New York Times Bestseller COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come? Lenin once said, "There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. Written in the form of ten "lessons," covering topics from natural and biological risks to the rise of "digital life" to an emerging bipolar world order, Zakaria helps readers to begin thinking beyond the immediate effects of COVID-19. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.
The Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking widespread disruption, social and economic. Much more than what the Great Depression and the Second World War together did. Unfolding as humankind’s greatest challenge to date, the pandemic is rapidly altering the world, its politics and economics. In the process, turning upside down established relationships, accepted rules and prevalent norms. Though we cannot foretell with certainty what is in store, we can at least try to decode the telltale signs that are popping up all around us. The Post-Pandemic Planet does precisely that. This futuristic study examines the socio-cultural changes that are in the offing. It peeps through the prism of unfolding events to understand the possibilities that lie ahead. Among others, The Post-Pandemic Planet looks at how coercion-employing territorial states are changing and how the politico-cultural nation states are morphing. It tries to go into the reasons why our social lives are gradually getting colonised and why mysophobia will increasingly dictate the complexion of travel tomorrow. Is Covidisation of a new European Union a possibility? What happens to the concept of common markets now? Will the Marshalls and the Molotovs give way to the Merkels of the world? Will food nationalism degenerate into gastroracism? What colour the world health order is likely to take? How will the dissent-intolerant governments manipulate the privacy laws tomorrow? Why is the World Wide Web in the danger of turning into a World Narrow Web? Will jingoistic data localisation lead to digital dictatorships? These are among a score of questions you will find answered in The Post-Pandemic Planet. As a pandemic-threatened planetarian, you are sure to find them absorbing.
"The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 draws on the troubled and uneven COVID-19 experience to illustrate the critical need to ramp up resilience rapidly and effectively on a global scale. After years of working alongside public health and resilience experts crafting policy to build both pandemic and climate change preparedness, Alice C. Hill exposes parallels between the underutilized measures that governments should have taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 -- such as early action, cross-border planning, and bolstering emergency preparation -- and the steps leaders can take now to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Through practical analyses of current policy and thoughtful guidance for successful climate adaptation, The Fight for Climate after COVID-19 reveals that, just as our society has transformed itself to meet the challenge of coronavirus, so too will we need to adapt our thinking and our policies to combat the ever-increasing threat of climate change." --
This book translates the latest theoretical perspectives on the emerging field of Planetary Health Studies into the practical reality of global political decision makers. It builds on the scientific data on the impacts of environmental change on human health to propose practical methods for operationalizing planetary health. The book maps opportunities for decision makers to break institutional silos and engage with bottom-up approaches that can transform planetary health from a global idea into a local reality. The analysis frames human health in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans have become the most powerful force affecting global ecosystems, and reveals new existential risks for humankind.Departing from ongoing multilateral efforts to promote sustainability, the author’s analysis places the agenda of planetary health on the desk of political decision makers, still underrepresented at planetary health gatherings. Given the pressing need to implement sustainable development policies, the book presents planetary health as an overarching framework for global policy targets, notably the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the post-2020 biodiversity framework under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The book is timely in offering a concrete road map for practitioners and researchers interested in transforming the concept of planetary health into reality. With a collection of success stories, the analysis dwells on tools for community engagement, opportunities for health professionals training, gender empowerment, digital health, and innovative ways to enhance human well-being on a changing planet.
This book explores the innovations, disruptions and changes that are required to adapt in a fast-evolving landscape due to the extraordinary circumstances triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognized experts from around the world share their research and professional experience on how the working environment, as well as the world around them, have changed due to the pandemic. Chapters consider how different fields across technology and business have been affected by this new, dramatic scenario and the drastic consequences that the pandemic had on them. With diverse contributions stemming from public health, technology strategies, urban planning and sociology to sustainable management, this volume is articulated into four distinct but complementary sections of People, Process, Planet, and Prosperity influencing the post-COVID world. This book will be of great interest to those in the fields of computer science and information technology, as well as those studying the impact and effects that COVID-19 is having on society.
"This book’s great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis."—Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review "Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed. The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death. Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that. Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.
The future of politics after the pandemic COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned? The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
Beyond precipitating illness and death in a great many people across the globe, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a diverse range of further impacts. Among these, it has revealed that rapid large-scale change in the behaviour of societies is possible, it has led to inspiring stories of human endeavour (and dispiriting stories of human greed), and it has offered a stark warning as to the fragility of current economies. In addition, the pandemic has provided a desperately needed opportunity for reflection on humanity's present trajectory, a course that is destroying the life-support systems on which we-and the innumerable species with whom we share the Earth-depend. In this collection of new writing, a number of the world's most exciting environmental thinkers provide their visions for what a radically new normal could look like in a post- Covid world. Between them, they shine a light on a spectrum of key topics, including economics, energy, food systems, education, climate, rewilding, animal rights and communication.
As an unprecedented global pandemic sweeps the planet, who better than the supercharged Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to uncover its deeper meanings, marvel at its mind-boggling paradoxes and speculate on the profundity of its consequences? We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Žižek, a new form of communism – the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism – may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. Written with his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H. G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx), Žižek provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.
