Huma Balouch
Imagine if a country reduced its carbon footprint by a quarter in just two weeks, dramatically improves its Air Quality Index from 303 to 92 in a month, and its electricity demand plummeted by 30% compared to the same period the previous year. These earlier unimaginable scenarios have turned into reality in China, India, and Pakistan as a result of the ongoing pandemic crisis of COVID-19. Many of us are seeing its effects on the climate as a silver lining but this is a wildly mistaken and short-sighted interpretation of pandemic’s dark clouds. Governments were compelled to making unprecedented decisions of nationwide lockdowns that created these unintended environmental co-benefits, which are not conscious mitigation strategies based on multi-objective science-based approaches, but are unintentional externalities of pandemic fear. This reprieve will only last as long as the COVID-19 does and does not ensure the well-being on environment in the long-run.
Nevertheless, the positive environmental impact of this pandemic is stark indicator of interdependent relationship between health, environment and economy that constitute the core of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The lack of planning and preparation for the present and previous outbreaks of this decade are a strong impetus that the targets of risk reduction, mitigation, and resilience-building in the following Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 1 (poverty); Goal 2 (hunger); Goal 3 (Good Health & Well-being); Goal 11 (sustainable cities and communities); and Goal 13 (climate action) must be prioritized now in the policy design and delivery to make them preventive rather than reactive, to potentially catastrophic events in the future. Whenever the world experienced a health crisis, it provided an opportunity for creating major changes. For instance, all spheres of political leadership in the global system interact, reinforce, and implement adaptive decisions at much faster pace in response to humanitarian emergencies. The current situation suggests a clear need to adopt a coordinated approach which may not focus solely on overcoming the crisis but ensure effective short and long-term initiatives with engagement of all political stakeholders, civil society actors, private sector and public institutions to better design the frameworks and responses to make the best use of the synergies between different goals as well as to manage aftermaths of pandemics. It is abundantly clear from the unprecedented suffering of the already unequal World exacerbated by COVID-19 that all countries must seek immediate support from their local government systems, private health services providers, local donors, and community volunteers to streamline effective and equitable emergency preparedness and response capacity. One such capacity that is now more relevant than ever is of the digital and mobile technologies in healthcare delivery system.
This pandemic crisis has pushed societies at all levels to recognize that health is central to the core dimensions of sustainable development – economy, society and environment. The term Sustainable development came into the limelight in late 20th century as a result of the rising public concern over the unrestricted resource exploitation leading to global ecological, financial and health crisis. Calls for concerted action for strengthening the institutional foundations to support developing countries in their efforts to harness S&T for their sustainable socio-economic uplift came following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992. One of the earliest and thoughtful contributions made in this vein was by Pakistani Nobel Laureate, Prof. Dr. Abdus Salam, who gave the idea of establishing an Intergovernmental platform, the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), for providing visionary leadership to developing countries for utilizing and mobilizing STI as an integral component of strategies for promoting sustainable development.
At its inception as a high level forum of regional cooperation in S&T, represented by Heads of State/Government, COMSATS assumed an advocacy role for sensitizing the relevant government machinery in its 27 Member States for investing in STI for development and encouraging the decision-makers to strongly interact with the scientific community to incorporate relevant mechanisms and policies in their activities and development agenda. A platform for the latter was also made available in the form of a network of 22 renowned International Science and Technology Centres of Excellence. The Network compliments the organization’s efforts for fostering active collaboration and resource-sharing among themselves and their counterparts in other regions. COMSATS is mandated to facilitate achievement of sustainable socio-economic development in the South long before the realization of 2030 Global Agenda. Several important initiatives have been taken by the Commission pertinent to education, environment, health and most importantly South-South and North-South partnerships that hold considerable relevance to the UN sustainable development targets. The major initiatives of COMSATS that laid solid foundations for STI development included, inter alia, establishment of high-quality educational institutions (COMSATS University) and Infrastructure (COMSATS Internet Service); International Thematic Research Groups (ITRGs) for promotion of cutting-edge research using multi-, Inter- and Tran disciplinary approach; COMSATS Telehealth Programme (CTH) pioneer in using ICTs application for providing healthcare in community-based settings; COMSATS Centre for Climate & Sustainability (CCCS) a broad coalition of academic and research institutions and organizations working on environmental risks to achieving SDGs, and various group training courses and workshops for technologists and practitioners from its Member Countries for building and strengthening education and research capacities.
To join and support COVID-19 response efforts and to carry on the momentum of progress towards achieving SDGs, COMSATS aims to give better insight into wide range of social, economic and environmental determinants of health, bring the regional- and national-level discussions with a multi-sectoral approach on mitigating the socio-economic impact of this crisis and alongside improving capacities and skills of personnel working across health and health-related disciplines. Utilizing South-South and North-South cooperation as mechanism to improve countries’ capacities to better deal with the global health crises, the Commission encourages the governments, development agencies, research institutions, private sector and civil society to collaborate and to form necessary partnerships that are useful for SDGs implementation before, during and after the crises. —Concluded
—The writer is Senior Assistant Director at COMSATS Secretariat, working to promote and map awareness of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among COMSATS’ Network.
