COVID-19 recovery and climate policy

The global crises of COVID-19 and climate change present unparalleled challenges, with policymakers now at a crossroads. The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed sickness and death worldwide and a global economic crisis that is still unfolding today. A swift and sweeping response has come from governments around the world, triggering roughly $8 trillion by April 2020 in economic stimulus and recovery spending (IMF, 2020a). Most of the spending has been in developed countries, with later estimates suggesting that stimulus announced by G20 and other major economies surpasses $17 trillion today (Beyer & Vandermosten, 2021). Debt crises in developing countries are expected to deepen due to the pandemic as their governments’ borrowing increases, in turn diminishing their ability to meet financial obligations; increased debt payments lower their ability to spend on other priorities from health to basic infrastructure services or acting on climate change (von Lüpke et al., 2020). The challenges of the pandemic itself have been exacerbated by a legacy of economic and racial inequality and by a failure to sufficiently invest in basic health care and infrastructure services for all (Phillips et al., 2020). The same could be said of the challenges for effective climate change policy and spending, notably where a lack of investment in basic infrastructure services increases the vulnerability of the poor to climate change (Revi et al., 2014). The rise in climate-related (un)natural disasters has compounded risks and impacts from the pandemic, threatening local and global recovery efforts and disrupting the already too slow pace of climate adaptation responses (Phillips et al., 2020; Ranger et al., 2021). But amidst the human suffering, the pandemic’s crisis conditions have created new opportunities to break down political, economic, and social inertia to spark real, transformational change. These opportunities were recognized early in the pandemic by many international organizations, including the UN, UN Climate Change, the IEA, OECD, and IMF, all advocating for a ‘green recovery’ and calling on governments to ‘build back’ or ‘recover better’. At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue of May 2020, for example, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres identified a ‘rare and short window of opportunity to rebuild our world for the better’. These calls were motivated in part by the vast sums of money announced by some governments for economic stimulus and recovery spending. There were hopes that these unprecedented financial flows would be directed towards investments that would not only generate economic recovery, but also boost efforts towards decarbonisation, greater climate resilience, and wider achievement of the sustainable development goals. For Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Change secretariat, there was ‘an opportunity for nations to green their recovery packages and shape the twenty-first century economy in ways that are clean, green, healthy, safe and more resilient’. The climate crisis and its real-world impacts are no longer distant threats. Climate change is here and now (IPCC, 2021). The question is what are we doing to respond? Will these twin crises shake policymakers out of lethargy to go beyond good intentions and embrace transformational change (Kinley et al., 2021)? How can we act to slow the pace and scale of climate change, particularly in the face of the post-pandemic world order? How can governments take advantage of this unique situation and use unprecedented levels of public spending to build a climate-safe economic recovery?