What after COVID?

COVID-19 has been impactful if we had to summarize it in one word. The impacts, however, have been on both sides of the sustainability spectrum.

COVID-19 has led to the shutdown of economies and loss of livelihood for a considerable percentage of the population. It has drastically increased water and land pollution due to improper waste disposal. A specific case is the shoreline pollution that has occurred due to the dumping of biomedical waste into water bodies. But it is not all bad. If we step back a bit and look at the bigger picture, we might be able to notice some positive benefits that COVID-19 has given us. These are chances to undo the years of environmental damage that we have done to the earth and it depends upon us if we want to pursue these paths or not.

Given below is a matrix for all the impacts of COVID-19, categorized into immediate, short-term and long-term.

The green cells represent the positive impacts, the red cells the negative ones and the white cells the neutral ones.

It is no surprise that over a long time, all the impacts are positive and will push us towards a more environment-friendly, sustainable world.

Today, we are at a critical juncture in the history of humanity. What we decide today, will impact our lives for centuries to come. COVID-19 has clearly shown that human and planetary health are intimately interconnected.

Our world is going through a phase of instability. There are fast and dynamic changes in our environment and society. Once we get out of this dynamic phase, there are three paths that lie ahead of us.

It depends on the governments and their policies that will determine which path our world will take. We should take COVID-19 as a lesson and actively document and tell its story so that the future changemakers of the world do not forget that we can still save the world if we act right.