Environmental crisis and the Pandemic in Latin America

The YSI Webinar series on the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America has already discussed the economic, political and social dimensions of this crisis. In the next episode, we turn to the environmental crisis in the context of the pandemic in Latin America. The current development model in Latin America has led to an increasing rate of degradation of natural resources and pollution, besides the climate change consequences. The images of the burning Amazon are just the tip of the iceberg of a large number of environmental degradation, such as water and soil pollution and extreme weather events. Besides, climate change tends to exacerbate structural problems in under-developed countries, such as social vulnerability and the external constraint. The current health crisis has reinforced the urgent need for State coordination to tackle world-wide humanitarian and economic crises that have been at the heart of the environmental crisis we were already in.

In this context, the ECLAC/UN initiative called “The Big Push for Sustainability” tries to bring forth the developmentalist idea of State-led coordination of investments in order to foster a green development. In order to discuss the connections between the COVID-19 crisis and the environmental crisis, the next episode of our webinar series will deal with the implications of the COVID-19 crisis to the debate around green development policies. In this meeting, we will host Camila Gramkow. She holds a PhD in Climate Change Economics from the University of East Anglia (UK) and has more than 10 years of experience dealing with sustainable development. She is currently an Economic Officer at the ECLAC/UN working with the Big Push For Sustainability initiative. She has published, in 2019, the ECLAC/UN report: “O Big Push Ambiental no Brasil Investimentos coordenados para um estilo de desenvolvimento sustentável” (https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/44506/1/S1900163_pt.pdf)