The global response and fallout from the coronavirus pandemic serves as a dress rehearsal for a worldwide climate catastrophe, the head of the UN’s sustainable business agency has warned.
Lise Kingo, executive director of the UN Global Compact, insisted in an interview with The Guardian that there were “very, very clear connections” linking the current health crisis, climate change issues and the Black Lives Matter protests that have spread across the globe.
The coronavirus pandemic is “just a fire drill” for what’s coming, she told the news outlet. Government actions purportedly taken to stop the spread of the virus have crippled economies across the globe and it has been attributed to widespread social unrest – making her warning particularly sobering.
According to the UN official, issues surrounding inequality are “part of the sustainable development agenda.” She added that “the only way forward is to create a world that leaves no one behind.”
Kingo also argued that the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd at the hands of police exposed a “horrible racism” in the world, and that human rights were “inseparable” from dealing with climate issues. She encouraged CEOs and business owners to become “social activists,” claiming that young people would not want to work for them unless they “understand social equality.“
Although she didn’t elaborate on exactly how Black Lives Matter demonstrations relate to climate change, it appears that many activists have already made the connection.
Last week, climate-change activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) targeted Cambridge University, vandalizing a college building in protest against a memorial for allegedly “racist” statistician Ronald Fisher. Although hailed as one of the important figures in 20th century statistics, Fisher was an outspoken proponent of eugenics and even postulated that civilizations fail because people of “low genetic value” have more children than people with “high genetic value.”
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