Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has already had a devastating impact on the world. Billions have had their lives disrupted and, by 1 July 2020, over ten million people had been infected and over 500,000 people had died. It is a safe prediction that, by the time you read this the figures will be much worse. Other pandemics in the past have killed more people – for example, the horrendous Spanish flu of 1918. But, reflecting the fact that we now live in a highly interconnected world, the COVID-19 virus set an unenviable world record in no time at all. It became the first virus to spread across the globe in a matter of a few short weeks.

Moreover, COVID-19 presents an ongoing threat, and it will almost certainly continue to do so, even after a vaccine is discovered. The gravity of our current predicament has led to many voices, as in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, pleading ‘never again’. A central claim of this book is that the COVID-19 pandemic, while it is awful and merciless in every respect, provides all of us with a remarkable opportunity to engage in a radical rethink. We need to ask the question: after COVID-19, what kind of future do we want for ourselves, for our children, for our grandchildren and for subsequent generations?

Profound political choices now present themselves. Some believe that the best strategy is to roll back the clock to 2019, to revert, somehow, to the kind of world that existed shortly before this new, and lethal, virus emerged. Others take the view that the COVID-19 pandemic raises fundamental questions that need to be addressed. They ask: is it wise to believe that continued exploitation of people and the planet provides the right lodestar for modern societies? It may seem idealistic but perhaps now is the time to think through why the world is in such a bad place and, equally important, to share ideas on how to co-create a rather different world – one that recognizes that we are all interconnected.