Covid 19 is just one warning light in the dashboard of the potential threats to humanity. Climate change is biggest threat facing humanity over the long term and a much more invisible and deadly one.
When the current emergency ends, there will no ‘war-is-over’ party with people celebrating in the streets, like after WWII. There will not be a back to business-as-before. There will be no immediate sigh of relief. When we ‘get out’, we will have other emergencies to deal with, the economic one and the social one, and we can decide now, during this enforced hiatus, how we intend to deal with them: in the old fashioned “money first!…forget the environment” approach – which incidentally would immediately sow the seeds for the next pandemic – using the emergency condition as an excuse? Or could we perhaps use this forced re-boot as an opportunity to re-start with a different, more sophisticated, approach that puts environmental, social, and economic sustainability at its centre.