Saturday, August 21, 2021

ACADEMIA
Letters
Government leadership and social mobilisation for crises planning: 
From wartime mobilisation to pandemic response to climate action

Laurence Delina
As we continue working towards containing COVID-19, we see how public resources have been deliberately re-adjusted towards this public health disaster. Many governments went on to adopt a wartime-like mobilization approach to produce necessary testing kits and pro-tective gears in quantities at a period of time never previously thought out (Kreitman 2020;Mulder 2020; Yglesias 2020). Research funds were also made available at quick speed to develop vaccines (Piper 2020). Communities started producing their own foods reminiscent of Victory Gardens during World War 2 (Sarmiento 2020; Rao 2020). Everywhere, we hearthe translation of wartime lingo to everyday conversations from ‘frontliners’ to ‘heroism to‘a common enemy.’ Crisis mobilisations, such as for the present pandemic and the past Great War, provides some lenses to strategize about another lingering emergency—that of acceler-ating climate change.These strategies, which I explored in details in my book (Delina, 2016), call for the mobil-isations of technologies, finance, labour, and policy to speed up the transition to sustainable and renewable energy systems.

 Deploying systems that will generate energy from wind, water, and sunlight to replace existing fossil fuel-based energy assets require massive investments of money, time, skills, and capacity. Factoring in the need to accomplish this project as quickly possible and across all communities, cities, and countries in light of the climate emergency would necessitate extraordinary mobilisation of vast resources. Sounds impossible but the present response to the pandemic and the historical stories of mobilisations for war seem to provide some sorts of a blueprint

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