A Future of Sustainable Development is Being Challenged by Current Circumstances

March 19, 2020 – Fighting to get the world of business to focus on net-zero goals until a few months ago appeared to be the number one priority for those interested in saving the planet from global warming. But how things have changed in subsequent months. Sustainability has been overshadowed by survivability. What’s remarkable about this moment in time is how quickly the world has unraveled because of a virus, the smallest of living things on the planet.

As a retired senior citizen whose family is living on savings, watching the stock market plunge has produced a feeling of helplessness. What can anyone do to restore confidence that the economy can right itself in the face of high-speed computer-generated trades that feed the panic? I wonder why governments don’t shut down the exchanges and declare a financial holiday. The news, both business and biological, is so horrendous it is creating feelings of helplessness and hopelessness for many.

How did we get here?

Since the end of the Second World War, the world has experienced unprecedented growth and widely-shared prosperity. Even with regional wars, the pace of global expansion has altered the lives of billions, from the poorest to the richest countries on our planet. Technology has been a driving force in this global expansion connecting almost all of us. It has helped to raise all boats on all continents.

Our collective connectivity goes beyond telecommunications. We are enmeshed as never before whether we are talking about supply chains, financial institutions, or trade agreements. Our human population has expoloded. When I was born, four years after the end of the War there were under 3 billion of us. Today we number 7.8 billion.

Every year economists tell us our consumption is overshooting the planet’s ability to renew. Last year Earth overshoot day occurred on July 29th marking the point in time when we consumed 100% of our planet’s resource renewal capability. In 2018 the overshoot day was August 6th. Each year we are consuming more than the planet can give back and doing it faster.

Consequences of Globalism

Global expansion has produced a number of consequences. One of them is global warming. And another is pandemic. It’s not the first time our world has experienced the latter.

The Black Death or Bubonic Plague was fueled by a 13th-century global expansion. That century had seen significant population growth and expanded trade linking Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. A flea-borne bacterium followed those routes from China to Europe. Without the benefit of modern antibiotics and proper sanitation, the Plague killed at least 20 million in Europe in its initial arrival and millions more in subsequent reappearances over a number of centuries. The death and havoc it caused, some historians believe ushered in the ending of Europe’s feudal system and the rise of mercantile banks and the flowering of the Renaissance.

A second pandemic occurred in the Americas after 1491 when Europeans first sailed across the Atlantic to “discover” these two previously unknown continents. The natives of both were unequipped biologically to handle the bacterial and viral assault. Within a few short years, more than 90% of the population of North and South America succumbed to European-borne diseases. Explorers fifty years after Columbus would come upon villages and towns devoid of life. The demise of the native population would lead to an ecological imbalance that saw a dramatic rise in the population of Passenger Pigeons and American Bison. Both later would be slaughtered in the millions by an immigrant population from Europe.

The last global pandemic of note occurred as the First World War was entering its last year. The Spanish Influenza pandemic that began in 2018 infected nearly a third of the world’s population and killed an estimated 50 million, approximately 10% of those who were infected. The Spanish Influenza although occurring in the 20th century did not have a means for the world to combat it. There were no antiviral drugs or vaccines to save patients or build immunity in the global population. It began in Europe and was carried across the ocean after the War’s end spreading by sea and land routes. By 1920 it largely had run its course.

The Existential Pandemic Threat We Face Today

The COVID-19 pandemic has moved at lightning speed, enabled by modern transportation to disperse across the planet. No previous pandemic has had such assistance. To some degree, this explains why so many countries and their medical infrastructure have appeared to be unprepared for it even though news of its existence in China was very quickly known at the onset.

A prior precedent, SARS, a coronavirus that originated in China in 2002, spread via air transport to cities in North America and elsewhere infecting 8,273 and causing 775 deaths before it could be contained. Among those killed were 44 in Toronto, far from the virus point of origin. Unfortunately, COVID-19 is more virulent than SARS.

In the last two weeks it appears to have peaked in China where it originated, but now is spreading rapidly through Europe, North and South America, Africa, Australia, and South Asia. With few exceptions, almost every country on the planet is under assault. Only Antarctica and the human crew on the International Space Station are out of its reach.

The medical advice to all of us is to practice social distancing to ensure the virus doesn’t spread throughout the population of the six continents where it is present. Why? Because we have no vaccine to immunize the population. What we do have, however, is the technological know-how to help patients suffering the worst symptoms. Nonetheless, deaths from COVID-19 have already surpassed the number of those infected during the SARS outbreak. So COVID-19 is on a scale vastly different from SARS.

I have come to a realization that COVID-19 may end up being the instrument that unites our world to act in concert to beat it. Whether it be ventilators being built en masse on many continents and shipped where needed to help thousands, or from collective efforts in laboratories everywhere to develop a cure, the war against this virus could become the model for humanity to address our other existential 21st-century threat, global warming. If we can conquer COVID-19 through global cooperation, the organization and knowledge sharing we build can become the model for us to deal with climate change.

As I walked my dog today and spoke with neighbours walking theirs, always practicing social distancing, we talked about how the world is bound to change because of COVID-19, and the lessons learned from its assault on humanity. It is clear, like climate change, that the virus knows no borders. There are no walls high enough to keep it out. And in our interconnected world, unless we intend to revert to a world of closed borders as we did in the 1930s before the outbreak of the Second World War, we can learn to act collectively to beat this virus and apply what the effort teaches us to tackle the remaining existential threat to our way of life on this planet.