Pandemics and the global environment

Dramatic, short-term improvements in the global environment have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. Intrigued by these observations, we commissioned a series of papers for Science Advances dedicated to studies of pandemics from an environmental perspective. The first in this series is a paper by Liu et al . on the decline of nitrogen dioxide over China since the outbreak of COVID-19. Collectively, the series will explore how the Earth system as a whole – not just the human societies developed on it – is affected by pandemics like COVID-19, and how environmental conditions can influence the spread and severity of infection. The responses of governments around the world to the COVID-19 catastrophe is an ongoing, essentially uncontrolled experiment. We should not forget that this experiment is playing out in the context of another uncontrolled experiment of …