Background/Question/Methods 2020 was a year of unforeseeable challenges, novel working situations, reimagined home routines, and prolonged professional and personal interruptions. Almost everyone – regardless of age, geographical location, gender, or occupation – was impacted, across the globe. The impacts, however, were not the same for all people. For this session, we consider how COVID-19 has affected the ESA community, how we may be able to overcome some of these challenges, and areas where we see reasons for hope. We examine the literature, surveys done within ESA sections, and informal interviews to identify common challenges as well as potential paths forward. Results/Conclusions Students have had to adjust to remote learning, and professors have needed to learn how to teach remotely. Hands-on and experiential learning decreased dramatically, and for many students, there may not be an opportunity to make up for this loss in experience. Amongst scientists and researchers, COVID-19 disproportionally affected graduate students and early career professionals, individuals of color, and women. This is reflected in disparities in journal submissions, a loss of early career job opportunities, and decreased opportunities for lab and field research in a time of stay-at-home orders and university closures. Each of these issues will have follow-on effects for the near future, and possibly long after. However, there is some evidence that these challenges have forced a shift in how we thinking about teaching, learning, and access to knowledge. Science-based courses that were previously assumed to be only feasible in-person have been reconsidered, opening pathways to more online and distance learning courses for future populations. A shift towards open access journals was already occurring, but there is evidence that COVID-19 has accelerated this shift, as scientists learn new ways to collaborate across broader networks, and researchers at all levels no longer have access to university and public libraries. Conferences, which had been considering issues around accessibility for many years, suddenly had no choice but to go online, resulting in a sea change of opinion about what was and was not possible with networking and engagement in a virtual environment. The rapidity of these shifts resulted in complexities and challenges that are far from solved, but have also provided proof of solutions that were previously unrealized or actively avoided. The long-term repercussions of unequal impacts need to be understood and recognized, while we consider the lessons we have learned and build from them to continue to democratize knowledge.
