image sourceIEA or the International Energy Agency lays out $3 trillion green recovery plan to help rebuild global economies amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The vision of the agency is considered a “once-in-a-lifetime” framework to help economies recover from Covid-19 in a sustainable manner.
The Sustainable Recovery report is made to offer world leaders cost-effective measures that they could apply from 2021 through to 2023.
The green recovery plan of IEA has three main goals: boosting economic growth, job creation, and formation of more resilient and cleaner energy systems.
“As they design economic recovery plans, policymakers are having to make enormously consequential decisions in a very short space of time,” Fatih Birol, executive director at the IEA, said in the report.
“These decisions will shape economic and energy infrastructure for decades to come and will almost certainly determine whether the world has a chance of meeting its long-term energy and climate goals.”
Worst economic downturn
The IEA believes that the world is facing its worst economic downturn since the 1930s due to an unprecedented global public health crisis. The pandemic hit employment and investment across all sections of the economy, including energy.
The IEA said before that the coronavirus outbreak could lead to the largest decline of global energy investment on record for 2020, with spending set to drop 20%.
Based on the report’s analysis, the global energy industry hired roughly 40 million people in 2019, but 3 million of those positions have either been removed or at risk as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
“Today, attention is increasingly focusing on how to bring about an economic recovery that repairs the damage inflicted by the crisis while putting the world on a stronger footing for the future,” the IEA’s Birol said.
Collaboration
The Sustainable Recovery plan was released in partnership with the International Monetary Fund as part of the energy agency’s flagship World Energy Outlook series.
The agency studied 30 specific energy policy measures, covering six key sectors: fuels, electricity, industry, buildings, transport, and emerging low-carbon technologies.
Two years
The plan has to be sustainable because according to scientists from the University of Minnesota, the coronavirus pandemic may last for two years.
According to their report, the coronavirus pandemic was more contagious than the flu. It was likely to spread even after a first wave this spring.
Researchers from the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) noted that the new coronavirus has a longer incubation period than the flu. This means that symptoms may take longer to appear after a person got the virus.
They explained that the coronavirus may be at its most contagious before symptoms appear. Moreover, COVID-19 also manifested a higher rate of asymptomatic transmission as well as a higher R0 rating than influenza.
“Some countries appear to have been able to drive their R0 for (Covid-19) below 1 with mitigation measures, although as the mitigation measures are lifted, the R0 in any given area may creep back above 1, leading to disease resurgence over time,” the report’s authors said.
“A higher R0 means more people will need to get infected and become immune before the pandemic can end,” they said. “It likely won’t be halted until 60% to 70% of the population is immune.”
