Global Health Security and COVID-19

Curated and produced by Women’s Economic Imperative

In this final decade for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals and in light of the yet unfolding economic and social impacts of the pandemic, it essential to take a multi-disciplinary and inclusive approach to the response and recovery discussions aimed at identifying strategic pathways for our global, national, and regional leaders. The key objective of this session is to help articulate the perspectives of the Global South on the immediate issues, risks and consequences of the current and future pandemics, broadly defined, within the G20 member countries and across the Global South. This discussion is important, as we work on policy responses to address the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 and other emerging pandemics.

This Global Table will address key issues, propose solutions, and draw on lessons of experience where relevant. The multi-disciplinary panel of experts and leaders will discuss the social and economic impacts of the pandemic as well as policy solutions in the following areas: Health as a global public good; social cohesion, macroeconomic resilience, and microeconomic impacts; and social and economic resilience and the importance of a gender lens.

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again shown that we need everyone to get involved in a massive effort to keep the world safe. Researchers are working at high speed to understand new viruses, develop treatments and vaccines to curb pandemics and prevent future outbreaks. With COVID-19 new forms of collaboration have emerged for scientists around the world to share results much faster than during any previous outbreaks. With leadership by the G20 and the World Health Organization (WHO), science and other actors crucial for global health have to take a collective and non-discriminative responsibility to support such a form of global governance.

The far-reaching measures enacted by most countries worldwide to contain the COVID-19 pandemic have massive consequences for the economies. The situation affects almost every enterprise, regardless of whether it caters local communities or the global economy. The effects spread across countries as tightly knit global production networks are interrupted. Countries have different capacities to absorb the shock and counter it with fiscal policy. Not only the nature of a pandemic is global as it does not stop at borders; the tight integration of the world economy make the economic fall-out a global challenge to solve. The G20, as flexible forum of the world’s richest and most powerful countries, has a major role in stabilising the world economy: in coordinating fiscal and monetary responses, in helping developing country partners to manage the crisis, and in giving guidance and vision in these challenging times. Can the G20 live up to this task?

Curated and produced by CRUISSE Network and the UCL Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty

Policy-making is best understood as enacted in contexts of uncertainty and complexity rather than as a lottery. Radical uncertainty arises when you cannot quantify which factors are going to influence the future in what way and you may not know what the consequences of interventions are, or perhaps even where and when you can intervene. And in this situation you are not be the only one in a state of radical uncertainty, because everybody else is as well.

This is the context we are all in today with COVID-19, so the lack of global preparedness and often slow response to COVID-19 is a case study of the consequences of spending too much time discussing good decision-making as if it’s like lottery choice and too little time learning to be “attentive” to human strengths and weaknesses in coping with Radical Uncertainty. This panel explores how to think and to make better policy under radical uncertainty discusses both a proposal to create an independent Office for Global Risk Preparedness to help us mitigate pandemic and similar global threats in future, and the need to reform university curricula to get real.