Post Covid, Put People First

Context: New institutional structures, policies are needed to mitigate global catastrophes.

Challenges to Humanity: Our world faces many deeper, more intractable and persistent crises.

• Local: such as pervasive poverty and marginalization, pollution and waste, land-use change, and species/habitat loss.
• National and regional: Deforestation, human and wildlife trafficking, unsustainable trade practices and resource depletion.
• Global: The threats to the climate, biodiversity and oceans and collapsing international financial systems.

Institutional Acknowledgement to the challenges to humanity:

• Club of Rome: The “Club of Rome” in 1972 realized for the first time that the human species, unlike other living beings, was consuming not for its needs but for its greed.
• Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): Successive UN summits on environment and development issues that led to the global adoption of the SDGs by the leaders of 193 nations in 2015.

Suggested solutions: To build a new global economy that ensures an equitable and environmentally sustainable future for all nations, big or small.

• A new kind of global solidarity and international cooperation: For restoring the balance between people and nature and to build future resilience against existential threats.
  • Build strong new institutional networks and nodal agencies: At regional and national levels to provide the bridge between global entities such as WHO, FAO, Red Cross/Red Crescent, etc., and local institutions.
• Ensure timely achievement of national and global commitments: For net-zero emissions, conservation of biodiversity, resource efficiency, reduction of wastes, pollution, and maximize socio-economic equity.
  • Introduce policies and practices to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
  • Protect nature and restore our forests, rivers and degraded lands.
  • Adopt nature-based solutions to replace mechanized, resource-guzzling ones.
• Create safe and sustainable food systems:
  • By adopting regenerative agriculture, revitalize local production systems and shift to a more inclusive, green and circular economy to secure the basic needs of food, water, energy and soil supplies for all.
• Ensure socially just policies: Avoiding bail-out policies that only serve to subsidize unsustainable and polluting industries.
  • Post Covid-19, exit and recovery cum fiscal stimulus strategies should prioritize low-carbon, regenerative circular economic development.
  • Investments focussed on eradicating poverty and building a resilient ecosystem will deliver among the highest returns to the economy and are the lowest cost mean for preventing disasters.
  • There is a strong business and economic case for taking a proactive, bottom-up systemic approach to addressing such planetary emergencies.

Conclusion: It is not finances but the resolve of the leadership to achieve the above objectives that will be fundamental.