The Compounding Crises of the Pandemic, Climate Change, and Ukraine

Mar 1, 2022 | Alexander Verbeek
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As Eisenhower could have told you, if you continue to prioritize the urgent above the important, most of your essential tasks will ultimately end in the urgent & important quadrant, making your challenge even harder. Just when some governments hoped that the worst of the pandemic would finally be over in their countries, the war in Ukraine started. 

And against this background, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented today its latest report. All 195 member states approved the text stating that small steps are no longer sufficient to tackle the climate crisis.  The world is not in a crisis. It is worse: there are many. You can easily tick off the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as crises that all need urgent attention. At first glance, these may seem like independent events, but they are all connected. Worse: they often negatively impact each other.

If political leaders had listened to the warnings of climate experts in the 1990s, we would now have far more alternative forms of energy, which would tie our economies less to countries that we prefer not to be dependent upon.