Section: CRUNS Comment

This year has been one of the stranger ones in my life, and I’m sure yours as well. Looking back from the perspective of late October 2020, I had no idea at the start of the year how much time I was going to be spending in my study rather than in the office or a hotel! Covid has forced major lifestyle changes upon all of us this year, and it has definitely accelerated some trends that were already making themselves felt, but which have suddenly become a major part of our forced adaptation to strange times. I haven’t used cash since March, for example, except at one stubborn local takeaway that can’t take contactless payments. Perhaps the greatest of these changes has been enforced remote working, and that has meant looking at digital technologies and the way we can use them. Even those of us who are, shall we say, not digital natives or early adopters, have had to become intimate with both the potential and the pitfalls of Zoom, Teams and all of the rest.

It’ s not a very worthy thought, I’m afraid, but I must admit it was my first reaction on seeing the terrible pictures from Beirut on August 4th. The explosion that ripped through the centre of the historic and much troubled Mediterranean city was captured from many different smartphone cameras, and watching the expanding vapour cloud from the supersonic shockwave, and witnessing the sheer size of the explosion, it seemed immediately evident to me that it had to be a high explosive responsible, not the fireworks that could be glimpsed sparkling beforehand in the smoke from the burning warehouse. The rising cloud of orange-brown nitrogen dioxide that followed the blast was the clincher – it looked like it was ammonium nitrate yet again.

At the end of last year, in our November/ December 2019 issue, I remarked upon the fresh impetus that the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) target of reducing carbon emissions from shipping by 50% in 2050 (compared to a 2008 baseline) had given to the idea of using ammonia as a shipping fuel. This year, in spite of You Know What, things seem to have, if anything, accelerated.

The devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to be felt around the world. At time of writing, nearly 4 million cases have been recorded, and at least a quarter of a million people have died, with the suspicion of many more, either from accidental or deliberate undercounting. Figures for excess deaths above a normal seasonal baseline show that places such as Turkey, Ecuador and Indonesia have probably been far worse affected than the official statistics show. There are nevertheless finally hopeful signs that Europe, so far the worst affected region, is beginning to follow the pattern of East Asia and Oceania and that cases are falling. The infection also seems to have peaked in North America, though in the US there is a long tail of infections. Elsewhere, cases are still rising in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.

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.