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Is COVID-19 frustrating or facilitating sustainability transformations?
Summary
This chapter examines whether the COVID-19 pandemic has helped or hindered the transition to sustainability, noting that the crisis exposed deep interconnections between human health and ecological systems. The pandemic's surge in single-use plastic waste represents a setback for sustainability, while increased awareness of systemic risk may create openings for change.
COVID-19 and nature crises are interconnected. The climate and biodiversity crises consistently illustrate how people, ecosystems, and other living beings around the world are interconnected. COVID-19 has made this link even more obvious. As debates on transformations for sustainability and ‘building back better’ intensify, this chapter assesses whether COVID-19 is frustrating or facilitating these sustainability transformations and demands for environmental justice. While an increased call for connecting human rights and environmental law is beneficial, this chapter contends that COVID-19 and social-ecological crises require the implementation of human rights principles informed by a deeper understanding of the principles of interdependence and indivisibility of human rights in order to help trigger sustainability transformations. Recognizing and supporting the transformative agency of groups in vulnerable situations, rather than framing them as passive victims, is also at the core of human rights-nature solutions.
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