Meet Susan
Susan works on a building construction site in Rwanda. She’s a single mother with a three-year-old child and gets no support from the father. She has been shovelling earth and moving building materials around various construction sites for about five years. During that time, her salary hasn’t changed from just over $2/ day. On this particular day, she’s the only woman on the site. Any bathroom breaks involve going to the communal toilet, a hole in the ground behind the bushes.
She’d like to train to move up from her current position in the most labour-intensive and poorly paid job on site. She says there is a training school right around the corner. But a complete training course would take a year, limit her time to work and would cost $235 - about 40 per cent of her annual income.
Every morning she wakes up, gets herself and her child ready to go, drops her child off at a neighbour’s place and arrives at work. She’s also in the early stages of pregnancy, something that she tries to hide since the foreman indicated that pregnant women get rotated off the site.
Everyone was caught out by COVID-19. Despite scientific evidence pointing to a high risk of pandemic, no government or business sufficiently prepared. Those same institutions now need to lead recovery.
How to recover is under debate. As governments deliver enormous stimulus at extraordinary speed, there are calls to return to business as usual and get everything back to normal.
But pre-pandemic life was not normal. It wasn’t normal in March, the 423rd consecutive month of temperatures above the 20th century average. It wasn’t normal in February during Australia’s devastating bushfires, or in November of last year, when Venice suffered its worst flooding in over half a century.
Europe has been deeply scarred by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. The impact on human life, health and wellbeing is already immense, while the cost to economies, businesses and livelihoods will be felt for years to come.
Amid the devastation, our shared responsibility to put the lives and health of people first has come sharply into focus. With this renewed recognition, we must look to protect communities and to make them more resilient as we recover and rebuild from the coronavirus. We must build back in a way that protects us from growing systemic risks, whether from future pandemics, or other dangers such as climate change.
It is therefore essential that we ensure the economic recovery is consistent with the achievement of long-term climate objectives, including climate neutrality by 2050 at the latest.
