Afterword: Learning from COVID-19 for Dealing with Climate and Other Global Crises

This afterword is a call to expand the scope of the research on coping with the pandemic reported in this volume to other global crises, particularly the climate and biodiversity crises. On 11 May 2023 the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially declared the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency after more than 3 years since it was declared (United Nations, 2023). Of course, the virus is still mutating and infecting people, and has in fact become more contagious than the original strain, but according to the WHO announcement, because of the declining death toll, at this point it can be monitored and treated as like other infectious pathogens like the flu. While people are still dying and vaccines are still being developed and administered, the estimates are that by the official end of the pandemic, just under seven million deaths have been attributed to the virus and over five billion people have received at least one vaccination. Both numbers attest to the seriousness of the pandemic and to the effort to fight it (ibid.). The seriousness of the challenge with its relatively short duration makes it a valuable test case for the biodiversity and climate crises. In all three of these crises, the human social aspect of dealing or not dealing with the challenges is proving crucial. I highlight the importance of human shared intentionality (Tomasello et al., 2005) as a leading anthropogenic factor in these global crises, and as a key factor in dealing with these crises, and therefore as an important focal point for research. Biographical research methods are central to this volume and are therefore essential tools for coming to grips with global crises beyond the COVID-19 pandemic within this volume.