Over the past few weeks, as we’ve wrestled with making near-term adjustments to our lives, my team and I have been trying to understand what changes may result in longer-term alterations of societal and organizational behavior in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. I’ve drafted the following to outline a few changes that will resonate well beyond this current stage of acute stress, and influence how companies and government bodies operate. The outcome will significantly impact whether or not we succeed in accomplishing the many urgent targets outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
And why are the SDGs relevant in this context? If we look at problems like public health in a vacuum, they may seem disconnected from the topic of sustainability. That thinking stems, in part, from inconsistent definitions of sustainability that are also often quite narrow, solely being limited to topics such as corporate reporting or climate change. Another contributor to this disconnect is the common tendency to treat individual problems as discrete and independent from other elements of complex adaptive systems in which they exist. In reality, the types of challenges outlined in each SDG are interdependent of many other SDGs. Challenges related to environmental degradation, climate change, and resource depletion are inextricably tied to human development, education, and inequality. All of these challenges are woven, in one form or another, into public health and how we tackle large-scale problems like the current pandemic.
Each of the items below are potential paths or pivot points, which dictate whether the many systems we rely on will evolve in ways that regenerate or deplete our environmental resources and communities. Here are a few headlines that will likely to be prominent as the impacts of the pandemic continue to unfold: