Aug 1:728:138813.

doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138813. Epub 2020 Apr 20.

Authors

Manuel A Zambrano-Monserrate¹, María Alejandra Ruano², Luis Sanchez-Alcalde³

Affiliations

¹ Universidad Espíritu Santo, Ecuador. Electronic address: manuelzambranom@uees.edu.ec.
² Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, ESPOL, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanísticas, Campus Gustavo Galindo Km 30.5 Vía Perimetral, P.O. Box 09-01-5863, Guayaquil, Ecuador.
³ Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mexico.

PMID: 32334159
PMCID: PMC7169883
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138813

Abstract

This research aims to show the positive and negative indirect effects of COVID-19 on the environment, particularly in the most affected countries such as China, USA, Italy, and Spain. Our research shows that there is a significant association between contingency measures and improvement in air quality, clean beaches and environmental noise reduction. On the other hand, there are also negative secondary aspects such as the reduction in recycling and the increase in waste, further endangering the contamination of physical spaces (water and land), in addition to air. Global economic activity is expected to return in the coming months in most countries (even if slowly), so decreasing GHG concentrations during a short period is not a sustainable way to clean up our environment.

Keywords: COVID-19; Environmental impact; GHGs; Pandemic; SARS-CoV2; Social distancing policies.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.