“Tragedy need not be its on­ly lega­cy…the pan­dem­ic rep­re­sents a rare but nar­row win­dow of op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­flect, reimag­ine, and re­set our world to cre­ate health­i­er, more eq­ui­table and more pros­per­ous fu­ture”

—Pro­fes­sor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor,

World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum.

I am a be­liev­er of this phi­los­o­phy and in par­tic­u­lar, the nar­row­ness of the win­dow for ac­tion. This can­not be an evo­lu­tion­ary process, it must be rev­o­lu­tion­ary, be­cause, if left to nat­ur­al or­der, I’m afraid that hu­man re­sis­tance to change will quick­ly re­vert to the old nor­mal which got us to the dread­ed Covid-19.

The coro­n­avirus did not give us time to write white pa­pers, green pa­pers, hold pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions and de­bates in par­lia­ment. It thrust it­self up­on the world and we (the glob­al we) were forced to adapt in record time. In T&T, sud­den­ly our health care sys­tem usu­al­ly plagued with in­ef­fi­cien­cies and mis­man­age­ment was Con­trol Cen­tre and able to bring us to a lev­el of con­tain­ment that in­vit­ed in­ter­na­tion­al ac­co­lades.

For a long time, peo­ple like me have called for work from home/flexi hours as a so­lu­tion to the grid­lock on the na­tion’s roads, ar­gu­ing that this would al­so im­prove fam­i­ly and qual­i­ty of life. So many par­ents leave home while kids are asleep and re­turn when they in bed. But the trac­tion nev­er took. The state and pri­vate sec­tors re­mained stead­fast in want­i­ng phys­i­cal pres­ence in the work­place, as if, to see em­ploy­ees at desks equals pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Need­less to say, our poor pro­duc­tiv­i­ty rank­ing on the Glob­al com­pet­i­tive­ness in­dex tells the re­al sto­ry.

I have heard many suc­cess sto­ries of work from home dur­ing Covid-19. Will these trans­late in­to long term so­cial re­set? Imag­ine the sav­ings in rent, main­te­nance, over­heads, etc (where prac­ti­ca­ble) which can re­sult and con­tribute to in­creased busi­ness com­pet­i­tive­ness. And most im­por­tant, the con­comi­tant re­duc­tion in our car­bon foot­print. Of course, there will be the ob­vi­ous losers; land­lords, cloth­ing and shoe sup­pli­ers, even restau­rants which de­pend on work­ing class cus­tomers. This is where the op­por­tu­ni­ty for reimag­in­ing comes in. The con­ver­sion of va­cat­ed re­al es­tate in­to green­er and more pro­duc­tive us­es? A shift to “home-work” at­tire, more de­liv­ery of food? Post-COVID de­mand pat­terns are chang­ing and with it new op­por­tu­ni­ties are emerg­ing.

Then there is the for­eign trav­el for work and meet­ings. Covid-19 brought this to a grind­ing halt. Did busi­ness meet­ings stop hap­pen­ing? Not at all, on­line meet­ing plat­forms like zoom and google chat videos and oth­ers I’m ig­no­rant of, stepped in to pro­vide so­lu­tions. Again, if this re­mains the post-COVID norm, CO2 emis­sions would be re­duced and busi­ness trav­ellers could see more of their fam­i­lies. The biggest ca­su­al­ty in this in­stance would be the air­line in­dus­try.

But maybe the air­line in­dus­try needs such a jolt to rev­o­lu­tionise its re­sponse to the cli­mate change im­per­a­tive with re­spect to fos­sil fu­el con­sump­tion and health pro­to­cols. Car­bon diox­ide emit­ted by air­lines in­creased by 32% from 2013 to 2018, ac­cord­ing to a study by the In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­cil on Clean Trans­porta­tion (IC­CT). In fact, the IC­CT cal­cu­lat­ed the to­tal in­crease over the past five years to be equiv­a­lent to build­ing about 50 coal-fired pow­er plants (re­port­ed in The Guardian by Gwyn Topham). Even be­fore Covid-19, the in­dus­try was aim­ing by 2050 to cut to­tal emis­sions to half the 2005 lev­el, us­ing a com­bi­na­tion of sus­tain­able fu­els and rad­i­cal new tech­nolo­gies. Well, now is the time to re­set tar­gets, maybe 2030 or soon­er, needs to be the new 2050.

Let’s talk ed­u­ca­tion. Cer­tain­ly at the ter­tiary lev­el, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, in quick time, tran­si­tioned to on­line class­es and ex­ams. This was a phe­nom­e­nal ac­com­plish­ment for an in­sti­tu­tion gen­er­al­ly re­sis­tant to change. And while the teething prob­lems are still be­ing ironed out, the In­sti­tu­tion has in­deed vir­tu­al­ly kept the wheels of teach­ing and learn­ing in mo­tion. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we have not been as nim­ble to adapt at the lev­el of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion.

While there are cer­tain­ly some suc­cess sto­ries of teach­ers find­ing cre­ative on­line modes to con­tin­ue the teach­ing process, it’s not across the board and the is­sue of stu­dent ac­cess to com­put­ers and in­ter­net adds to the chal­lenge. And I won’t do more than men­tion the dis­turb­ing con­tentions around the ad­min­is­ter­ing of SEA, CSEC and CAPE. Teach­ing and learn­ing has been reimag­ined be­yond brick and mor­tar.

Yes Covid-19 has trig­gered se­vere hu­man and eco­nom­ic tragedy, but it has al­so un­leashed the hu­man spir­it in imag­i­na­tive ways.

From zoom con­gre­ga­tion­al wor­ship, to on­line util­i­ty pay­ments to Banks grow­ing a con­science to self- suf­fi­cien­cy in so­cial dis­tanc­ing. Let us con­tin­ue to re­flect, reimag­ine and re­set.