Post-Pandemic Measures: Enabling a Green Recovery
Policy Brief (2020)
Executive Summary
Pandemics, by their global nature, subject the international community to a collective experience at once humbling and unifying, unjust and yet entirely predictable. COVID-19 is the sixth infectious disease to have reached pandemic scale since Spanish influenza claimed nearly 40 million lives in 1918. Between 2008 and 2011 alone, the WHO reports a further 1483 epidemic events spanning 172 countries. Indeed, the modern world economy fosters “near-ideal conditions” for viral transmission due to an unprecedented volume of global trade and trave. This reality informs the imperative for global collective action in developing pandemic prevention, preparedness, and recovery strategies simultaneously tailored to national circumstances while also responsive to broader social, economic, and environmental challenges. As COVID-19 has exploited failures of existing measures to comprehensively address the myriad intersections of disease and human well-being, placing international institutions under severe strain, it is critical to design and deploy novel law and governance approaches sensitive to this need. To this end, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lend an important framework which must guide decision-making as COVID-19 relief packages take shape around the world.
Download the policy brief here: CISDL Post-Pandemic Policy Brief – 01.11.2020-Final
