World Environment Day: Covid-19 an opportunity to pursue green economic recovery

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered unusual environmental benefits - cleaner air and coast lines, lower carbon emissions and some respite for wildlife.

The World Environment Day, being celebrated today, is the United Nations' foremost movement encouraging awareness and action for the protection of our environment ever since 1974.

These days, owing to Covid-19, the air is clean and fresh. At Venice and at Amsterdam, fish have reappeared in urban waterways while in Europe and elsewhere the birds are frequenting uncut gardens and in Asia we see wild mammals are meandering through cities as the greenhouse gas emissions are likely to drop by an unprecedented 8 per cent this year rendering a beautiful view of the horizon. Nature it seems is wanting a break from the Man.  From a climate crisis perspective, this drop in emissions is astonishingly close to the 7.6 per cent yearly reduction in emissions that scientists have advised will be necessary during the next decade.  

We know, this resilience of mother nature is temporary, and will last only as long as the lockdown - which is easing up across the world - is enforced. More importantly, the reduction in greenhouse gases is not the result of decarbonising the economy, but the unintended consequence of economic paralysis causing painful human consequences and huge costs to lives and livelihoods. This is not what sustainable addressing of the climate crisis must look like. The thoughtful reduction of greenhouse gases has to be intentional not circumstantial or temporary. Above all, it must lead to improved human wellbeing, not to human or economic suffering.

Accordingly, the case for rebuilding our economies in line with environmental targets has broad public support. A recent poll from Ipsos Mori shows that 71 per cent of the global population understands that climate change is as at least as serious a crisis as Covid-19, and 65 per cent think the former should be prioritised in the economic recovery.

A growing number of corporate leaders are also calling for government stimulus packages to be having the green strings attached. In Europe, business leaders, policymakers and researchers explicitly urged the EU to build the recovery package around the Green theme. Encouragingly, the most surprising are the carbon-intensive industries that have confirmed they are continuing to decarbonise despite the pandemic, including BP, Shell, Daimler and Rio Tinto. Elsewhere, eight investment groups, including BNP Paribas Asset Management, DWS and Comgest Asset Management, have urged corporates to maintain their focus on decarbonisation whilst dealing with the consequences of the recession.  

Crises are a moment of contemplation and change. In the midst of the pandemic, we face a choice between recovering the carbon-intensive global economy that has set us on the path towards environmental breakdown, or accelerating the transition towards a future that prioritises the health of people and planet. Today, that future may be closer within our reach than it was at the beginning of 2020. Lockdown won't save the world from warming, but the pandemic is an opportunity to pursue a green economic recovery.

We have never had a better chance to make a greener world. Covid-19 has delivered unusual environmental benefits - cleaner air and coast lines, lower carbon emissions and pretty views of the distant horizon and some respite for wildlife. Now the big question is whether we can capitalise on this moment or not. One response to the coronavirus outbreak that has drawn mixed reactions from climate scientists is the ways that many communities have taken big steps to protect each other from the health crisis. The speed and extent of the response has given some hope that rapid action could also be taken on climate change if the threat it poses was treated as imminent and urgent.

Anurag Kashyap is VP Marketing and Corporate Communications at NMC Health Plc and is the author of ESG Sustainability Reports. He has been an invitee to the Sustainability initiatives of UNSDG, UNGC and UNPRI.