By Virginia Capmourteres
GIER’s Director, Dr. Madhur Anand, wrote an article for the World Economic Forum explaining what COVID-19 can teach us about human behaviour.
Dr. Anand says that the pandemic itself is not good for any of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, we have seen that rapid and unprecedented changes in human behaviour can indeed shape environmental trajectories. For example, air pollution has dropped significantly in many urban centres across the globe due to the lockdown.
Dr. Anand says that ‘social learning’, or the way people learn from each other and change their behaviour accordingly, can help us respond better when we are faced with a common enemy. What if we harnessed this lesson from COVID-19 to reduce the risk of catastrophes and environmental threats in the future?
