Pedro Conceicao
United Nations Development Programme
Development Co-operation Report 2020
Learning from Crises, Building Resilience
Development Co-operation Report
2. Urgency of inequality and climate change raised by COVID-19
Abstract
This chapter explores the implications of the COVID-19 crisis for human development. Drawing on themes from the 2019 and the forthcoming 2020 Human Development Reports, it argues that the digital divide and other inequalities condition how people cope with the pandemic and warns that failure to avoid dangerous planetary change would increase the risks of shocks such as COVID-19 and exacerbate inequalities. It concludes with a call for bold collective action with new approaches to account for these risks, including through climate-sensitive financing and closing data gaps in our understanding of the natural world and the myriad forms of inequality between groups in societies.
Human activities created this crisis, we must ease the pressure on our planet
The fallout of the COVID-19 crisis derails three of the fundamental building blocks of human development: health, income and education.
Inequalities in non-social sectors, such as broadband access, are also crucial to human development in the 21st century, and worsen the impacts of COVID-19 for disadvantaged groups.
Activities that harm the planet do not just exacerbate climate change, they also create conditions for new pandemics, underscoring the need for development strategies to take the health of the planet into account.
The global community needs to come together to use the COVID-19 response as a springboard to tackle inequality and dangerous planetary change, starting with new approaches to financing.
Better and more data are needed to improve our understanding of various forms of inequality and how they might determine the impact of shocks such as climate change and pandemics on different groups in society.
COVID-19 – in both its origins and impacts – is emblematic of much that is wrong with humanity’s current development trajectory. While it has affected livelihoods, health and education across the world, the pandemic has also highlighted how growing inequalitiesdetermine the degree to which people can cope with a crisis. To understand why COVID-19 has had such an impact, the policy and development co-operation worlds need to broaden their understanding of what inequality looks like in the 21st century. This was the theme of the 2019 Human Development Report, and one of its key messages now seems particularly prescient. Governments everywhere, the report urged, must pay attention to an emerging, next generation of inequalities in areas that might once have been seen as luxuries, like broadband access, but are now rapidly becoming necessities.
COVID-19 is just an opening act for the long, slow burn of other impacts on our planet, including climate change.
While it is important to tackle inequalities to soften the impacts of the next crisis, it is equally important to look at what led to this pandemic and how to prevent another. COVID-19 is just an opening act for the long, slow burn of other impacts on our planet, including climate change. The human activities that harm the planet and exacerbate climate change created the conditions for this pandemic, and increase the risk of new disease outbreaks and new pandemics. The forthcoming 2020 Human Development Report will address the need for urgent action and look at how human development can progress while easing the pressures on our planet.
The scale of the global response to COVID-19 should embolden the development co-operation community. There is a need for enhanced collective action, within and across countries, to address inequalities; ensure that recovery financing supports transitions to sustainable production and consumption; and address the massive data gaps in our understanding of the natural world.
The COVID-19 crisis is causing a reversal in human development
For years, scientists have been warning that a new pandemic was on the horizon. There is nothing new about diseases springing from animals. Plague, influenza and tuberculosis started that way. While new diseases such as these are still rare, they have become more frequent and are now spreading more quickly. We know the reason: more pressure on the world’s remaining wildlife and more people coming in contact with animals, and viruses, they have never encountered before. This has created a time bomb.
The world has seen many crises over the past 30 years, among them health crises such as HIV/AIDS and Ebola and economic crises such as the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Each has hit human development, devastating the lives of millions. But the world, overall, has still made development gains year on year. What distinguishes COVID-19 is the triple hit to health, income and education, fundamental building blocks of human development. And as a result, simulations accounting for the impact of lockdown measures in the first half of 2020 indicated that the global Human Development Index would suffer a sharp decline (Figure 2.1).
The pandemic is not affecting everyone equally
The human and economic cost of the pandemic is mind-boggling. By early October, the World Health Organization was saying that as much as one-tenth of humanity might have already been infected (Tuemmler, Fox and Woodyatt, 2020[1]). But the fallout is not affecting all groups equally. Rather, it has highlighted the fault lines in society, showing all too clearly that some income groups are disadvantaged and suffer disproportionally. The virus – in some countries at least – has been more deadly among more disadvantaged groups. In the United States, for example, age-adjusted death rates from COVID-19 have been 2.5 times higher among black people compared to white (Wrigley-Field, 2020[2]). In the United Kingdom, the death rates among the most deprived decile of areas were more than double the rates among the least-deprived decile (Blundell et al., 2020[3]). And in South Africa, infection rates have been starkly higher in the townships than in wealthier areas (Reuters, 2020[4]). Moreover, the broader social and economic impacts of national shutdowns have also often hit the poor particularly hard, as in India, where 10 million migrant labourers had to return to their home villages – half a million on foot or by bicycle – when the lockdown began (Kugler and Sinha, 2020[5]). Preliminary analysis suggests progress against a broad swathe of deprivations could be set back by three to ten years in many developing countries (UNDP and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 2020[6]).
Figure 2.1. COVID-19 impacts may drive the biggest Human Development Index decline since 1990
Note: The 2019 value is a provisional estimate.
Source: UNDP (2020[7]), COVID-19 and Human Development: Assessing the Crisis, Envisioning the Recovery, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/covid-19_and_human_development_0.pdf.
Inequalities in areas crucial to human development worsen the impacts of the pandemic
Before the COVID-19 crisis, levels of inequality in basic capabilities were closing (Figure 2.2). In life expectancy at birth, in access to primary education and in access to mobile phones, countries with lower human development are catching up with more developed nations. While much still needs to be done and the gaps are still wide, the indicators show narrowing inequalities. The picture is different in terms of enhanced capabilities, where inequalities are widening. Countries with higher human development have longer life expectancy at older ages, higher tertiary education enrolment and more access to broadband – and they are increasing their lead.
COVID-19 has exposed the significance of many of these inequalities in enhanced capabilities. In particular, access to broadband Internet is determining whether people can continue to work and access healthcare remotely. Consider, too, education. The COVID-19 crisis resulted in millions of children around the world being sent home from school during the first half of 2020 (Human Development Report Office, 2020[8]), but not all pupils were affected equally. The United Nations Development Programme estimated in May 2020 that 86% of children in primary education were not getting an education in low human development countries, compared to just 20% in countries with very high human development. Until it was safe for schools to reopen, children out of school were not learning unless they could access classes remotely, for example over the radio, television or the Internet (Basto-Aguirre, Cerutti and Nieto-Parra, 2020[9]). This will almost certainly lead to widening gaps in education between children in rich and poor countries. We risk scarring an entire generation of children who will be left at a permanent disadvantage (Human Development Report Office, 2020[8]). This is what drives the decline in the simulated Human Development Index presented in Figure 2.1.
Thus, COVID-19 has reaffirmed one of the key messages of the 2019 Human Development Report: we must continue to close gaps in basic capabilities while working to reverse the trend of growing inequalities in enhanced capabilities to ensure the world is less vulnerable to shocks such as the current pandemic.
Figure 2.2. Levels of inequality in basic capabilities
The trajectory of development must be in balance with the planet and benefit all
The ways in which we put pressure on our planet and the impacts of that pressure interact with inequalities. Many who have wealth and power are preserving the status quo, while the negative consequences of their actions or inactions fall more heavily on those least able to cope, exacerbating inequalities. That is why, as crucial as it is to focus on dealing with the impacts of COVID-19, it is equally important to ask how it could have been prevented in the first place.
There is no doubt that pandemics are becoming more common. In 2012, Morse and his co‑authors argued that the frequency with which new pathogens emerge is increasing, even accounting for increased surveillance (Morse et al., 2012[10]). Why? The broad consensus appears to be that the human pressures on the planet, especially in biodiverse regions where wildlife diversity and microbial diversity go hand in hand, increase the chances of new diseases emerging and then spreading (Johnson et al., 2020[11]; Berger, 2020[12]; Morse et al., 2012[10]).
More humans and more activity increase the risk of a pandemic because, all things being equal, an increase in either puts more pressure on Earth’s systems. And while social distancing, testing and one day, hopefully, a vaccine will overcome COVID-19, the only cure for climate change is prevention and adaptation. As the 2020 Human Development Report will argue, the urgent challenge is to ensure that the trajectory of development is in balance with our planet and benefits all.
More planetary pressures, more risk
In 1951, the global population was around 2.5 billion people. It reached 5 billion in 1987 and now stands at almost 8 billion. By 2050, it is predicted to reach 10 billion (UN, 2020[13]). Diseases like COVID-19 leap from animals to people. All other things being equal, the sheer increase in population and the high density in many parts of the world increase human-animal interactions and therefore the risk of a virus mutating across the species boundary. Moreover, once a virus has made the leap from animal to human, there are now more people it can infect, more people living in densely populated environments and more who are moving around the world. Perfect conditions for a virus to spread.
Increases in activities such as forest clearing along with the wildlife trade have increased the chances of pandemics. Analysis by Loh et al. (2015[14]) found that the leading driver in zoonoses emergence is land‑use change. This is in line with other findings that land-use change (mainly for agriculture, grazing and plantations) is the single greatest pressure on the planet’s terrestrial ecosystems more generally (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010[15]).
There is no doubt the planet’s climate is changing and that human activity is responsible. A warming atmosphere is already driving dangerous planetary change and without urgent action, things will get worse. Extreme heatwaves and rising sea levels will leave areas uninhabitable. Widespread crop failures will leave millions at risk of food insecurity. Whole ecosystems may eventually collapse. And new diseases may spread as malaria- and dengue-carrying mosquitoes expand their range. Without urgent action, it is not a matter of if all this will happen, but when.
The COVID-19 response can be a springboard for global action on inequality and climate change
The impact of COVID-19 on human development is huge. But with concerted effort, much of that damage can be turned around. There should be two questions at the front of our minds as we consider a post‑COVID-19 world. First, what can we do to soften the impacts of the next crisis? And second, how can we reduce the risks of a similar pandemic from occurring in the first place?
The scale of the COVID-19 response should embolden the development co-operation community to tackle old and new inequalities and to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Some areas for action are as follows:
Recovery will require a change in global co-operation that promotes more co-ordination among countries and collective action in multiple dimensions of development. Countries can learn from each other and work together on an equal footing to fight inequalities in areas ranging from access to quality healthcare to access to broadband Internet.
Better accounting methods are needed to make visible both the social costs of inflicting damage on nature and the financial risks associated with climate change and other planetary pressures. This has the potential to dramatically shift incentives that drive where people, firms and governments invest. Already, fiscal packages allocated to support the COVID-19 recovery are being used to support transformations towards more sustainable production and consumption. Financial intermediaries also are responding to investor pressure to avoid investing in unsustainable assets, with some pension funds, for instance, divesting from fossil fuels. This is also smart investment, as some of these assets could become stranded in the future. The development co-operation community should engage with this fundamental shift in thinking about financing, ensuring that allocations of official development assistance can protect both people and the planet.
There are massive data gaps in our understanding of the natural world. We know far too little about the pace of deterioration of many ecosystems, for example. We also urgently need better data (beyond averages) on the myriad forms of inequality between groups of people, and how these inequalities are likely to determine the impact of shocks and crises, such as climate change, on particular groups.
The global response to COVID-19 demonstrates just how much can be done and how quickly in the face of a crisis. Mere months ago, at the start of 2020, it would have been unthinkable to suggest tackling global challenges with measures like those now being taken to defeat COVID-19. And yet, mitigating and adapting to climate change presents far greater challenges to humanity. They call for the same, or greater, magnitude of response – because no matter how much we want to believe that our species and the technology we invent give us mastery over the natural world, the laws of biology, chemistry and physics know differently. As James Lovelock (2009[16]), the environmentalist and author most famous for his Gaia Theory, reminded us, “it is hubris to think that we know how to save the Earth: our planet looks after itself. All we can do is try to save ourselves.”
References
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