Coronavirus pandemic could lead to greener future for all, says Erin McDaid, of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust

After almost a year of worry, bad news and enforced lifestyle changes, it can sometimes be hard to hard to focus on glimmers of hope.

However, alongside good news of the fast-paced delivery of the UK vaccination programme, I do wonder if the way our lives have changed since last March could provide a road map for more sustainable lifestyles.

Before the pandemic there was a growing realisation that we had reached a critical time for the planet. There was increased consensus that the environment was in trouble and that we only had a limited time to act.

While our focus and resources have rightly shifted to fighting an immediate problem, the threat of looming environmental catastrophe hasn’t gone away.

Rather than seeking to add to anyone’s woes, I would suggest our collective response to the pandemic suggests that the prospect of tackling the climate and ecological crises could finally be within our grasp.

No one wants lifestyle changes forced upon them, but lasting and dramatic change rarely comes about gradually and it often requires an outside impetus.

As we emerge from the health crisis triggered by covid-19 and plan for the much-vaunted new normal, there is real scope for some of the changes forced upon us during the pandemic to stick.

During lockdown I’ve been filling some time sorting through old photographs and papers in my loft.

In one box I discovered a number of Your Environment columns I wrote for the Nottingham Post in 1999. In one I suggested that although earlier predictions that many of us would be working from home by the 1990s had proved to be wide off the mark, things could be about to change thanks to newfangled emails and telephone conferencing!

In another I suggested that if more of us chose to take holidays in the UK, we could dramatically reduce our impact on the climate change.

Although staycations have had something of a renaissance in the last decade, many UK trips are in addition to overseas holidays and, frankly, there hadn’t been much evidence of a dramatic shift towards home-working.

Now, our shared experience has proven beyond doubt that it’s possible for many of us to work productively from home.

While the huge reductions in traffic levels, noise and air pollution witnessed during the first national lockdown might not be repeatable any time soon, we mustn’t allow everything to go back to how it was without challenging and questioning the status quo.

We all long to be able to see friends and colleagues face to face and to escape our own four walls from time to time, but it has to be worth exploring which of the positive elements of change we can adapt and adopt for the future.

In one of the pieces from 1999 I highlighted, rather appropriately it now seems, that working from home could lead to issues of isolation and boredom, so we must also ensure that employers continue to focus on enabling employees to strike a good work-life balance as well as cutting down on unnecessary travel.

At the moment, grabbing a daily dose of nature is one of the best ways to find your own happy medium.

With the days getting longer and lighter and signs of spring, such as snow drops and hazel catkins, starting to show there will be more and more opportunities to recharge your batteries after a day spent cooped up talking to colleagues on Teams or Zoom to colleagues who, through no fault of their own, look rather like a low rent panel from celebrity squares.