First, the COVID-19 pandemic is obviously far from over. While global vaccine distribution continues to be spotty and a matter of economic and political privilege rather than equality and fairness, new variants of the virus such as Omicron continue to emerge and suggest that the largest global health crisis in at least a century is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

It is tragic that the shortsighted, irresponsible attitude to just and equitable global vaccine distribution has now become the root cause for a seemingly infinite loop of viral mutations and spread. Indeed, the policies that are adopted by some countries allow new variants to incubate where vaccines are scarce, only to soon boomerang back to nations that are hoarding doses and patents alike.

Water World: Is Climate Change Driving Our Future Out to Sea?  

READ MORE

Second, the rapidly deteriorating situation, the stunning collapse of the status quo and public order, and the ongoing humanitarian and human rights crisis in Afghanistan remind us of the inherent vulnerability and fragility of the international order and its institutions. Afghanistan is but one example of a fundamental shift in global and regional geopolitics and balance of power that is now ubiquitous. The consequence is that human security and justice seem to become even more disposable than before.

Third, the 6^th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that the global climate crisis is not only real and impactful but certain to increase, perhaps exponentially, and become even much more destructive, disruptive and deadly than previously projected.

Keeping the Goal Alive

At the same time, the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow reinforced the widespread fear that it is increasingly unlikely that the 1.5˚C goal sealed in the Paris Agreement — perhaps even the 2˚C fallback position — can still be reached, meaning that unimaginable threats like mega heatwaves, floods, droughts, hurricanes and blizzards, food crises and famines, mass migration and violent conflicts are to be expected to rise throughout this century.

COP26, unfortunately, was more of the same: cynical delegations of certain industrialized countries, as well as ruthless fossil fuel lobbyists, coerced poor countries already hit hard by climate change into a defensive mode and dictated a watered-down compromise that is far from adequate. Despite some mitigation pundits — typically white, male and Western — praising COP26 for “keeping the 1.5-degree goal alive,” the point is not about what’s hypothetically feasible but is very much about what has been done and continues to be done to this world’s poor, marginalized, underdeveloped, disenfranchised and remote people?

Much of the Conference of Parties process carries the handwriting of neoliberalism and neocolonial rule. If those people in the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere count, then why has the 2009 promise of COP15 in Copenhagen to make $100 billion in support of adaptation needs available still not been met, even to 50%?

Why do the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters still refuse to pay a single penny for the loss and damage to developing nations that they are responsible for? How dare wealthy carbon-emitting countries refuse to commit to immediate and drastic emission reductions knowing that their selfishness will kill millions of people, wipe out entire species and make much of this planet uninhabitable?

See a pattern? What COVID-19, Afghanistan and climate policy as a global phenomenon have in common is the toxic mix of short-sightedness, selfishness and ruthlessness with which international solidarity, collective action and the noble cause of pursuing equality, dignity and justice in international relations are being sacrificed for short-term gain, dominance and privilege.

Forty years of largely unregulated capitalism, economic globalization and neoliberal rule have not furthered the spirit and goals of the UN Charter. They have ruined our planet, its ecosystems and habitats, and left humanity in a state of shock, turmoil and disintegration — closer to what Hobbes’ “Leviathan” described as the state of nature.

International Threat

By the way, climate change adds to other global risks and threats: It is intersectional, cross-cutting and compounding. , and therefore epidemics and pandemics, are on the rise also because of changing climates, temperatures, precipitation, humidity, biomes and expanding human habitats. Wars such as those in Sudan, Yemen and Syria have been precipitated by climate change, desertification, water shortage, crop failure and hunger — as is forced migration as a mass phenomenon. The list goes on.

We simply can no longer afford a business-as-usual approach or even a moderately progressive approach, let alone a backward approach. This century of complex crises requires a whole new type of global action and response unlike anything before it because peace, security, prosperity and statehood are at risk globally. New, innovative and disruptive legal, economic and political tools are needed, paired with technological advances, ethical and sustainable investments, social movements and large-scale behavioral change.

Make Sense of the World

Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

I agree to receive emails and other content from 51łÔąĎ. I understand that I may repeal my consent at any time. You can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for further information..

Ultimately, the climate agenda — and with it, many other issues of global concern — is a matter of global justice and survival. Measures and instruments must be atoned to yield the safety and well-being of the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised and the underserved. The resilience of the weak will determine the fate of the whole. If that is the case, humanity — and alongside it, other species, ecosystems and the planet — will benefit as a whole. If it isn’t, today’s hubris, ignorance and selfishness will come back as a mighty boomerang, much like Omicron, to haunt many wealthy nations.

*[This article is submitted on behalf of the author by the HBKU Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the University’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The Global Climate Crisis Is the New Frontier of Justice appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Germany’s Handling of the Pandemic: A Model of Incompetence?

READ MORE

Both acts were hugely symbolic, especially since they occurred within hours of Biden’s inauguration, as they set a fundamentally new tone in US foreign policy and sent a strong signal to the world, paraphrased as: We are back, count on us. But other than being symbolic, these acts constitute a material and substantial backing of global efforts to address two of the 21st century’s most severe world crises — the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change — under the aegis of the United Nations.

When the Trump administration announced in July 2020, in the middle of the most devastating pandemic in at least a century, that the US would withdraw from the WHO — having already frozen payments of mandatory membership dues and thereby violating international law months earlier — that move was widely regarded as not only hugely counterproductive but as outright insane.

The World Needs the US as Well

Clearly, the country hit hardest by the pandemic — both in terms of total infections and deaths — is better off as a member of the very global community that ensures the fast sharing of research, data and best practices, coordinates responses, and comes together to devise evidence-based solutions to the world’s most pressing public health issues, be it malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or COVID-19. But the international community needs the US as well.

In fact, the US has been the single most important independent variable in international relations and global affairs since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of the Declaration of the United Nations on January 1, 1942. Hence, a WHO without the active participation and support of the US government is unthinkable. This engagement extends well beyond funding. Since its inception in 1948, the US has been the single largest contributor to the WHO — which budgeted $4.84 billion for the biennium 2020-21, not including COVID-19-related expenses — with a steady share of 22% of the organization’s assessed core budget and significant additional voluntary contributions made every single year.

Yet the active support of medical research data, analysis, know-how, logistics, supplies and people power to the WHO’s multifold programs and emergency operations by the US, such as during the West African Ebola crisis of 2013-15, is priceless and virtually irreplaceable. Indeed, a great sense of relief was voiced in unison by scientists, senior government officials and UN leaders alike when the Biden administration applied common sense and restored the United States’ bond with the WHO on the day of its inception. This step will have an immediately relevant and measurable impact on the global response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

With the unfreezing of previously withheld payments and the allocation of additional, fresh sums of money targeted at global health emergency relief efforts, research and development, and the provision of supplies and teams, the global fight against COVID-19 will experience an important boost. This will be particularly important in the context of WHO’s COVAX initiative, which is a historic, unprecedented fundraising effort to make effective and safe vaccines available to all countries, especially developing ones. Moreover, COVAX entails a proprietary vaccine development program, including the building of manufacturing capabilities, and provides technical and logistical support to countries in need.

COVAX Initiative

The new US administration has quickly become COVAX’s largest funder and pledged to donate surplus vaccine stocks in addition to its financial contributions. Also, efforts to assist developing countries by deploying on-the-ground technical assistance where needed are underway.

However, COVAX still has a long way to go to meet its goal of buying supply so that 2 billion doses can be fairly and equitably distributed by the end of 2021. To date, financial support by OECD countries to the facility has been lukewarm at best, although the US and Germany stand out. The apparent lack of solidarity and tangible support by wealthy nations is disappointing and recently prompted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to global vaccine distribution “wildly uneven and unfair,” describing the goal of providing vaccines to all as “the biggest moral test before the global community.”

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic with its rapidly-emerging mutations and variants, quick, unequivocal and substantial support — both financial and technical — to developing countries and those behind in getting access to effective vaccines is not only a moral obligation for developed countries, but also a mere matter of rationality and self-interest.

As long as over 100 countries globally have not even received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, even the most ambitious and aggressive vaccine rollout campaigns in wealthy countries may be in vain as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 can emerge and cause new viral strains at any time. The Biden administration, along with other governments, is well advised to massively support multilateral solutions and collective action. It is the only reasonable, promising approach to tackling the world’s biggest crises in the 21st century.

*[This article was submitted on behalf of the author by the Hamad bin Khalifa University Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the university’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Why the US Return to the WHO Matters appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Global climate change is finally being recognized as the single most severe threat to humanity and the planet. This century is also on track to become the era of natural disasters, unique in the history of humanity, with tropical storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires rising exponentially in number. Pandemics, global warming and natural disasters are but three of the many large-scale crises at play, posing problems that are particularly challenging for policymaking at various levels.

A New Social Contract Amid a Crisis

READ MORE

The 21^st century is expected to produce even more and ever greater challenges for the global community. Biodiversity loss, water scarcity and desertification, food insecurity, refugee crises, failing states and more will affect many societies in intricate, complex ways. Termed “” by the United Nations and various other institutions in an effort to generate data, knowledge and advice to decision-makers, the pressing problem centers around how we go about solving them.

Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity

Phenomena like climate change, pandemics or the creeping collapse of democratic governance and the rule of law can be resolved neither by any individual country, let alone by populist and nationalist politics that defy multilateralism, nor by conventional policy design. Humanity will have to find a way to come together and develop novel and innovative concepts of governance of global public goods and commons, and of global crises, under 21^st-century conditions.

These are conditions of wickedness, , , occurrence at a planetary scale. Humanity and planet Earth, with all its living species, form a huge symbiosis, a socio-ecological system, much as depicted in James Cameron’s 2009 movie “Avatar.” There is no pristine natural space left untouched by human influence and no human remains untouched by at least one of the many disturbance regimes, such as climate change or the current pandemic, that are haunting us.

In our previous op-eds, we advocated that in the face of these mega crises, new or renewed social contracts are key and that social learning will provide for the vehicle to get us there. We argued that scientists play an important role if they become engaged citizens of their societies and that the self-serving politics of delusional populists and autocrats — whose global mushrooming coincides with the exponential rise of global crises — are to be replaced.

Future narratives that are necessary to guide collective action in the 21^st century must be principled and must be about resilience and, sometimes, resistance, often through adaptive or transformative approaches and processes, as well as through education, learning, enlightenment, empowerment and responsible citizenship. Such narratives have to be global and universal, mirroring the scale and globality of the crises that are so daunting today.

The truth is simple: Solutions have to fit the scale and magnitude of the problems, as the pandemic has shown. Humanity must now overcome the comfort zones and confines of tribalism, nationalism and self-interest, or it will perish. In the face of a perfect storm of global mega crises, we must transcend the ideological concept of self-interest driven nation-states, of hegemony and of balance-of-power ideologies that date back from the 17^th century but still drive much of our modern world. The 21^st century poses brutal challenges to humanity but bears the potential for an evolutionary leap forward, toward true global citizenship and a global social contract.

Transforming Globalization

In less than a year, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the very tenets of 50 years of globalization: the tyranny of international trade regimes, return on investment-oriented global supply chain management, carbon-intense industrial production, the brutal transnational labor market and related migration schemes and global air travel. The notoriously short-lived international capital flow and foreign direct investment came to a halt for a moment — something the 2007-09 financial crisis failed to achieve — and are now being questioned by unlikely sources.

Even die-hard Chicago School economists have started to explore the circular economy (better late than never). It appears that the pandemic and its fallout are a drastic eye-opener that forces us to realize, finally, that much of the “progress” that globalization has brought about is borrowed, if not stolen, from future generations, non-human species, ecosystems and the planet, divided as we are by equators of rich and poor, of winners and losers, of “developed’ and “underdeveloped.” It is simply not sustainable.

COVID-19, climate change and many of the other “Grand Challenges” are of course correlated with the so-called Third Industrial Revolution and 50 years of neoliberal globalization and Wall Street finance capitalism. One does not have to be a socialist to understand this simple truth. Indeed, there is hope that the current global public health crisis will lead to a general reckoning, including of people in power, and that there will not be a mere continuation of business as usual after the pandemic.

Globalization and capitalism have to be transformed, enlightened, guided by mutuality and governed by wisdom and foresight based on the revitalized ideas of the global common good, of global citizenship and of a new global social contract. Think “Avatar.”

*[This article was submitted on behalf of the authors by the Hamad bin Khalifa University Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the university’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Will the Pandemic Revitalize Ideas of the Global Common Good? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.