Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

LOCKDOWN LEVELS This index assesses the intensity of a government’s response across 11 containment and health measures, including school and work closures, stay-at-home orders, and travel restrictions. No clear method for success Policy strictness and deaths in the 100 days after a country’s first confirmed case *IN MARCH, THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST REPORTED THAT CHINA’S FIRST CASE MAY HAVE BEEN ON NOVEMBER 17, 2019. MANUEL CANALES, IRENE BERMAN-VAPORIS, TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO, AND TED SICKLEY, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: THOMAS HALE, LAURA HALLAS, AND TOBY PHILLIPS, OXFORD COVID-19 GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TRACKER, BLAVATNIK SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT; EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR DISEASE PREVENTION AND CONTROL…

IN THE SPRING OF 1858, three years before the Civil War, a young engineer named John T. Milner rode into Jones Valley, at the tail end of the Appalachians in north-central Alabama. He’d been dispatched by the governor to plan a new railroad. There were riches in those hills: The state geologist had reported coalfields to the north of Jones Valley and, just to the south, cropping out at the crest of Red Mountain, a thick seam of iron ore. Milner rode up through ancient woods to see it. “I rode along the top of Red Mountain and looked over that beautiful valley,” he recalled much later, after he’d helped fill the valley with Birmingham, a city of belching smokestacks, intersecting railroads, and dark, deadly mines: “It was one vast…

* BASED ON A MIDYEAR ANALYSIS OF LOW- AND MIDDLE-INCOME COUNTRIES; DATA UNAVAILABLE FOR INDIA, PAKISTAN, AND SENEGAL. ALBERTO LUCAS LÓPEZ, NGM. SHELLEY SPERRY. DATA SOURCE: LAKNER, C., ET AL., “HOW MUCH DOES REDUCING INEQUALITY MATTER FOR GLOBAL POVERTY?” JUNE 2020. FINDINGS ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHORS, NOT WORLD BANK. PUSHED INTO POVERTY The devastating effects of COVID-19, combined with other natural and economic disasters, play out differently in each country. Many wealthier nations have been relatively insulated; some of the world’s poorest countries are struggling the most. In this visualization, the longer the colored bars, the bigger a country’s projected jump in poverty rates from early 2019 (pre-pandemic) to late 2020.*…

DURING THIS YEAR—“this devastating year,” as Robin Marantz Henig writes in the pages that follow—a man in Central Java assembled a barrier from bamboo poles, painted LOCKDOWN onto a piece of vinyl, and blocked the entrance to a village road. A Belgian undertaker began dressing for work in a hazmat suit. A child in Detroit complained of headache; a month later, during the memorial service that only 12 people were permitted to attend, her parents grieved behind face masks. Here’s what the year has demanded we understand: that a single phenomenon connects these people, these places, this sorrow, this fear. Most of us are neither epidemiologists nor Spanish flu survivors; for most of us, before 2020 the word “pandemic” belonged to history, dystopian fiction, or books of warning from science…

WHO KNEW THAT stay-at-home orders could bring so much displacement? That’s how the spring of 2020 felt for many in our generation—we who were just starting to get a glimpse of independence and adulthood before the pandemic came crashing down. Maybe we need a name, those of us who are currently 18 to 25 years old, instead of remaining just a purgatorial generation: feeling like we’re too young to be millennials but not young enough for Gen Z. I’m not sold on any of the names I’ve heard us called—Rainbow Generation, zillennials, Generation Screwed. Yet the unavoidable fact is that we’re at a critical turning point in our personal lives at a time when the world seems to be imploding in so many ways. As lockdowns were spreading earlier this…

CÉDRIC GERBEHAYE dressed as advised by the medical workers around him: face mask, face shield, body suit, double bags over his shoes, double gloves over his hands. The outer gloves were plastic, taped to seal out virus. He learned to hold and work his camera through plastic. In a Brussels nursing home he watched an aged woman look into the eyes of the nurse who had come to test her for COVID-19. “J’ai peur,” the woman said. The nurse took her hands, leaned in close, and said: I’m scared too. She and her team were testing nearly 150 people on that day alone. When she turned to Gerbehaye afterward, her voice was thick in a way that stays with him still; she sounded broken, tough, grieving, and furious, all at…

PANDEMIC IMPACT ON ENERGY INVESTMENT Energy investment had been projected to grow in 2020, but COVID-19 has put the world on track for the largest decline on record: a reduction of one-fifth—nearly $400 billion—compared with 2019. Fossil fuels accounted for almost all of the loss. *FUEL SUPPLY AND FOSSIL-FUEL-BASED POWER †DATA PRIOR TO 2014 NOT AVAILABLE WHAT’S TO GAIN BY GOING GREEN The increasing affordability of renewables and the potential for millions of new clean-energy jobs are two benefits for governments to consider when structuring COVID-19 economic recovery plans. CHEAPER ENERGY In about two-thirds of the world, wind and solar are the least expensive new energy sources. SUSTAINABLE JOBS A swift, broad shift to clean energy could create seven million more jobs than the trajectory we’re on. NGM STAFF; LAWSON…

FROM THE KENYAN CAPITAL, two voices on Nairobi and the pandemic. DANIEL OWINO OKOTH: My aka name is Futwax. I’m a recording artist, a sound engineer, a community leader, and I was learning music production. I have a family: a son and a wife. In Kibera we have many stories to tell about how we are living our lives, you know? We tell them through music, through art, and I was doing gigs, traveling outside the county, performing in schools. Teaching people about Kibera, about ghettos around the world. Things were good when the corona was not around. I was hoping to do music videos, but then the corona came. NICHOLE SOBECKI: Kibera is one of more than a hundred informal communities, as I call them, in Nairobi. I know…

COVID-19 AMBUSHED US, replacing familiar situations with disorienting, deadly unknowns. So much has changed. Too much keeps changing. How welcome it is, then, to see something that’s totally unexpected … but good in every way. Whimsical. Beautiful. Overflowing with life. Spain was struck early and hard by COVID-19 and locked down for three months. In June the easing of restrictions was celebrated with a concert at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. In attendance: 2,292 live plants. The verdant audience was treated to a string quartet performing Giacomo Puccini’s Crisantemi. The name means chrysanthemums, a flower Italians use to express loss and mourning. Artist Eugenio Ampudia hoped that greening the opera house would make it feel “alive, even when there are no people.” An unseen human audience did benefit: After the…

IF A THEME RUNS through the books and articles I’ve written over the past 40 years, it’s a fascination with what scientists have learned about the human body. A long career spent explaining biomedical research has led me to a deep respect for the scientific process. Despite its occasional missteps and self-corrections, I believe it ultimately moves us toward a clearer understanding of the world and how to thrive in it. So as scientists first scrambled to figure out the never-before-seen coronavirus, I was primed to follow their advice about how to keep safe, based on the hypothesis that the virus was transmitted mostly by droplets from coughs and sneezes lingering on surfaces. I dutifully wiped down countertops, refrained from touching my face, and washed my hands so emphatically that…

THE PANDEMIC CRIPPLED the mudik, which is what Indonesians call the great holiday migration of city people traveling to see their families in villages and the countryside. Indonesia’s Muslim population is the world’s largest, and the Ramadan mudik is massive. In an ordinary year, as the month of daily fasting comes to a celebratory close, photographer Muhammad Fadli would buckle his wife and daughter into the family’s Nissan van and brave the traffic out of the capital, Jakarta. The trip to Fadli’s hometown takes 36 hours by winding roads and ferry, but his parents are there. Fadli is their only child. Late this past April, with infection numbers soaring and Ramadan about to begin, the Indonesian government restricted region-to-region travel for six weeks: a “mudik ban,” the Jakarta Post called…

DEMAND BY SOURCE 2020 Oil use plummeted when aviation and other transport—nearly 60 percent of global demand—were slowed by COVID-19 restrictions. 2040 In a sustainable scenario, renewables—mostly wind and solar—rise from 14 percent to 34 percent of total energy demand, replacing fossil fuels. EMISSIONS BY SECTOR 2020 COVID-driven declines are unsustainable and inefficient, with relatively small impacts on the largest-emitting sectors. 2040 Emissions fall as electricity replaces fossil fuels in industry and transport; renewables and nuclear power help decarbonize the grid. CLOSING THE GAP Existing and future technologies and focused policies could accelerate a global energy transformation. *ABOVE PREINDUSTRIAL LEVELS BY 2100 NGM STAFF; LAWSON PARKER; SCOTT ELDER. SOURCES: INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY; LE QUÉRÉ AND OTHERS, NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE 2020 (EMISSIONS FROM CEMENT CALCINATION OMITTED) Individual actions are not enough…

AT FIRST THE government shut down nearly everything: borders, businesses, schools, civilian presence on the streets. Tanks and army trucks backed up an around-the-clock lockdown—no exceptions, even to shop for food and medicine. Amman is built on hills, and from his kitchen, photographer Moises Saman could hear the echoes of citywide sirens, the kind used for air raid warnings. He stayed inside with his family until the curfews began to ease, during prescribed daylight hours only, for certain approved purposes only. Then he went to find the places where refugees live. About 750,000 recent refugees are in Jordan now, grouped into designated camps or scattered into settlements and neighborhoods. They come from as far away as Somalia and Sudan, but the vast majority are Syrians escaping civil war. Photographing inside…