Activating Trust: Energising Sustainability for a ‘Low Touch Economy’

By Manishankar Prasad,

​Date of Publication: 20 June, 2020

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This pandemic has overturned the old normal or as Bill Gates calls it the ‘semi-normal’. No one is cognizant of the contours of the constantly buffering new normal. The demise of the world as know, needed a brutally savage global pause, the world war for this generation. As has been the case World Wars have been a ‘policy window’ for transformation as the current paradigm for thinking, theory and praxis breaches its sell by date. The future of work and everything we map in foresight and scenario planning exercises is brought forward by a decade or gets pulverised by the weight of the times we inhabit.

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As the world enters the phase, where lives and livelihoods both need to be balanced, with the hope and prayers that a silver bullet in the form of a medicine or vaccine brings salvation to humankind. The environmental space beginning from academia, research, consultancies, NGOs, technology firms and the regulators have shaped the discourse on the normative till the black swan of the pandemic, where the calculus and rhetoric was overturned in the light of present, real and imminent danger. Environmental issues are multi scaler and hierarchical.  The global climate change externalities such as cyclones are manifested in the local and the regional in terms of first and second order effects such as rainfall and flooding. Flooding causes utility disruptions that impede routine lives and businesses hitting the local economy. Lives when impacted in an intimate manner bring the global home. The pandemic is a result of globalisation, cutting across class, race and nationalities. It is the greatest equaliser in a trenchantly unequal world. Climate Change as the virus is a global idea and phenomenon engaging with the everyday and mutating its outcomes in unpredictable ways. Fighting the global pandemic in terms of ‘flattening the curve’ has flattened the global GDP curve, while the infections are still on the rise.

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The world reconfigured by the virus, has brought about social configurations (social distancing) and values (hygiene and cleanliness) for a brand-new operating environment. Sustainability is an omnibus and umbrella meta-concept which moulds its shape as a hydra, depending on the context.  Sustainability has intellectual imports from Meteorology to Ground Water Modelling to Social Anthropology to Finance depending on the end user case. The intellectual edginess and porosity of the sustainability framework is a strength in building the relevant tools on the go while fulfilling its core purpose of saving the planet for our children and their children.

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Sustainability is connected to measures in order to secure the long term and thus is grounded in the value of trust. In the aftermath and during this pandemic, trust is the need of the day. Sustainability through its focus on improving the quality of life for communities will be the central pillar in a post COVID-19 world. The measures for hygiene and social distancing is a facet which can interact with sustainability frameworks and policies of companies and cities in a synergistic fashion.  Sustainability draws a lot from the analytical sciences with strong laboratory capacities in testing. Hygiene is detected through quantification of water samples for viral loads. Predictive modelling is a mainstay in Environmental Impact Assessment Studies in air and noise. The post pandemic world shall require a lot of analytical modelling and scenario analysis for cogent decision making. As per Mr. Vineet Chatwal, CEO of a Skills Centric University in the Indian State of Odisha in an education webinar relayed a statistic that 60-70 percent of his university campus cannot be inhabited if all the social distancing norms are adhered to the last dot. He had his team model scenarios for aiding the decision-making processes in the post lockdown era. How many of us are modelling scenarios for optimising our businesses in the post pandemic world?

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There has been an emphasis on resilience for communities in this turbulent period. Sustainability is a starting point for conversations on resilience as it’s a tripod where ecology, society and economy intersect. Communities when consulted in an inclusive manner, beyond the performance of participation build trust in order to reimagine and restore our communities to health. This trust will coalesce communities for the next phase of humanity, and sustainability as an intellectual enabler can drive that change.