Page 105 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

beachside holiday resort) or a company (like a hotel group)
will not necessarily be considered as material by investors

and will therefore not be priced in by the markets.

2. The causality problem is easy to grasp, as are the reasons
that make respective policies so much more difficult to
implement. In the case of the pandemic, the causation link
between the virus and the disease is obvious: SARS-CoV-

2 causes COVID-19. Apart from a handful of conspiracy
theorists, nobody will dispute that. In the case of
environmental risks, it is much more difficult to attribute

direct causality to a specific event. Often, scientists cannot
point to a direct link of causation between climate change
and a specific weather event (like a drought or the severity
of a hurricane). Similarly, they don’t always agree about
how a specific human activity affects particular species

facing extinction. This makes it incredibly more difficult to
mitigate climate change and nature loss risks. While for a
pandemic, a majority of citizens will tend to agree with the

necessity to impose coercive measures, they will resist
constraining policies in the case of environmental risks
where the evidence can be disputed. A more fundamental
reason also exists: fighting a pandemic does not require a
substantial change of the underlying socio-economic model

and of our consumption habits. Fighting environmental
risks does.

1.5.1. Coronavirus and the environment

1.5.1.1. Nature and zoonotic diseases

Zoonotic diseases are those that spread from animals to
humans. Most experts and conservationists agree that they have
drastically increased in recent years, particularly because of

deforestation (a phenomenon also linked to an increase in carbon
dioxide emissions), which augments the risk of close human–
animal interaction and contamination. For many years,

researchers thought that natural environments like tropical forests
and their rich wildlife represented a threat to humans because this

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