A Test of Resilience: Covid-19 and the Business of Europe’s Green Deal
The impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic is clearly enormous in health, social and economic terms. It has also had an immediate environmental impact which may play out over the longer term, with a number of political repercussions. How resilient is the European Union’s Green Deal proving to be? What are the implications for business, policymakers and other stakeholders to this strategic initiative which seeks to make Europe climate neutral by 2050 strategy? The impact could have global consequences.
Coronavirus as a sustainability challenge
If the notion of ‘business as usual’ as we entered the 2020s had any residual meaning, it must surely have lost it in the wake of Covid-19. The impact of the global pandemic is clearly enormous in health, social and economic terms. Even if different countries and regions are experiencing its grim human effects in different ways, depending on the timing and extent of public health responses and their effectiveness, the degree to which social and economic activity has shut down is significant almost everywhere. With the prospect that restrictions are maintained in some form for many months to come, global financial markets are anticipating a depression as severe as in the 1930s, and perhaps even more so in some countries – even taking into account the historic commitments from governments and financial institutions to construct emergency economic survival and recovery packages.
