Covid-19 is only a dress rehearsal for the transformations coming with climate change

Name: Demand for free food rises in US as nation’s Covid-19 pandemic crisis deepens
Uploaded: 2020-12-20T19:30:15.000Z
Duration: 2 min 26 s
Description: Demand for free food rises in US as nation’s Covid-19 pandemic crisis deepens

2020 has seen democracy challenged, and debt and deglobalisation threatening our future, but the bungled pandemic response has above all revealed a world perilously unprepared for climate change and its economic impact

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A one-year-old girl walks along a road in the Alaskan village of Kivalina, which is being swallowed by rising oceans, on September 13, 2019. Photo: Getty Images/AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 3:30am, 21 Dec 2020Updated: 3:32am, 21 Dec 2020

Out of true turmoil come profound and sometimes surprising transformations. Not for nothing is The Economist talking of 2020 as: “The year when everything changed.”

Not unreasonably have friends reflected on the first world war and the subsequent creation of the League of Nations intended to manage global conflict, or on the aftermath of the second world war which gave birth to the United Nations and other still-indispensable Bretton Woods institutions.

So as we slam the door on this truly diabolical year – and for Hong Kong we must, in truth, talk about two diabolical years – where has life been transformed? Where has it simply been interrupted? And might it be for good as well as ill?

Of course, it is preposterously early to predict. And it would be foolish to blame all the changes of the past year on Covid-19.

For the United States, there is the merciful reprieve in a month from Donald Trump and the deep, searing divisions he opened up across US communities. The pandemic and the government’s incompetent response no doubt deepened those divisions, and forcefully contributed to 2020’s diabolical qualities. But are they likely to be permanent? Will the new Biden administration summon the capacity to heal wounds?

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Demand for free food rises in US as nation’s Covid-19 pandemic crisis deepens

As the BBC’s New York correspondent Nick Bryant wrote poignantly last week: “To watch America’s response was to witness its national decline play out in real-time. The Trump administration’s management of the outbreak may come to be seen as the most catastrophic domestic policy failure of the past 100 years.”

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