World’s crises are interlinked and need a global response

Those who are disappointed by the inconclusive outcomes of the COP26 climate-change meeting, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual summit, or efforts to achieve Covid-19 vaccine equity need to wake up about the world we live in. Under current circumstances, global governance is guaranteed to disappoint. In a new report, Our […]

Those who are disappointed by the inconclusive outcomes of the COP26 climate-change meeting, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual summit, or efforts to achieve Covid-19 vaccine equity need to wake up about the world we live in. Under current circumstances, global governance is guaranteed to disappoint.

In a new report, Our Global Condition, I and my colleagues on the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy attribute these difficulties to the fact that we are in the grip of not one but four crises. 

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The only way forward is to recognise the connections between planetary public health, climate change, declining public trust and democratic legitimacy, and geopolitical instability. These issues are interlinked. Treating them as separate domains will get us nowhere.

Environmental stresses increase the likelihood that zoonotic diseases will spread to humans and become pandemics. 

The social, political and economic stresses introduced by a pandemic then foster attitudes and behaviours that undermine social solidarity, making it harder for governments to secure public buy-in for strong decarbonisation measures. 

In countries and political systems where trust in institutions and the authority of expertise has been undermined by the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis and the growth of social media, coping with new crises remains an uphill struggle.

This description is especially apt for the US, the country to which so many look for leadership. The crisis of trust has weakened the US both internally and on the world stage, contributing to the deteriorating relations between the West and China. 

Following the logic of feedback loops, tensions over the pandemic and climate change have contributed to the world’s foremost geopolitical crisis. Yet without US-China engagement and mutual understanding, little substantive progress against either the pandemic or climate change can be made.

Similar dynamics are evident in the failure to deliver a sufficient supply of vaccines to poorer countries, a reality made salient by the emergence of the new Omicron variant. According to the Global Commission’s vaccination countdown, Asia, Europe and the US are on track to have vaccinated 80% of their populations by March-May 2022, whereas most African countries will not have reached that point until mid-2025.

Sino-American cooperation could close this gap, given the two countries’ unmatched capital and logistical resources, and also could deal swiftly with the looming sovereign-debt crisis that is likely to strike low-income countries and then the rest of the world in 2022. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of such agreements any time soon.

It is a bleak picture, auguring not imminent disaster but rather continuing disappointment and vulnerability. To confront this situation, we must develop new strategies based on four key principles.

The first principle — and the most immediate task — is to get all populations vaccinated, so that we can accelerate the shift from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic public-health issue. 

Whether they act alone or in groups, all countries need to place the highest priority on delivering vaccines to Africa and other lagging regions, as well as devoting more resources — medical, financial, logistical and administrative — to support vaccination programmes. Eliminating pandemic-driven uncertainties may also be the surest way to create trust and public buy-in for sustained climate measures and other necessary but costly “build back better” policies.

The second (and longer-term) principle is to recognise that US-China rivalry plays a central role in global affairs. Neither that rivalry nor the continuing importance of either countries can be wished away. 

By Bill Emmott

Source: The Mail&Guardian