What has COVID-19 taught us about risk in this interconnected world?

From the mangroves of West Bengal to the vast archipelago that makes up Indonesia, and from the bustling port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to the tropical shores of southern Togo, the systemic risks of the COVID-19 pandemic have been exposed in human terms. very raw.

Millions of people who were already struggling to make ends meet, often working in the informal economy of the agricultural sector and surviving below the poverty line, faced a series of new risks they could not have foreseen. .

Among them the lack of employment, indebtedness, civil and domestic violence, the derailment of children’s education and fewer opportunities. In many places, women suffered disproportionately due to existing gender bias in society.

On the whole, these human experiences are not just a catalog of suffering in places around the world that often do not make headlines. Indeed, they highlight a very real challenge: how to better understand and manage the cascading systemic risks resulting from COVID-19 as it spreads across borders.

Life-threatening domino effect

The report “Rethinking risks in times of COVID-19” shows how, in each of four locations studied—the paper consists of five field investigations conducted in 2021 by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) and the United Nations Office United Nations for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)—a domino effect is clearly observed, resulting from the outbreak of COVID-19, which spread through societies far beyond the immediate effects of the pandemic itself.

The cases clearly illustrate that our world is interconnected through systems that come with associated risks and volatility that have revealed, and reinforced, vulnerabilities throughout society.

In the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil, for example, families already living in overcrowded conditions suffered more from stay-at-home orders than those in more favorable living situations.

The city’s health system reached a turning point in a matter of weeks after the first case was detected in February 2020, causing a high number of bodies to remain unattended in hospitals and residences, as well as in the streets. The images of corpses accumulated in the streets that circulated through the media around the world showed what happened when COVID-19 reached densely populated urban areas..

UNU-EHS/Polina Schapova

School closures during the COVID-19 lockdowns had a negative impact on children’s nutritional needs, with schools providing a daily meal to every child under the age of five.

A complex and fragile network

Before COVID-19, the interrelationship of such risks was not evident in our daily lives. Neither was the systemic nature of these risks, that is, how they affected, or could potentially affect, entire societies beyond the problem itself.

On the one hand, when we thought of systemic risks, we related them to what happened with the financial crisis of 2008, where the failure of the big banks spread throughout the world economy, leaving millions of people without work and causing a global economic recession. .

Other examples of this interrelation are seen in how climate change, natural disasters and, more recently, the global consequences of the war in Ukraine, which show that our world depends on a complex and often fragile web of interdependent factors and, if destabilized, can have devastating effects on entire societies.

Without going any further, since Ukraine and Russia are the main world producers of cereals and fertilizers, one of the indirect effects of the war can be seen in the increase in world food prices. This has resulted in rising costs of living for those who can afford them and pushes those who cannot into greater food insecurity.

WFP/Richard Mbouet

Cape Verde is facing record levels of food insecurity as a result of drought, COVID-19 and the crisis in Ukraine.

change of perspective

The appearance of COVID-19 forced us to broaden the perspective of systemic risks. The good news is that you have broadened your understanding of these risks and how to address them.

Hazards and disturbances can arise from outside and inside the system. Exposure to these circumstances can be indirect, meaning that the effects can be felt in places that are not directly affected by the hazard—in this case, COVID-19—but end up harmed as a result of the interaction. Finally, the vulnerability of one system can also become a danger or a disturbance for other interdependent systems.

What measures can then be taken to improve risk management, given that traditional approaches are insufficient in more complex environments?

One of them is to understand how things are connected. The cascading effects caused by COVID-19 made it possible to detect the correlation that exists in many of these systems and to assess whether they are working as expected.

Another is to identify implicit policy trade-offs: various measures imposed by COVID-19, such as school closures, stay-at-home requests, or travel restrictions, have had widespread effects.

This highlights the need to assess and evaluate the possible trade-offs and cascading effects that the introduction of such measures entails, as they can have unexpected repercussions and aggravate existing vulnerabilities in society.

A third measure is to focus on system recovery processes without leaving anyone behind. The intrinsic linkage of systems presents an opportunity to achieve positive tipping points, creating beneficial effects. In the context of the pandemic, this became a reality with the creation of jobs that followed the provision of financial assistance by governments, charities and NGOs, or the advances in digitalization that followed home confinement measures. .

Today’s interconnected world is an evolving system, and disasters are often the result of failures of that system.

This report shows that the time has come to develop a deeper understanding of systemic risks and how they trigger other hazards and shocks, often unpredictably.

It also reveals that managing these risks must be properly integrated into the way policymakers, planners, and other stakeholders approach risk management, with the goal of creating more resilient, equitable communities and societies. and prosperous all over the world.