Page 103 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

1.5. Environmental reset

At first glance, the pandemic and the environment might seem
to be only distantly related cousins; but they are much closer and
more intertwined than we think. Both have and will continue to
interact in unpredictable and distinctive ways, ranging from the

part played by diminished biodiversity in the behaviour of
infectious diseases to the effect that COVID-19 might have on
climate change, thus illustrating the perilously subtle balance and
complex interactions between humankind and nature.

Furthermore, in global risk terms, it is with climate change and
ecosystem collapse (the two key environmental risks) that the
pandemic most easily equates. The three represent, by nature
and to varying degrees, existential threats to humankind, and we
could argue that COVID-19 has already given us a glimpse, or

foretaste, of what a full-fledged climate crisis and ecosystem
collapse could entail from an economic perspective: combined
demand and supply shocks, and disruption to trade and supply

chains with ripple and knock-on effects that amplify risks (and in
some cases opportunities) in the other macro categories:
geopolitics, societal issues and technology. If climate change,
ecosystem collapse and pandemics look so similar as global risks,
how do they really compare? They possess many common

attributes while displaying strong dissimilarities.

The five main shared attributes are: 1) they are known (i.e.
white swan) systemic risks that propagate very fast in our
interconnected world and, in so doing, amplify other risks from

different categories; 2) they are non-linear, meaning that beyond a
certain threshold, or tipping point, they can exercise catastrophic
effects (like “superspreading” in a particular location and then
overwhelming the capabilities of the health system in the case of

the pandemic); 3) the probabilities and distribution of their impacts
are very hard, if not impossible, to measure – they are constantly
shifting and having to be reconsidered under revised

assumptions, which in turn makes them extremely difficult to
manage from a policy perspective; 4) they are global in nature and

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