Officials from 30 countries discuss how to tackle climate change and inequality when the world bounces back from COVID-19
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Officials from 30 countries discuss how to tackle climate change and inequality when the world bounces back from COVID-19
Coronavirus is changing the world in unprecedented ways. Subscribe here for a daily briefing on how this global crisis is affecting cities, technology, approaches to climate change, and the lives of vulnerable people.
By Megan Rowling
BARCELONA, April 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Government efforts to help economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic could also tackle inequality and climate change through investment in energy-smart buildings, electric vehicles and other green measures, officials and economists said on Monday.
As 30 nations joined a two-day virtual climate dialogue, co-chaired by Germany and Britain, policy makers stressed that spending to head off a global depression due to COVID-19 shutdowns should not restart growth built on planet-heating fossil fuels.
"The climate crisis has not disappeared just because we are currently focusing on another acute crisis," said German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze.
The coronavirus outbreak had helped many around the world understand what it was like to live through a major crisis, she told journalists.
"I believe that in the future people will be more willing to do something against the long-term environmental crisis that we will be faced with, if we don't act," she added.
The world may not yet have a vaccine for COVID-19 but it knows how to stave off climate change, she said.
Measures such as shifting to renewable, clean wind and solar power are "available, affordable and they make our lives better", she noted.
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The German government said the Petersberg Climate Dialogue would focus on how to organise a green economic recovery after the emergency phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
The dialogue would also look at how countries could push