Section: CRUNS Comment

What a difference two months can make. When I came to write the editorial for the January/February issue, the talk was all about climate change and sustainable production in the wake of Australia’s bushfire crisis, but these days there appears to be only one story that it is obsessing the world, and that of course is the Covid19 pandemic. The focus of concern has pivoted in recent days and weeks away from China and east Asia, which seem – hopefully – to have weathered the worst of the storm so far, and across to Europe and North America, where some difficult weeks and perhaps months clearly lie ahead.

At the time of writing this editorial, the World Economic Forum was having its usual annual meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos. Prior to this year’s meeting, as usual the WEF had produced its annual Global Risks Report to serve as a talking point for the meeting. While some of the risks were as usual political and economic, from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the “retreat from multilateralism” to growing inequalities of wealth in the developed world and “domestic political polarisation”, for the first time in the organisation’s history, the top five global risks in the report ranked by likeliness – which looks at potential global pitfalls over the next 10 years – were environmental. Perhaps with the pictures of Australia’s bush fire season fresh in their minds, the 750 experts ranked extreme weather events as the most likely, but climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainability in agriculture all ranked highly.