Finding profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet

THE iconic deadline for many an economic plan - 2020 - is turning out more to be Year 0 as the world is being remade by the global pandemic. In six short months, entire industries have been brought to their knees, household brands made bankrupt, and more than 195 million jobs lost, according to International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates in April.

Could we have been better prepared for this? Epidemiologists and virologists warned of a pandemic of Covid-19 scale decades ago. More recently and famously, Bill Gates - in a 2015 TED talk - pointed out that the world was simply "not ready for the next epidemic".

Even as we failed to heed the warnings this time round, it would be remiss if we continue to ignore other imminent and potentially more devastating threats: climate change and its attendant ecological impacts and the debilitating social and income disparities, which are exacerbated by Covid-19.