Anne Bardsley: is there such a thing as a post-pandemic future?

Covid-19 has dominated the public consciousness for more than 18 months.

Many references have been made to a ‘post-Covid world’ – once imagined as an opportunity to refresh and do things differently, including thinking more long-term and living more sustainably, investing in innovation, and addressing the long-standing inequities that the pandemic brought painfully to the surface.

I have been part of the call to refresh and reset, with colleagues at Koi Tū and the many strategic thinkers we involved in our conversations about Aotearoa New Zealand’s path through and after the pandemic, resulting in a series of reports since April 2020 under the banner ‘The Future is Now’.

But for long locked-down Aucklanders, despite eased restrictions, that future may still seem a long time coming. We now face the reality that Covid will likely be with us for the foreseeable future: indeed, it will almost inevitably become endemic. We are a remote island nation, but we are part of the global community and cannot keep ourselves isolated permanently. It has been aptly said that the pandemic will not end anywhere in the world, until it ends everywhere.

We also know that many decisions made both here and internationally to deal with the pandemic will have wider consequences, the implications of which will ripple around the world, all the way to fortress Aotearoa. The issues extend well beyond public health, to social, economic, geopolitical and environmental impacts, among others. What we do now will shape the future trajectory and impacts of the pandemic in multiple ways. So, how can the best outcomes be achieved?

Working through questions like these requires deep and inclusive deliberation using transdisciplinary systems thinking and futures methodologies, and synthesising inputs from a range of viewpoints and disciplines. This is what Koi Tū was set up in 2019 to do.

I have been fortunate, through Koi Tū’s deep connection with the International Science Council (ISC), to have been a technical advisor in the Global Covid Scenarios Project run by the ISC in partnership with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The project’s important remit epitomised true transdisciplinarity in a future-focused exploration of the pandemic’s evolution to find the key drivers of global outcomes. Chaired by ISC President and Koi Tū Director Sir Peter Gluckman, working with an oversight panel of global experts in public health, virology, economics, behavioural science, ethics, sociology and strategic studies, among other areas, the project team conducted more than 160 expert interviews and regional workshops across more than 30 countries.

The project aimed to develop future scenarios from which to consider the implications of today’s policy decisions – and the costs of inaction. Systems mapping was used to illustrate how events and policies affect each other, and the critical outcomes, allowing the project to produce the ‘most likely’, ‘pessimistic plausible’ and ‘optimistic plausible’ future scenarios.

A large number of significant contributory factors to the pandemic’s long-term outcomes emerged. Some are being prioritised by governments, the private sector and multilateral actors, such as WHO and COVAX in the health domain, but many critical factors affecting other policy domains have not been addressed, or responses have been very uneven.

Policies such as monetary stimulus packages to boost economic growth and measures to recover educational losses have been restricted to advanced economies. The mental health costs have been largely put aside. Trust in governments has been affected.

We have also seen a rise in nationalistic ‘country first’ measures and geopolitical manoeuvres that could ultimately undermine reaching positive and equitable outcomes around the world and may prolong the suffering caused by the pandemic, well beyond the health crisis.

Mapping out the interactions of policies, events and outcomes has highlighted the numerous systemic and long-lasting effects of the pandemic. What concerns me most is that many of these are already apparent, but governments and other actors have not given them sufficient focus.

Each of the necessary actions starts with recognising the intertwined global, multi-sectoral system that will govern everyone’s futures and where no one – and no country, even the most remote – is truly an island.

A key output of the ISC project is an interactive systems map tool designed to help decision-makers explore the issues in their own context. The project’s report, due out January 2022, will make essential reading.

Here in Aotearoa we will adjust to a level of endemic Covid, but will have many other long-term consequences to address. Critically, we must think more systemically not only about how to prepare for future pandemics, but how to be resilient in the face of the diverse challenges the world will inevitably throw at us in the long-term ‘post-pandemic’ future. To echo the calls of Glasgow COP26 on the parallel and indeed existential crisis of the climate, we still have a chance to do things differently – just.