Global Pandemic and Human Security: Technology and Development Perspective 981165073X, 9789811650734

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Rajib Shaw Anjula Gurtoo   Editors

Global Pandemic and Human Security Technology and Development Perspective

Global Pandemic and Human Security

Rajib Shaw • Anjula Gurtoo Editors

Global Pandemic and Human Security Technology and Development Perspective

Editors Rajib Shaw Graduate School of Media and Governance Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan

Anjula Gurtoo Department of Management Studies Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Karnataka, India

ISBN 978-981-16-5073-4 ISBN 978-981-16-5074-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had a deep impact on people and communities globally. While we are still living with uncertainties, differential lessons are learnt in different parts of the world, creating major human security challenges. The human security concept has evolved over the last 20 years and covers the broader aspects of development, environment, and disaster risk reduction perspectives. On the one hand, due to COVID-19, people and communities are facing severe developmental challenges like water, education, health, gender, etc. On the other hand, emerging technologies and innovations have been used to reduce the impacts of COVID-19. This has also created a digital divide in rich and poor countries, in urban and rural areas, and in aged and young population. However, the positive part of technology development was accelerated by social innovation amidst the global pandemic. Grassroots problems form the core of social innovation and relate to different dimensions of SDGs, like water, health, education, poverty, urban, etc. Based on the above context, the book has three key parts: Part I: Overview (with introduction, development, technology, and fiscal dimensions); Part II: Development (consists of 14 chapters), and Part III: Technology (consists of four chapters). Covering significant aspects of development and technology issues for COVID-19 pandemic response, this book is intended for students, researchers, academia, policy makers, and development practitioners in the fields of development, human security, public health, emerging technology, and policy, which has a strong relevance to Asia Pacific and beyond. The book will help to better understand the challenges and opportunities related to human security in the global pandemic phase. We will be happy if readers find this book useful and relevant. Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Rajib Shaw Anjula Gurtoo

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About the Book

COVID-19 has exemplified that the pandemic is global, but its responses are local. The responses depend on national governance and policy framework, use of technology and innovation, and people’s perceptions and behavior, among many others. There are many differences in how the pandemic has affected the rich or the poor, urban or rural sectors, development and fiscal sectors, and developed and developing nations and communities. The basic human security principles and development agenda are highly affected by the global pandemic worldwide, irrespective of its development and economic status. The book highlights the nexus between human security and development issues. The book has two major pillars, one on development and the other on technology issues. These two interdependent issues are discussed in the perspective of the global pandemic. Based on specific case studies, field data, and evidence, the book describes how the human security aspect has been affected by the global pandemic. While the world is still in the middle of the pandemic, and possibly, in future, other natural and biological hazards may affect people’s lives and livelihoods, the book draws some key learning, which can be used to cope with future uncertainties, including climate risks.

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Contents

1

Introduction: Global Pandemic, Human Security, Technology and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rajib Shaw and Anjula Gurtoo

Part I

1

Overview

2

Developmental Agenda and the Global Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bita Afsharinia, Anjula Gurtoo, and Rajib Shaw

17

3

Co-evolution of Pandemic, Human Security, and Technology . . . . . Sakiko Kanbara and Rajib Shaw

41

4

Fiscal Policies and Post-COVID-19 Development Challenges: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Azreen Karim, Andrew DeWit, and Rajib Shaw

Part II 5

61

Development

Climate Change and Human Security in the Context of the Global Pandemic: Emphasising Responses that Maximise Synergies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sivapuram Venkata Rama Krishna Prabhakar, So-Young Lee, and Masashi Tsudaka

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6

Global Pandemic and Human Security: Using Health-EDRM Risk Assessment Framework to Enhance Technology Support for DRR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Emily Ying Yang Chan and Chi Shing Wong

7

Those Above Poverty Line: Development and Vulnerability to the Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Nimruji Jammulamadaka

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Contents

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Urban–Rural Linkages and Their Implication to Human Security in Pandemic Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Vibhas Sukhwani and Rajib Shaw

9

International Migration and Human Security Under the COVID-19 Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Oscar A. Gómez

10

Fragility and Resilience in Food Systems: What Can We Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Rami Zurayk, Abed Al Kareem Yehya, and Rachel A. Bahn

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Challenges and Solution Pathways in Water Use Through the Lens of COVID-19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Rajarshi Das Bhowmik and Tirthankar Roy

12

Education in the Time of a Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Kurukundi Vaijayanti

13

Implications on Gender During the Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Channamma Kambara, S. Manasi, Malini L. Tantri, and G. Shivakumar Nayka

14

Access to Green Spaces: Consider Green Infrastructure Implementation with/Post-COVID-19 World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Ai Tashiro and Masaki Kotsubo

15

A Sustainable and Resilient Urban Transportation System . . . . . . . 281 Rohit Singh Nitwal and Ashish Verma

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Responses for COVID-19 in the Pacific Small Island Countries . . . . 295 Lilian Yamamoto

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Between Protection and Empowerment COVID-19: Haiti’s Older People’s Perception and Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Margot de Greef and Martín Coria

18

Government Responses to COVID-19 and Their Implications on Food Security in Indonesia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Laely Nurhidayah and Riyanti Djalante

Part III 19

Technology

Preparing for the Future Crisis: Frontier Technologies Hold the Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Sanjay Srivastava, Madhurima Sarkar-Swaisgood, Sung Eun Kim, and Maria Bernadet Karina Dewi

Contents

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20

Emerging Technologies and Global Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 Arunabh Mitra and Rohit Chaurasia

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The Importance of Data Sharing in Managing Public Health Crises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393 Rahul Patil and Inder Gopal

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Governing Artificial Intelligence in Post-Pandemic Society . . . . . . . 413 Aravindhan Arunagiri and Avadhanam Udayaadithya

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Rajib Shaw is a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, Japan. He is also the Senior Fellow of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) Japan and the Chairperson of SEEDS Asia and CWS Japan, two Japanese NGOs. He is also co-founder of a Delhi (India) based social entrepreneur startup Resilience Innovation Knowledge Academy (RIKA). Earlier, he was the Executive Director of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) and was a Professor at Kyoto University. His expertise includes disaster governance, community-based disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, urban risk management, and disaster and environmental education. Professor Shaw was the Chair of the United Nations Science Technology Advisory Group (STAG) for disaster risk reduction, and currently the Co-chair of the Asia Pacific Science Technology Academic Advisory Group (ASTAAG). He is also the CLA (Coordinating Lead Author) for the Asia chapter of IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Progress in Disaster Science and series editor of a Springer book series on disaster risk reduction. Prof. Shaw has published 52 books and over 400 academic papers and book chapters. Anjula Gurtoo is a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. She is also the Chairperson of the Policy Centre at the Institute. She works in the area of public policy including informal economy, urban infrastructure, and public systems. Prof. Gurtoo has published 2 books and over 70 academic papers and book chapters. She is the recipient of the Chevening/Rolls-Royce Science and Innovation Leadership Fellowship, British High Commission, United Kingdom (2017), Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru National Award for her outstanding contribution in the field of Public Policy and Social Science from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh, India (2010–2012), and the Social Science Research Award for overall contribution to research, by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada (2009). She is an expert member in xiii

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Editors and Contributors

several governmental committees including Karnataka BioEconomy Report 2020 (KBER), Rajasthan Public Service Commission, Empanelment Committee of Karnataka Evaluation Authority, and Professional Technical Advisory Committee, Karnataka Municipal Data Society.

Contributors Bita Afsharinia Indian Institute of Science, Center for Society and Policy, Bengaluru, India Aravindhan Arunagiri Mphasis NEXTLabs, Mphasis Ltd., Bengaluru, India Rachel A. Bahn American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon Rajarshi Das Bhowmik Interdisciplinary Centre for Water Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India Emily Ying Yang Chan Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Rohit Chaurasia Hyderabad, India Martín Coria Church World Service (CWS), Buenos Aires, Argentina Maria Bernadet Karina Dewi ICT and Disaster Risk Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand Andrew DeWit Faculty of Economics, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan Riyanti Djalante ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta, Indonesia Oscar A. Gómez College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan Inder Gopal Center for Society and Policy, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bengaluru, India Margot de Greef Church World Service (CWS), Port-au-Prince, Haiti Anjula Gurtoo Center for Society and Policy, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India Nimruji Jammulamadaka Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Kolkata, India Channamma Kambara Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India Sakiko Kanbara Kochi University, Kochi, Japan Azreen Karim Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh Sung Eun Kim ICT and Disaster Risk Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand

Editors and Contributors

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Masaki Kotsubo Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan So-Young Lee Institute of Global Environmental Strategies, Hayama, Japan S. Manasi Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India Arunabh Mitra HCL Technologies Ltd., Hyderabad, India G. Shivakumar Nayka Grassroots (GRAAM), Bangalore, India

Research

and Advocacy

Movement

Rohit Singh Nitwal IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab), Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India Laely Nurhidayah National Research and Innovation Agency (PMB-BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia Rahul Patil Center for Society and Policy, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bengaluru, India S. V. R. K. Prabhakar Institute of Global Environmental Strategies, Hayama, Japan Tirthankar Roy Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA Madhurima Sarkar-Swaisgood ICT and Disaster Risk Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand Rajib Shaw Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan Sanjay Srivastava ICT and Disaster Risk Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand Vibhas Sukhwani Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan Malini L. Tantri Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India Ai Tashiro Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Tokushima, Tokushima, Japan Masashi Tsudaka Institute of Global Environmental Strategies, Hayama, Japan Avadhanam Udayaadithya Mphasis NEXTLabs, Mphasis Ltd., Bengaluru, India K. Vaijayanti Akshara Foundation, Bengaluru, India Ashish Verma IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab), Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India Chi Shing Wong Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

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Lilian Yamamoto South American Network for Environmental Migrations (RESAMA), University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Abed Al Kareem Yehya American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon Rami Zurayk American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Chapter 1

Introduction: Global Pandemic, Human Security, Technology and Development Rajib Shaw and Anjula Gurtoo

Abstract Human security concept has evolved over the last 20 years and covers the broader aspects of development, environment, and disaster risk reduction perspectives. In general, human security concerns itself with safeguarding and expanding people’s vital freedom, with the ambition “freedom from want,” “freedom from fear,” and “freedom to live with dignity.” COVID-19, the global pandemic, has affected the lives and livelihoods of people globally, including the human security issues from losing livelihoods to losing choices for education, access to health, and safe water. Different technologies (both existing and emerging) are being used globally to address these issues, albeit differentially, creating a significant digital/ technology divide. The divide would have a much larger impact on human security in the near future. On the contrary, social innovation plays an important positive role to address the challenges of human security. With this context, the chapter provides some historical perspective on the evolution of the concept of human security, its relation to different development, environment, and disaster-related frameworks, and role of technology in achieving human security. The chapter provides an overview of the book with a short introduction of each chapter and provides a few ways forward at the end. Keywords Human security · Global pandemic · Sustainable development · Technology divide and social innovation

R. Shaw (*) Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan e-mail: [email protected] A. Gurtoo Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_1

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1.1

R. Shaw and A. Gurtoo

Introduction: Global Pandemic

The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), also known as COVID-19, was reported to originate from Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The virus was officially reported by authorities in China in January 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 31, 2020, and finally a pandemic on March 11, 2020. COVID19, which started as a humanitarian disaster, has infected more than 171 million people (as of June 1, 2021) from more than 185 countries and territories, resulting in 3.5 million plus deaths. Three countries, namely, the USA, India, and Brazil, account for more than 45% of the total number of infected people as of May 2021. Although more than 153 million people have recovered, the virus has made significant health damages to the recovered people as well (Worldometer 2021). Referred to as a “biological hazard” in scientific terminology, the virus has deeply impacted all sectors, which is difficult to quantify, and therefore, making the ongoing pandemic event as the worst crisis of the century. While 2020 was full of new experiences of the pandemic with multiple waves in most countries, the year 2021 continues with additional waves with some of them more lethal than the previous waves in some countries. The year 2021 also characterizes the uncertainty of vaccine and its availability, as well as emergence of new variant of the virus, making “living with uncertainties” as the new normal of the current years, and possibly in the future as well. The crisis has undoubtedly affected the development sectors significantly, hindering many countries and communities to reach their sustainable development goal (SDG) targets. The compromise with development goals affects the human security dimension strongly as well. However, the past 1.5 years of the pandemic has seen significant growth of technology, both, the conventional and the emerging/disruptive. The world has become possibly more complex in terms of development of technology as well as its unequal distribution/accessibility. A strong digital divide can be witnessed in developing and developed countries, urban and rural areas, and age and gender as well. This book addresses the complex dimensions of human security and global pandemic discussed above through the development and technology lens. This introductory chapter elaborates the key concepts and provides a quick overview of the book.

1.2 1.2.1

Human Security Dimension and Development Issues Human Security Concept

The concept of Human Security was promoted by the then Japanese Prime Minister Kenzo Obuchi in his speech in United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 as the

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umbrella concept to interlink development, environment, disaster, poverty, and conflict issues. In general, human security is concerned with safeguarding and expanding people’s vital freedom, with the ambition “freedom from want,” “freedom from fear,” and “freedom to live with dignity.” The core concept of human security demands that the insecurity be tackled together and comprehensively, so that people can live with dignity with a better well-being and better freedom to make the right choice for themselves. The concept gets elaborated later in Noble Laureate Amartya Sen’s famous book “Development as Freedom” (Sen 2004). Understanding the risk and challenges and providing solutions to enable people at eliminating the different drivers of insecurities is the key to achieving human security and build resilience. The concept of human security started a new dialogue and discourse on people-centered security versus state-centered security. Human security gets achieved through protection and empowerment strategies built on four principles: people-centered, comprehensive, context-specific, and prevention-oriented. To take the concept forward, the Commission on Human Security was established in January 2001 in response to the UN Secretary-General’s call at the 2000 Millennium Summit for a world “free of want” and “free of fear.” On May 1, 2003, Co-Chairs of the Commission on Human Security, Sadako Ogata, and Amartya Sen presented the final report to the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, known as “Human Security Now” (Ogata and Sen 2003). The report highlighted the importance of human security to protect people from different types of “downside risk,” related to equity, dignity, human rights, and freedom. It also linked hunger, water, population, and environment with the concept basic human needs. The report highlighted that, . . . the centre of the sustainable development lies is the delicate balance between human security and environment,

and urged for the balance of ecological stability and human security. Environmental dimension got a stronger emphasis on achieving human security. The report also mentioned that . . . governments and other stakeholders are increasingly aware of the relationship between ecological stability and human security. The emphasis is more on environment management. However, there has been little concrete actions at local level to ensure the participation of affected communities and people in such management. Critical to this is the need to explicitly plans for improved environment management and sustainable development to disaster prevention and preparedness.

Thus the emphasis of local-level implementation and role of people and communities become crucial in human security. As well as the link of human security, disaster risk reduction, environmental management, and sustainable development become more explicit.

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1.2.2

Evolution of Human Security and Development Issues

To enhance human security implementation, a trust fund was established in the United Nations called “Human Security Trust Fund,” which brings diverse partners and government to collaborate on the needs and vulnerabilities of people and communities. The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution (UN 2005) to accept the outcomes of the UN major conferences and summits on economic, social, and related field. Taking the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as the key yardstick, the resolution urged for “Investing in development: a practical plan to achieve MDGs.” Health, education, environment became key pillars for humans security. To strengthen basic healthcare system in urban and rural areas and to ensure investment in human resources in healthcare management were of higher priority. Primary and basic education for rural areas and urban informal settlements was highlighted as well. Time-bound environmental targets are considered important for resource and ecosystem management and curbing pollution and making a disaster-resilient community. Gender issues were also emphasized as a cross-cutting element. On the technology front, the emphasis included To increase countries’ indigenous capacity for science and technology, including information and communications technology, Governments should establish scientific advisory bodies, promote infrastructure as an opportunity for technological learning, expand science and engineering faculties, and stress development and business applications in science and technology curricula.

In 2012, the UN took another resolution (UN 2012) to highlight the importance of national perspective and ownership of human security concept, based on the governance, culture, socioeconomic conditions, etc. It focuses on four specific principles: (1) from coordination to integration: need to integrate actions among a network of stakeholders to ensure lasting responses to the most difficult deficits in peace and development; (2) promoting multi-stakeholder partnership, including government, private sector, civil society, academia, media, etc.; (3) localization and “leaving no one behind” focusing on inclusive growth, and (4) prevention and resilience: strengthening local capacity to enhance resilience, social cohesion, and human dignity.

1.2.3

Human Security, Climate Change, and Disaster Risk Reduction

In a recent review, Shaw et al. (2021) elaborated the links between human security, climate change, and disaster risk reduction. Analyzing the historical perspectives of development of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation regime, the authors argued on the initial global disaster framework, known as Hyogo Framework for Action (2005–2015), being deficient in achieving one of key priority areas, namely, the “underlying risk factors.” The key issues of poverty, access to safe

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drinking water, education, health, gender issues comprise the underlying risk factors, and these are not addressed sufficiently either in disaster risk reduction or climate change adaptation approaches. Five specific recommendations are provided to reduce the gap: “(1) reducing underlying risk factors for poverty reduction and sustainable development, (2) enhancing the economic viability of risk reduction measures, (3) institutionalizing community-based disaster risk reduction, (4) addressing risk reduction in recovery, and (5) enhancing DRR education to help reduce the underlying risk factors” (Shaw et al. 2021).

1.2.4

Sustainable Development Goals and Related Frameworks

The year 2015 was a landmark year in the global agenda setting in the field of environment, disaster, and climate change. The year marked the initiation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG: 2015–2030), Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR: 2015–2030), and New Urban Agenda. All these have cross-cutting references and relevance. Shaw et al. (2016) analyzed these frameworks and observed that the word “local” has been highlighted and mentioned several times in all the frameworks, especially in the context of governance, culture, tradition, values, implementation, and communities. This clearly highlights the strong links of the frameworks to local implementation, be it on environment, development, or disaster. In 2019, World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the Health Emergency Disaster Risk Management (H-EDRM) to incorporate health issues in emergency management weaving together health, DRR, and other relevant disciplines, with prevention as the pivot in the framework. Chan and Shaw (2020) presented one of the first comprehensive reviews on research paradigm and research linkages on health and disaster risk reduction with the link to human security dimensions from Asia. Some of the key challenges include un-coordinated research, lack of a strategic research agenda, limited development of multisectoral and interdisciplinary approaches, deficiency in the science–policy–practice nexus, the absence of standardized terminology, and meagre coordination among stakeholders. In this context, 2020 was supposed to be the fifth-year review of all the global frameworks and link them to public health issues. At this junction, the world was hit by the global pandemic. The impacts of the pandemic on the SDGs are dynamic. There have been several assessments published in the later part of 2020 on global pandemic impacts on SDGs; however, the actual data remains to be verified, and we are within a constantly changing dynamic world. Thus, the global pandemic impacts on human security issues are also quite critical, especially when the pandemic affects livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable, and leaving them very few choices to access basic human needs.

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Technology Perspectives

The global pandemic created a “lockdown” on many things and could restrain us from doing many things. However, we can safely say that there was no “lockdown” on innovation. The year 2020 saw 10 years’ worth of innovation done in 10 months. As we understand that innovation typically evolves out of needs and necessities. While the pandemic created different types of restrictions on physical gathering, different types of online systems/platforms emerged instantly as a solution to physical distancing, including online education, online health services, online shopping, work from home, etc. In a recent analysis by Hua et al. (2021) on post-COVID19 technology development in China, the authors highlighted the acceleration of 5G and other disruptive technologies like Internet of Things (IOT), robotics, drone, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), etc. Although the evolution of these technologies was part of the growth plan of China; however, the need and priorities of these technologies to combat COVID-19 has led to accelerated evolution and implementation of these disruptive technologies. However, in terms of human security perspectives growth of technology has created a major digital/technology divide between developed and developing countries, between communities in urban and rural areas, and between people from different age groups, gender, and physically/mentally challenged people. Thus, while the inclusive technology growth is the key to achieve human security, the high speed of technology polarization has made significant imbalance in the system. In the World Economic Forum (WEF) Risk Outlook (2021), “digital power concentration” and “digital inequality” have been identified as the two top global risks in terms of likelihood, which was not there in the earlier Risk Outlook (WEF 2021). Therefore, digital inequality in the uncertain world can be considered as a major hindrance in achieving SDGs as well as human security. Conversely, the positive part of technology development was accelerated by social innovation amidst the global pandemic. Grassroots problems form the core of social innovation and relate to different dimensions of SDGs, such as water, health, education, poverty, urban, etc. To provide a better solutions under a pandemic situation, the young and youth entrepreneurs in both developing and developed countries have come out with new innovation to provide customized solutions, some as start-ups, some as nonprofit initiatives. Innovations grew on multiple scales where countries provided an innovation ecosystem for these social innovations. This was also widely used for higher education and mentoring purposes in terms of online hackathon. Science-based entrepreneurship has become popular in many developing countries, and most of them address critical human security issues. It can be considered a new trend linking technology and development.

1 Introduction: Global Pandemic, Human Security, Technology and Development

1.4

7

About the Book

COVID-19 has exemplified that the pandemic is global, but its responses are local. The responses depend on national governance and policy framework, technology and innovation ecosystems, and people’s perceptions and behavior, among many others. Significant differences exist on the effect of the pandemic on rich and poor, urban and rural sectors, development and fiscal sectors, and developed and developing nations. The basic human security principles and development agenda are highly affected by the global pandemic worldwide, irrespective of its development and economic status. Thus, the book highlights the nexus of human security and development issues. The book has two major pillars, one on development and the other on technology issues. These two inter-dependent issues are discussed in the perspective of global pandemic, and that forms the most important feature of the proposed book. Based on specific case study, field data, and evidences, the book highlights how the human security aspect has been affected by the global pandemic. While the world remains in the middle of pandemic, and possibly other natural and biological hazards may affect people’s lives and livelihoods in the future, the book draws some key learning, which can be used to cope with future uncertainties, including climate risks. The book has three parts. The first part consists of three chapters: Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the pandemic and its impacts on human security, by identifying the key development sectors linked to SDGs and human security. Chapter 2 focuses on different technological challenges and innovations. Chapter 3 focuses on fiscal boosting at global, regional, and national level and will highlight the key opportunities to overcome the challenges posed by pandemic. The second part has 14 chapters consists of water, food security, public health, climate security and environment, migrant worker and urban resilience, aged population, gender, education, etc. Each of these issues is linked to respective SDGs. The chapter analyzes development perspectives, and link to human security with global, regional or national/local examples. This third part consists of four chapters: technology and policy and different emerging technologies. The chapters provide diverse dimensions of core concept of technologies, its governance/policy, and its implementation challenges and opportunities. With this overview chapter as the first chapter, the second chapter focuses on the relation of developmental agenda and global pandemic. With the perspective of global pandemic, this chapter looks at the developmental issues through a systematic review of current literatures on seven mainstream human security indicators: health, economy, food, education, environment, personal, community, and political security. After conceptualizing the pandemic’s contribution toward sustainability and human security, the chapter presents illustrative questions in the discussion section to understand the application of the human security concepts in practice. We find that the pandemic not only affected the key basic SDGs related to health, income, food, education, environment, etc., but also affected the community as a whole. The pandemic has aggravated physical and psychological stress at the community level

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and increase incidences of violence within and between communities are observed globally. However, authorities across the world have realized this aspect of the pandemic and are taking effective steps largely by leveraging the advancements in the digital technologies. The larger potential of digital technologies gets revealed, as a vital tool to alleviate the adverse effects of the pandemic. Chapter 3 focuses on technology with health dimensions. Science and technology for handling a pandemic has always existed in some form in different countries. This chapter presents key lessons from various community-based activities where technologies have been widely used, and emphasizes the importance of interfacing science policy practice to sustainable development. Relative importance and emphasis of science and technology for human security is also mentioned, followed by case studies that illustrate the existence of a good partnership of science technology groups and different other stakeholders. However, strengthening of the partnership is required with a clearer direction and strategy for implementation as a mechanism to foster collaboration across global and regional mechanisms and institutions for the implementation and coherence of instruments and tools relevant to Human Security and Health for All. Chapter 4 covers fiscal issues. In a massive effort to save the global economies and protecting livelihoods, national governments had been obliged to announce stimulus (fiscal) packages and create local and regional funds to boost up domestic production and ensure food, water, and energy security. The chapter intends to provide a broader overview on the implications of fiscal stimulus toward sustainable recovery and address post-COVID-19 developmental challenges in a cross-country setting. Although we expect incentivizing through fiscal policies to mobilize food security, public health, climate security and environment, migrant worker and urban resilience, gender, education and facilitate attainment of the respective SDGs; sustainable recovery could largely vary based on national resilience and the extant developmental framework. Chapter 5 focuses on climate change and human security in the pandemic perspective. The pandemic directly affected human security as people’s ability to live peacefully, free of fear, and live with dignity has been severely affected. These pandemic experiences call for revisiting the concepts of human security in developmental planning. Accordingly, the chapter evaluates the nexus between human security, climate change, and pandemics. The chapter provides essential pointers as well that can help identify suitable policies and practices that help promote human security while mitigating climate change and pandemics. Chapter 6 examines how the latest World Health Organization Health-EDRM framework may inform the conceptualization and assessment of health risks and proposes a Health-EDRM assessments framework for biological hazard. A case study of how health risks and vulnerability associated with home care may be reduced by employing technology in nonstandard living context during pandemic and a case study of community resilience and community engagement are also included. The discussion also puts Health-EDRM Framework into a human security perspective.

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Chapter 7 covers the poverty issue. Covid pandemic has posed severe challenges to human security with unprecedented vulnerabilities to food, health, and income insecurities. The chapter looks at a section of people who are not the extreme poor but nevertheless experience food, health and income insecurity. The group lies just above the poverty line and is excluded from usual welfare targeting and benefits provided by the state and represents the gains of development interventions over the last 2–3 decades as well. The pandemic has adversely impacted the livelihoods of the group of people and sent them into a downward spiral of decline into poverty with economic and psychological consequences. The trauma of decline impacts the psychological resilience of these individuals. From a policy perspective, arresting such decline into poverty requires a dynamic and emergent classification of population to target relief interventions at these groups as they are invisible in routine and static categories of welfare targeting. Chapter 8 emphasizes on urban rural linkages. The core issues pertaining to limited healthcare capacities, job losses, economic slowdown, etc., also bring forth a range of inequity issues for urban and rural populations within a regional space, which are closely interlinked through spatial and sectoral linkages. While the geographically dispersed rural populations often depend on their urban counterparts for access to emergency services, they are often disproportionately impacted by a crisis situation due to the persisting connectivity gaps and socioeconomic barriers. Several such experiences have also been made during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which call for revisiting the contemporary developmental planning from human security perspective, so as to safeguard the survival, livelihood, and dignity of the diverse urban and rural populations. The chapter highlights the key lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation and offers a forwardlooking perspective on strengthening urban–rural linkages for consideration by the policy-makers. Chapter 9 reviews the effects of the pandemic on population movements, following three human security frames of migration: migration as a threat, migrants as a population of concern, and migration as a means for security. Despite great global efforts to debunk the myth of migration as a threat, the pandemic’s nature has once again made the stereotype prominent. Distrust and xenophobia episodes have taken place worldwide, adding a new layer of complexity to the emergency. Moreover, an almost complete halt to migration closed the possibility of moving away from the direct disease threat and ensuing deprivation, not only because governments impeded new movements but also because people on the move found themselves in new precarious situations. The fall in remittances and relapses into poverty across the world are evidence of the trend, so any recovery strategy will have to include migration considerations. Finally, different migrants have fared differently against the pandemic’s challenges: while specific vulnerabilities are notorious, contributions covering dangerous jobs during the emergency have also been exalted. Efforts to contain stigma and provide protection without discrimination will be necessary to potentiate the migration contribution to the pandemic recovery. Preventing further disease relapses remains a difficult problem to address.

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Chapter 10 reviews the academic and grey literature on food systems, with a focus on concepts of fragility and resilience. The chapter applies secondary data (quantitative and qualitative) to assess the status of our food systems prior to and within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. A food systems approach allows for the clear identification of its components (FSC, food environments, individual-level filters, and consumer behavior), a range of external drivers, and contemporary outcomes (food security, environmental, economic, and social outcomes). By applying the approach, we find some aspects of our food systems were already fragile prior to the pandemic, and the fragility has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of the pandemic and associated lockdowns have been widespread in terms of geography and scope, with serious impacts on the performance of our food systems. Within a span of a few months, food systems were pushed to the brink of crisis. However, while many impacts were negative, some parts of the food system were resilient and even flourished via significant financial gains. Resilience of a system cannot be solely measured by that of its individual components. Building food systems that are (more) resilient to shocks remains an urgent priority for humanity to avoid suboptimal outcomes, particularly food insecurity. Lessons derived from the COVID-19 pandemic help explain incongruous instances of fragility and resilience and point to measures that can limit the adverse effects of future shocks to food security. The need for a holistic rather than mechanistic approach to food systems performance, improvement, and transformation will be central to the effort. Chapter 11 focuses on water security. The ongoing COVID19 pandemic has exacerbated the already existing critical issues related to sustainable future water use. New challenges have emerged, requiring both short- and long-term solutions. Hence, understanding the current public and irrigation water use changes resulting from the pandemic become essential. An appropriate estimate of future changes in water use would help develop/upgrade new/current water resources systems that can mitigate the risks and show increased resiliency under global climate and environmental changes and unprecedented events like the COVID-19 pandemic. The present chapter investigates the regional/local changes in water use during the ongoing pandemic and our increased preparedness or a lack of it. Additionally, the chapter discusses future risks and resilience of the water resources systems to meet the future demands of water use and due to unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 12 presents data collected during a pilot implemented by an educational NGOs on the impact on education. The data gathered attempts to present the direct and indirect impact of COVID-19 on the education of children. Children studying in government schools are the worst hit during the pandemic. The uncertainties of school reopening, lack of clarity in guidelines as to what needs to be done to engage children in the educational process, and of course the great digital inequality that prevails have led to a deeper crisis in education in general and more so for the most vulnerable sections of society. On the one hand, livelihoods are slowly rolling back, while on the other, children have been left in a nowhere situation, as most of the parents of these children had to get back to their respective occupations. Many

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children were left behind without sufficient adult supervision while their parents were out doing their jobs. Schools, in general, were also perceived as a safe place for children to be during a substantial period of the day with children provided with mid-day meals and engaged in learning activities. While the pandemic has thrown many challenges, we urgently need to gather evidence from the grassroots to help understand the damage caused by the pandemic. Chapter 13 focuses on gender issues. Apparently response to the pandemic across the globe and its impact on society and economy are clearly dependent on the pre-existing social-economic and cultural setup of the nation. Among others, we suspect the pandemic may reverse the state of human security achieved in the past two decades—specifically the one associated with gender. Consequently, the chapter takes the case of women working in the formal sector, and those living in slums of informal settlement and attempts to locate the gender response to human security in the urban setup of Bengaluru, India. The analysis based on field insights backed by secondary literature helps us to argue that gender dimensions of pandemic and its response indeed need due acknowledgment of the situation and also sensitization to prevent its multiplier effect in due course of time. Chapter 14 covers ecosystem issues and argues that COVID-19 has indirectly had a positive impact on our environments. Substantial evidence shows water and air quality improvements in many countries due to the lockdowns. The COVID-19 crisis has brought attention to new ways of thinking about sustainable planetary health and human health and security. Green infrastructure (GI) forms a desirable new sustainable nature-based solution that helps people achieve better mental and physical well-being with improved air quality. GI incorporates natural or seminatural features, including parks, open spaces blue/green spaces. What kind of green spaces function can be utilized at a specific place remains a critical issue for future GI planning. Thus, the chapter focuses on green spaces and examines the association between access to green spaces and air quality under the political mobility restrictions to suggest more appropriate greenspace designs to address GI with/postCOVID-19 world. Chapter 15 covers the transport system in the context of human security and global pandemic. The chapter presented a conceptual framework to develop an urban transportation resilience indicator framework. The framework incorporates both properties and dimensions of a resilient urban transportation system to identify and classify the indicators, making the framework different from the existing conceptualizations. The five key properties of an urban resilient transportation system are defined. These properties are then used to obtain the indicator framework. Further, these indicators are also mapped to resilience targets in the 2030 development agenda. These targets also include the basic human security principles, such as disaster resilience of the poor. Chapter 16 presents the vulnerability of small island developing states. Pacific small island countries (PSICs) could have been heavily affected by COVID-19 in terms of human security due to their healthcare limited capacity, reliance on food imports, and tourism industry but because of their rapid response to it, the spread of the virus in their territories was prevented. The chapter reviews the region’s

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responses to the pandemic by examining the recommendations of the UN framework for the immediate socioeconomic response to COVID-19. Since the region forms one of the major international aid recipients, the study will review international aid through multilateral and bilateral channels in addition to national- and communitylevel responses with regards to public health and socioeconomic areas. The sources of the analysis are the database of global governmental measures to combat COVID19 (ACAPS), governmental websites, international organizations regional reports on COVID-19, and scientific articles. Chapter 17 elaborates a case study on the aged population from Haiti. The chapter summarizes the respondents’ views on the themes of COVID-19 awareness and behavior, food and income, health and WASH, and initial feedback received from Haitian civil society representatives and participant rural NGOs. The authors conclude on the need for a serious and sustained effort by member states and organizations to operationalize the full promise of the human security approach to older people, especially in fragile states and developing countries where human insecurities predate COVID-19, are systemic and interconnected. Chapter 18 examines COVID-19 and its implications on food security in Indonesia. We examine government response and challenges in strengthening food security in times of COVID-19 and its implications on the achievements of the SDGs 1 and 2 zero poverty and hunger in Indonesia. The chapter uses literature review and published public materials to collect and analyze the data. We conclude that targeted social safety protection remains a critical policy in times of pandemic. The implementation requires improvement, particularly on data of beneficiaries through one data policy to address food insecurity toward poor and vulnerable groups. Investing in a sustainable future forms a significant pillar of COVID-19 response. Priority to strengthen resilience of the local food system and facilitate food production at local level with ensuring smallholders have financial support and minimizing the impact to the environment requires more urgent attention than a mega project causing more land tenure conflicts and environmental degradation. Chapter 19 analyzes how frontier technologies are supporting the key stakeholders to manage the COVID-19 crises—protect lives, livelihoods, and enhance the quality of risk governance in Asia and the Pacific. The chapter addresses five key lessons emerging from the COVID-19 response—(1) making risk assessment more dynamics, (2) empowering at risk communities, (3) managing a global risk with local action, (4) managing uncertainties, and (5) bridging the gaps in knowledge and understanding in systemic risks. The chapter also outlines three key enablers— frontier technologies, data science, and national innovation systems that help to prepare for future crises. Chapter 20 presents examples of how emerging technologies have been employed during the COVID-19 crisis; discusses trends that may heighten the role of emerging technologies in a post-COVID-19 world, and reviews risks to and opportunities of faster adoption of emerging technologies and its implications to human security. Chapter 21 examines the potential benefits, concerns, and solutions related to sustainable and secure access to public health data. We study some of the data-driven

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solutions in action worldwide and present them as replicable use cases. We also examine why a large volume of data from public and private sources never reaches the desks of decision-makers and suggest technical and policy solutions to eliminate these sources of “data friction.” Chapter 22 provides commentary on the social, ethical, and technical issues that AI can impose along with various aspects that need to be considered while governing AI. Finally, an AI governance framework is proposed based on socio-administrative principles to extend their credibility in mitigating, managing, and governing the human threats and uphold human security.

1.5

Future Perspective

As mentioned in Sect. 1.1, “Living with uncertainty” is becoming core to during as well as possibly post COVID-19 lifestyle. The year 2020 and first half of 2021 have also experienced different disaster and climatic events. The traditional risk reduction approaches had their limitations, which was observed in the response to natural hazards during pandemic. Cascading or complex emergencies would possibly become more common in coming days, and needs adaptive governance to cope with the impacts. Adaptive governance require unique decision making, new mindset in training and capacity building, use of new technologies and understanding, as well as awareness of communities. In the human security perspective, basic development issues would face tremendous challenges in the coming days. However, on the positive side, rural healthcare infrastructures in developing countries is hopefully witnessing a betterment due to prolonged pandemic. A biological hazard like the COVID-10 pandemic is an opportunity to strengthen partnerships under Goal 17 to develop warning mechanisms and to reduce gaps in data sharing and accuracy for effective evidence-based policy and decision making. The role of science and technology and multi-stakeholder partnerships are of utmost importance in such a case. Better global partnerships and effective risk governance need to be brought into the core of preparedness and response for future health emergencies. Furthering the Health Emergency Disaster Risk Management (HEDRM) Framework may support a coordinated response across various linked sectors rather than straining one particular sector. Also, as mentioned earlier, innovation and entrepreneurship would play a critical role in fostering social innovation, and thereby addressing the challenges of human security in future days.

References Chan E, Shaw R (2020) Public health and disasters: health emergency and disaster risk management in Asia. Springer, New York, NY. 343 p

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Hua J, Adu-Gyamfi B, Shaw R (2021) Post COVID-19 technology and innovation ecosystem in China. Springer Nature, Singapore Ogata S, Sen A (2003) Human security now. Commission on Human Security, New York, NY. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/ 91BAEEDBA50C6907C1256D19006A9353-chs-security-may03.pdf. Accessed 2 Jun 2021 Sen A (2004) Development as freedom. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 384 p Shaw R, Prabhakar SVRK, Chiba Y (2016) Policy brief: SDGs, DRR and CCA: potentials for strengthening inter-linkage. IGES publication, Hayama. 12 p Shaw R, Pulhin J, Inoue M (2021) Disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and human security: a historical perspective under the Hyogo Framework and beyond. In: Pulhin J, Inoue M, Shaw R (eds) Climate change, disaster risk and human security. Springer Nature, Singapore, pp 21–36 UN (2005) In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all. UN, New York, NY. https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol¼A/59/2005. Accessed 2 Jun 2021 UN (2012) General assembly resolution. UN, New York, NY. https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/ view_doc.asp?symbol¼A/RES/66/290. Accessed 2 Jun 2021 WEF (2021) World Economic Forum the global risk report 2021. WEF, Cologny. https://www. weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021. Accessed 2 Jun 2021 Worldometer (2021) COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavi rus/?utm_campaign¼homeAdvegas. Accessed 2 Jun 2021

Part I

Overview

Chapter 2

Developmental Agenda and the Global Pandemic Bita Afsharinia, Anjula Gurtoo, and Rajib Shaw

Abstract With the perspective of global pandemic, the chapter looks at the developmental issues through a systematic review of current literature on seven mainstream human security indicators: health, economy, food, education, environment, personal, community, and political security. After conceptualising the pandemic’s contribution towards sustainability and human security, the chapter presents illustrative questions in the discussion section to understand the application of the human security concepts in practice. The pandemic has affected the key basic SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) related to health, income, food, education, environment, and others, and affected the community as a whole as well, through aggravated physical and psychological stress at the community level. Evidently, the SDGs and other global developmental agenda have faced a setback since 2019 due to the deep and systematic negative consequences of the current pandemic. How can nations, in these circumstances, remove systemic inequality and prioritise growth? In the chapter, we raise some questions for discussion on how to alleviate the impacts and put the world on track towards development. Keywords SDG · Global pandemic · COVID-19 · Human security · Global framework

2.1

Introduction

COVID-19 crisis, more than a public health emergency, indicates a systematic human development crisis, spread across the world. The COVID-19 crisis has damaged the core foundations of development in the world alongside key human

B. Afsharinia · A. Gurtoo Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India R. Shaw (*) Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_2

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development dimensions including heath, economy, food security, and education, among others (UNDP 2020a). Consequently, each and every individual across the globe has become vulnerable due to the ongoing health crisis. However, several research reports have highlighted the disproportionate social and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as compared to those on the high-income counties (HICs) (Bong et al. 2020; Walker et al. 2020). Moreover, the uncertainty of the current pandemic potentially worsens the condition. This chapter discusses the various human security issues facing the world due to the pandemic, with the objective of outlining the main questions for the consideration of the social and political leaders, in order to meet the SDGs for the world. Using the human security approach taken by the UN, the impact of COVID-19 on various human security dimensions is outlined. Subsequently, literature review conducted between October 2020 and March 2021 and content analysis are utilised to identify the various dynamics between human security dimensions and the pandemic. A deductive approach is applied using the UN framework for categorisation. After detailing the pandemic’s impact on sustainability and human security, we present illustrative questions in the discussion section, to understand the application of the human security concepts in practice. The subsequent sections explain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these diverse dimensions of human development across the world.

2.2

Methods and Material

Literature review of the eight mainstream human security indicators and content analysis to understand the integration of human security with sustainability and the pandemic impact forms the base of the conceptual paper. The UN human security framework forms the theoretical basis for the review and content analysis.

2.2.1

The Framework

The human security approach taken by the UN (https://www.un.org/humansecurity/ wp-content/uploads/2017/10/h2.pdf) forms a multidimensional analytical framework incorporating an integrated approach to a broad range of human sustainability issues. These are: 1. The right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty, and despair 2. People-centered, comprehensive, context-specific, and prevention-oriented responses strengthening the protection and empowerment of all people and all communities 3. Exploring interlinkages between peace, development, and human rights

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Table 2.1 Type of insecurity and root causes Type of insecurity Economic insecurity Food insecurity Environmental insecurity Personal insecurity Community insecurity Political insecurity

Root causes Persistent poverty, unemployment, lack of access to credit and other economic opportunities Hunger, famine, sudden rise in food prices health insecurity epidemics, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to basic healthcare Environmental degradation, resource depletion, natural disasters Physical violence in all its forms, human trafficking, child labour Inter-ethnic, religious and other identity-based tensions, crime, terrorism Political repression, human rights violations, lack of rule of law and justice

Source: https://www.un.org/humansecurity/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/h2.pdf

4. Security as distinct from the responsibility to protect and its implementation 5. The threat or the use of force or coercive measures 6. National ownership, and strengthening of national solutions that are compatible with local realities The UN framework, consequently, follows the five fundamental principles of sustainable human conditions, namely, people-centered, comprehensive, contextspecific, prevention-oriented, and protects and empowers. Table 2.1 outlines the types of human insecurities and possible root causes. Based on these principles, we develop the possible impacts of COVID-19 on individuals, groups, and communities (Table 2.2), and our framework forms the base for the analysis.

2.2.2

Literature Review

The literature review was conducted between October 2020 and March 2021. An initial search of literature started with broad and paired keywords using the AND operator. Some examples of key search terms used during the extensive literature were ‘human security’ AND ‘pandemic’, ‘sustainability’ AND ‘human security dimensions’, ‘defining human security’ AND ‘pandemic’, ‘COVID impact’, ‘COVID implications’ AND ‘human security’, etc. The initial search generated a mix of 96 articles. Further screening of titles, abstracts, introductions, conclusions, and type of publications led the removal of 41 articles. The deletion included articles focusing on ‘financial sustainability’, ‘political dynamics of security’, and ‘human security management’ among others. We selected papers focusing on the human security dimensions and analysed the papers from the pandemic perspective. Final selection involves a total mix of 55 relevant peer-reviewed journal articles, working papers, conference papers, book chapters, and short communications covering a period from 2020 to 2021.

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Table 2.2 Impact of COVID-19 on human security Human security components Health security Economic security

Food security

Education security

Environmental security Personal security Community security

Political security

Impact on individuals, groups and communities • Increase the physical and mental diseases for infected and uninfected groups in isolation • Increasing unemployment • Increasing job transformation (Emergent ICT: Information and Communication Technology) for work-life balance, employee safety • Collapse in economic activity and dips in productivity • Pushed the low-income populations towards poverty • Hitting global tourism and aviation industries • Increasing food insecurity including disruption of food supply chains, uneven food prices, adverse food environments, particularly in low-income households • Disruption of social protection programmes, specifically for vulnerable populations including women and children, and in turn increasing the risk of malnutrition • Disruption of education system and pedagogical systems • Reduction of innovation within the education • Shifting of the traditional teaching methods • Growing inaccessibility to the educational and feeding programmes • Increase in pollution level • Increase of medical waste, haphazard use, and increase the untreated waste • Negative influence on social identity development • Disruption in education and lives of working millennials across the world • Disruption in labour markets • Increasing transformations in job along with deteriorating quality of employment • Widening of gender inequality • Increasing the level of psychological distress • Increasing poverty • Oscillation social status • Growing inaccessible healthcare, and domestic violence • Created the challenges in women empowerment • Increased childcare performed by men • Growing sharing of responsibilities in household • Protection of fundamental human rights and well-being

After in-depth analysis, we divided the literature into seven broad themes as defined by the UN framework, giving emphasis on sustainability and human security crisis. The 55 articles selected for final review fall under general health security (e.g. Subbarao and Mahanty 2020; World Health Organization 2020; Banerjee and Rai 2020); mental health (e.g., Gennaro et al. 2020; Rogers et al. 2020; Troyer et al. 2020); physical health (Clair et al. 2021; McLeod et al. 2019; Pecanha et al. 2020);

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economy (UNCTAD 2020; Chaudhary et al. 2020; Khanna 2020; Sinding 2009; World Bank 2020a); food security (e.g., Swinnen and McDermott 2020; Klassen and Murphy 2020); food availability (e.g., Woodhill 2020; Lugo-Morin 2020); food accessibility (e.g., Erokhin and Gao 2020; Ibn-mohammed et al. 2020); food utilisation and stability (FAO 2020b; Naja and Hamadeh 2020; Aman and Masood 2020); education security (Drane et al. 2021; Bambra et al. 2020; World Bank 2020b); environmental security (Rume and Islam 2020; Science Daily 2020a); personal security (Andrea Carlà 2020; Hamilton 2020); community security (Bonal and González 2020; OECD 2020b; UNWOMEN 2020); and political security (GDRC 2020; World Justice Project 2020).

2.2.3

Content Analysis

A content analysis method identified the relationship between human security dimensions and the pandemic. A deductive approach was applied using the UN framework for categorisation. The data were separated into two stages: in the first stage, two main codes were created for each of the two constructs, namely, human security and pandemic. Subsequently, eight sub-codes (‘second level codes’) are created based on the eight human security dimensions developed in Table 2.2. In the second stage, multiple keywords are identified from the eight sub-codes, to identify, extract, and categorise the relevant text. After conceptualising the pandemic’s contribution towards sustainability and human security.

2.3 2.3.1

Review Results Health

Coronavirus disease or COVID-19 pandemic forms one of the greatest public health concerns gripping the world since World War II. COVID-19 virus causes an infection in the upper respiratory tract (sinuses, nose, and throat) or lower respiratory tract (windpipe and lungs) (Subbarao and Mahanty 2020; WebMD 2020). Among all the coronaviruses, seven have significantly affected the humankind and the remaining three can cause more severe illness including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic (Medical News Today 2020a). The recent surveys on the health consequences of COVID-19 pandemic have estimated more than 991,000 deaths worldwide in the year 2020 (WHO 2020), and keeps increasing as fresh variants and mutations develop. Hence, COVID-19 pandemic remains the greatest challenge for national and international health. The first influential step for reduction and control of the pandemic were social distancing and

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lockdowns. Although the social distancing and lockdown of public places were implemented to check on the rapidly spreading virus infection, the world experienced certain potential detrimental health effects of social isolation, such as psychological distress and physical inactivity (Banerjee and Rai 2020; physiopedia 2020). In the subsequent subsection, we present a detailed discussion on the influence of COVID-19 pandemic on the physical as well as metal health of people across the globe.

2.3.1.1

Mental Health

A significant association may exist between the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and psychiatric implications including experience of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delirium, depression, anxiety, and insomnia (Gennaro et al. 2020; Rogers et al. 2020; Troyer et al. 2020). Consequently, the year has seen a surge in mental health issues of individuals who contracted the virus even after physical recovery (Roy et al. 2021). Besides, the individuals who were not infected with the virus were also under severe psychological distress. Studies have brought out psychological distresses and severe stress attributing to fear of illness, loss of income, bereavement, social isolation, and uncertainties regarding the future. The stresses can adversely reduce the cortisol over the immune system and thus, resulting in increased inflammation (Gautam et al. 2020; Hannibal and Bishop 2014; Morey 2015; World Health Organization 2020). The increase in inflammation further aggravates the risk of other severe diseases and disorders, including autoimmune disorders, heart disease, and diabetes (Healthline 2020).

2.3.1.2

Physical Health

The social isolation implemented to contain the pandemic resulted in limited outdoor activities, which in turn resulted in adverse physical health condition in communities worldwide (Clair et al. 2021). Limited physical activities restricted the leisurely activities such as going to the gym or cycling which negatively influenced the immune system and inflammation for individuals (Kaur et al. 2020; Pecanha et al. 2020), contributing to increase in the severity of infections as well as common chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease (blood pressure, vascular function), diabetes, cancer, particularly for older adults (Contributors 2020; McLeod et al. 2019). Moreover, social isolation and lockdowns impact through sedentarism of muscular, cardiovascular, metabolic, and nervous systems (Narici et al. 2020). Evidence shows a strong association between lack of physical inactivity and muscle atrophy or loss of muscle tissue (English and Paddon-Jones 2010). The muscle atrophy known as an exceedingly phenomenon caused by lack of physical activities and detectable to the muscle denervation and damage to the neuromuscular junction (Narici et al. 2020). Additionally, process known as cachexia or wasting

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disorder causes extreme weight loss and muscle wasting and can often be seen in a weakened immune system (Argilés et al. 2011; Science Daily 2020b). Evidence suggests the immune response to the virus strongly depending on the regular physical activity of an individual, the lack of which impede the adaptive immune response to virus, further increasing the risk of COVID-19 (da Silveira et al. 2021). Studies reveal the complexity of human DNA getting affected by aerobic metabolism of a human body (Radak et al. 2013). Hence, physical inactivity acts an impediment to the O2 (oxygen) pathway at all levels, impairs oxygen circulation from the cardiovascular system which significantly contributes to poor cardiovascular health (Poitras et al. 2018). This in turn can potentially lead to lower body immunity (immune cells) and finally, result in higher risk of morbidity and mortality worldwide (Eroğlu et al. 2018; Nystoriak and Bhatnagar 2018; Radak et al. 2013). Furthermore, epidemiological evidence signifies the physical inactivity as an important risk factor for multiple causes of infections and diseases (Nielsen 1989; Strategies et al. 1999). Physical inactivity negatively impacts the responses of the immune system against respiratory infections viral. Moreover, recent studies suggest regular physical activities and exercise conferring some protection against infection diseases and its association with several anti-influenza benefits, including reduced risk and increased rates of vaccine efficacy (Scartoni et al. 2020; Zbinden-Foncea et al. 2020). In addition, studies demonstrate physical inactivity impairing structures and functions in the nervous system (Mischel and Mueller 2011). Physical inactivity directly influences the excitability of Rostral Ventrolateral Medulla (RVLM) neurons, known as primary cause of experimental and essential hypertension, and hence, contributes to sympathetic overactivity and increased risk of cardiovascular disease in sedentary individuals (Kumagai et al. 2012; Lloyd-Jones et al. 2010; Wærhaug 2020). Moreover, the pandemic has taken a big toll on the impoverished populations who strongly rely on the public healthcare services. Reasons being, limited access to health services, and availability of few clinics with the shortage of skilled trained and condition of poor quality sanitation and hygienic, and high cost of hospitality in public health expenditure particularly in deprived areas (Ahmed et al. 2020; De Souza et al. 2020). The inaccessibility and unavailability of proper healthcare services for the low-income populations also resulted in rapidly increase in the spread of the virus and contribute to the rate of the deaths with communities experiencing greater economic disadvantage. The disproportionate impact on low-income populations and inaccessible healthcare services presents a clear image of inequitable response to COVID-19 pandemic and requires special attention from the governments (Hanvoravongchai et al. 2020).

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Economy

COVID-19 implications have had significant impact on social-economic dimensions of the global economy. Several economic studies have reported the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in an incomparable slowdown of economic activities in all countries around the world (UNCTAD 2020). Due to the strict lockdown measures, the manufacturing and services sectors across the world came to a standstill. These services sectors include hospitality, tours and travels, healthcare, retail, banks, hotels, real estate, education, health, IT, recreation, media, and others. Moreover, the manufacturing sectors have primarily been disrupted due to the shutdown of factories and industries which lead to a largescale loss of jobs and income. The loss of jobs further pushed the low-income populations towards poverty and contributed significantly to the downfall of economies (Kapoor 2020; Khanna 2020; Sinding 2009; World Bank 2020a). Lockdown and social distancing resulted in productivity loss. Furthermore, a sharp decline in demand for goods and services was experienced, thus leading to a significant slowdown in economic activity (Chaudhary et al. 2020; Maria del Rio-Chanona et al. 2020). Additionally, COVID-19 pandemic influenced the global tourism and aviation industries, which are two of the world’s greatest service sector markets (Madani et al. 2020; UNWTO 2020). The travel restrictions due to the pandemic have had a hardhitting effect on the tourism revenues. Tourism forms a significant economic factor in the current millennium. The pandemic has impeded tourism- and tourist-related sectors like the travel and sports industry, resulting in major economic loss for the sector (National Geographic 2020; OECD 2020c; World Bank 2020c). The pandemic restrictions and changes have been significantly helpful to support the health and safety of the public. Gaurav Sharma (2020) and WSIS (2020) indicate positive influence of emergent ICT in favouring work from home options, including work-life balance, employee safety, and saving travel expense also leading to more job satisfaction and productivity, which are primary determinant of success for an organisation (Collins et al. 2013; Moore 2007; Wheatley 2012; Yang et al. 2020). The pandemic has seen large-scale job creation in the ICT sector, particularly for individuals for whom daily commute to workplace was a hurdle. Moreover, the paradigm shift of traditional work culture to the remote work culture has predominantly affected the low-income households who do not have access to modern technologies, such as computer, mobile, and internet. The inaccessibility to technological advancements, coupled with closure of industries and factories have secluded the low-income populations from livelihoods (Jackson et al. 2020; Moore 2007; Ayyagari et al. 2011; Scholarios and Marks 2004; Wright et al. 2014).

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Food Security

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked not only a health and economic crisis but also food insecurity, particularly in impoverished populations. All the six dimensions of food security are negatively impacted, including availability, access, utilisation, stability, agency, and sustainability, which plays a vital role in ensuring the right to food (FAO 2020a; Lawlis et al. 2018; OECD 2020a). Among other critical catalysts rupturing food security include food supply breaks, uneven food prices, adverse food environments, and disruption of social protection programmes. These unfavourable factors were aggravated due to mass loss in livelihoods, and significant cut in per capita income hampering the nutritional security further down (Clapp and Moseley 2020; Klassen and Murphy 2020; Swinnen and McDermott 2020). Moreover, the persistent higher risk of uncertainties attributing to the ongoing pandemic pose a great challenge towards food and nutrition security in the near future.

2.3.3.1

Food Availability

In the light of recent challenges in food supply chain and a decline in demand, nations are experiencing loss of production, disrupted distribution, and loss of income to the farmers, traders, and retailers. Globally, grains signify an important contributor to human food supplies (Enghiad et al. 2017). The start of the outbreak resulted in food insecurity in low-income countries. Unlike high-income counties food grains cultivation in low-income counties remains unmechanised and thus, requires huge labour (Woodhill 2020). High dependence on labour intensity in low-income countries, created massive disruptions in the food supply chain right from the farms to the market attributing to the closure of processing plants and restaurants or food shops (FAO 2020c). The supply chains for other commodities except grains, such as fruits and vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, and sugar experienced more disruptions in higher-income countries because of their more labour intensive nature, susceptibility to food worker illnesses, and closure of larger farms and processing facilities where disease outbreaks may spread rapidly (ETGovernment. com 2020).

2.3.3.2

Food Accessibility

The global economic reports demonstrated lockdowns having significantly negative effect on accessibility to food for individuals. Food accessibility dictates the economic challenges during the pandemic. Loss of jobs and consequent financial problems have significantly influenced accessibility to basic food products (Erokhin and Gao 2020; Ibn-mohammed et al. 2020). The problem gets aggravated due to the shooting up of food prices during the pandemic and hence, making the essential food even more inaccessible to the low-income population. Moreover, the pandemic

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disrupted many school meals programmes providing meal to children from the economically vulnerable communities (Dunn 2020). Further, due to the stringent restrictions concerning the pandemic, the local food shops were closed or allowed to open for shorter durations, resulting in worsening of food accessibility, particularly to the people who are predominantly dependent on these shops for day-to-day food consumption.

2.3.3.3

Food Utilisation

The pandemic significantly changed the utilisation and diet pattern of individuals. Given the issues related to the availability and accessibility of food negatively influenced the ability to afford a healthy diet and in turn shift to a cheaper food characterised by inadequate and imbalance diet (FAO 2020b; Naja and Hamadeh 2020). The diet is bulky, with low density of energy and nutrients and low bioavailability of vitamins and minerals which consequently, resulted on nutrition deficiency, particularly among vulnerable or low economic households (Michaelsen et al. 2009). Therefore, this could eventually impair growth and development and increase the prevalence of malnutrition associated with host defence to infections (Bourke et al. 2016; Ibrahim et al. 2017). Moreover, due to stringent restrictions and closure of restaurants and food stalls, the fresh food utilisation shift towards processed and shelf-stable food, along with artificial ingredients, for improving the taste, texture, and shelf life may weaken the immune system towards infections and virus (Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America 2019; Medical News Today 2020b).

2.3.3.4

Food Stability

COVID-19 restriction and its uncertainty over the evolution of the pandemic could significantly contribute to the higher risk of severe food insecurity including uncertainty of the food market. Market instability can, in turn, create a negative influence on price volatility and uncertainty of currency values resulting in disrupted food supply chain. In addition, market instability can significantly reduce the ability and willingness of individuals and firms to invest in the agricultural food sector attributing to high amount of uncertainties (World Bank 2020a, b, c). Further, these uncertainties lead to only a few food products in the market along with higher cost which hampers the accessibility to nutritious food of low-income individuals and consequently, increases the risk of malnutrition and its association diseases alongside with lower immunity against virus (Aman and Masood 2020).

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Food Sustainability

The food security issues resulting from the pandemic have raised concerns regarding the sustainability aspects of the food system. The sudden lockdown measures resulted in a large-scale food wastage across the world, due to closure of restaurants and markets, particularly the wet markets (Aldaco et al. 2020). Moreover, the whole world experiences a huge surge in the utilisation of single-use plastics for delivering food including packaging and carrier bags, consequently adding to the already severe concerns regarding environment degradation. These environmental concerns might lead to hampering of the food system sustainability in the future (Parashar and Hait 2021).

2.3.4

Education

COVID-19 pandemic caused one of the largest disruptions of education system and created new challenges worldwide. The pandemic exacerbated pre-existing education disparities, particularly for vulnerable population of the societies (Drane et al. 2021). The closure of educational institutions posed one of the greatest challenges faced by students as well as the educational institutions (Bambra et al. 2020; World Bank 2020b). Abrupt shifting of the traditional teaching methods involving physical presence to the virtual methods has further aggravated the problems of countries with low accessibility and availability of essential resources including computer and internet connection for the students and teachers (Coflan and Kaye 2020). Additionally, a large percentage (86%) of primary school children are not getting any education in low-income countries due to reasons of technology and access (UNDP 2020a). Moreover, school closure significantly compromised the dietary intake of children due to the inaccessibility to the educational and feeding programmes provided in schools. Furthermore, the healthcare and rearing remain great challenges particularly for children who are deprived from parental and family support due to the different reasons (Mayurasakorn et al. 2020). Hence, ongoing pandemic affirmed a gap in pedagogical education system, exceptionally vulnerable population of countries. Furthermore, the pandemic significantly stimulated innovation within the education sectors in order to make education equitable to everyone across the world. As the innovation requires openness and interactions between systems and their environments, governments worldwide redesigned the educational system by innovative approaches like technology-enabled support, and teacher training, resulting in empowerment of students to become lifelong learners and being productive (UNSDG 2020). These innovative steps in the education section were all the more important as appropriate and accessible education aids the development of strong

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foundation of a nation and possesses the potential to stimulate growth and prosperity in any economy.

2.3.5

Environment

The impact of COVID-19 on the environment has been twofold, positive and negative. Attributing to the worldwide lockdown resulting in closure of factories, industries, restaurants, and transportation, the world experienced a significant reduction in pollution level including air, noise, land, and water. Particularly, during the initial phases of the pandemic, the air quality in most polluted cities in the world showed a significant increase with reduction in Green House Gases emissions (Science Daily 2020a). In addition to the positive effects, certain negative environmental impacts of COVID-19 exist as well across the world. These impacts include as increase of medical waste, haphazard use, and disposal of disinfectants, mask, and gloves; and burden of untreated wastes continuously endangering the environment (Rume and Islam 2020).

2.3.6

Personal Security

The global pandemic has led to certain uncertainties in the lives of individuals worldwide, due to changes in daily routines, mode of working, and extensive reliance on technology (Andrea Carlà 2020). Moreover, the pandemic restrictions such as social distance, isolation, and lockdown draped the social interactions and in turn negatively influence the social identity development. The identity of an individual gets tied with several dimensions, including financial security (having resources to support a standard of living), personal safety (ability to go about their everyday life free from the threat or fear of psychological, emotional, or physical harm), particular relationships (close connections between people), reputation or position in society (central role in human societies). Pandemic has contributed to feeling more insecure through the experience of traumas, loneliness, social anxiety, alongside with concern about future uncertainty of these dimensions of security (Hamilton 2020). The pandemic has disrupted social identity, resulting in personal insecurity, and myriads of psychological distress.

2.3.7

Community Security

COVID-19 has had a severe influence on young people around the world. The reason for the negative influence includes disruption in education, as the schools, colleges, and universities were shut down worldwide (Bonal and González 2020; OECD

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2020b). Moreover, the pandemic has left a major influence on the lives of working millennials across the world. The primary impacts include large-scale job losses, income losses, increased barriers in getting job in the new labour markets, transformations in job along with deteriorating quality of employment (Alon et al. 2020). Moreover, studies reveal the pandemic has resulted in the widening of gender inequality attributing to numerous reasons. Evidence indicates the gender inequality due to women’s job disruption more than men since the current state of the labour market. Paired with increased caregiving responsibilities towards children by the school closure and COVID-19 exposure concerns have resulted in a marked loss in women’s employment (CRS 2020; Lee et al. 2020), attributed to the deep entrenched inequalities, social norms, and unequal power relations (UNDP 2020b; UNWOMEN 2020). As more women are losing job as compared to men, the level of psychological distress in women gets aggravated more than men, due to poverty, social status, inaccessible healthcare, and domestic violence. Thus, the pandemic has created the challenges in women empowerment across the world (UNICEF 2020). However, on the flip side, a few studies suggest working from home through digital channels has resulted in an increase in the amount of childcare performed by men as they are spending more time with their families (Almudena Sevilla 2020; UN 2020). In the long term, this might potentially lead to the narrowing of the gender gap as men will tend to share the responsibilities with women in the households, and would eventually be a positive step towards women empowerment.

2.3.8

Political Security

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant influence on the political security across the world including protection of fundamental human rights and well-being of all people. The pandemic resulted in discriminatory responses by some states with respect to certain minority or vulnerable groups (World Justice Project 2020). Moreover, excessive infringements on core political and civil rights of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly are evident. Besides, with contact tracing to contain the virus using sophisticated technologies has raised huge concerns about an individual’s right to privacy (GDRC 2020; World Justice Project 2020).

2.4

Discussion

The impact of an epidemic on human security is undoubtedly enormous. The SDGs and other global developmental agenda, consequently, have also faced a setback since 2020 due to the deep and systematic negative consequences of the current pandemic. How can nations, in these circumstances, remove systemic inequality and

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prioritise growth? Below we raise some questions for discussion on how to alleviate the impacts and put the world on track towards development. The first question pivots around improving the health security worldwide, with special focus on the vulnerable and neglected communities and societies. How can the world ensure safe and supportive environment for physical and mental health of people in general and vulnerable communities in specific? What actions can countries and communities take to safeguard and improve the physical and mental health of individuals? Studies since a decade or so, much before the current pandemic talked of universal insurance coverage for care delivery, developing electronic health records, and digitalisation health data in order for personalised care, integration, and coordination of all health institutions and infrastructure for seamless healthcare delivery and encouraging innovation in health technology (WHO 2010). The 2008 OECD survey (Paris et al. 2010) further highlighted need for population coverage and public financing of health risk, focusing on public/private mix of healthcare provision, user choice and competition among providers, and regulation of supplies and prices. These and other options require debate and consolidated action. The next question asks the ways and means of economic security. How do governments across the world ensure accessibility to technology particularly for impoverished and low-income populations? How do we leverage technology to tackle the economic adversities like loss of job, employment, and productivity? The five characteristics of a sustainable economic system include maximum participation, equity, growth for all, environmental and social sustainability, and economic stability (UNCTAD 2020). An economy should produce enough goods and services to enable well-being for all, in a sustainable manner, keeping the vulnerable populations in mind. These points remain valid during and after the pandemic as well. How to achieve them remains a question we ask. Food security forms our next focus and we ask the following questions: how do authorities ensure food security for each and every individual? How do they fulfil the aim to improve the food accessibility and availability for every individual during all times, and during the pandemic specifically? Many authors advocate for attention to vulnerable populations during the pandemic, through social security benefits, such as additional food items. Further, cash support to impoverished households can help in the reduction of hunger and tackle the malnutrition to a large extent. The long-term goal for food security, however, demand all people at all times have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO 2008). The four pillars of food security, hence, are food availability, access to food, utilisation, and stability (FAO 2008). Worldwide people need to deliberate on ways to achieve the four pillars of food security. The pandemic has disrupted education and children worldwide are left with gaps in their learning levels. How do governments ensure learning accessibility to all students, including those belonging to vulnerable communities? How can educators and education enabler use open-sources of digital learning solutions and learning management software in order to reduce the barriers to education during the pandemic? Studies have highlighted several indicators of inclusivity and access in

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Table 2.3 Impact of COVID-19 on human security Human security components Health security

Economic security

Food security

Education security

Environmental security

Personal security

Community security

Political security

Policy questions arising from impacts How can the world ensure safe and supportive environment for physical and mental health of people in general and vulnerable communities in specific? What actions can countries and communities take to safeguard and improve the physical and mental health of individuals? How do governments across the world ensure accessibility to technology particularly for impoverished and low-income populations? How do we leverage technology to tackle the economic adversities like loss of job, employment, productivity? How do authorities ensure food security for each and every individual? How do they fulfil the aim to improve the food accessibility and availability for every individual during all times, and during the pandemic specifically? How do governments ensure learning accessibility to all students, including those belonging to vulnerable communities? How can educators and education enabler use open-sources of digital learning solutions and learning management software in order to reduce the barriers to education during the pandemic? How do the people of this planet ensure sustainability of the planet? How do we deal with waste effectively and safeguard biodiversity? How do we minimise possible secondary impacts of environmental exploitation and degradation on health and the environment? How do governments ensure adequate and timely spread of information and communication to its citizens? How can governments support their citizens in preparing for disasters and calamities effectively and efficiently? What mechanisms of control, management and social media applications can provide better personal security? What should be the nature of consultation and agreements among members of a community, and between communities, on standards of democracy and human rights, to promote community security? How do nations ensure peaceful dispute settlement and prevention of violent conflicts? How can states ensure a consensus and majoritarian based political rules and development of shared political practices? What procedure and practices will encourage political learning at the social level and promote human rights based political thoughts?

education, namely, ease of use, stability, flexible approach, maintaining privacy, environment control, ease of communication, ability to handle diversity, and expandability to incorporate change. The pandemic has exposed all these indicators and put them up for scrutiny. To meet the criteria of inclusivity and access remains a challenge worldwide (Table 2.3). How do the people of this planet ensure sustainability of the planet? How do we deal with waste effectively and safeguard biodiversity? How do we minimise possible secondary impacts of environmental exploitation and degradation on health and the environment? Environmental security forms one of the most critical issues or debate in the current times. Several agencies indicate the human–environment

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dynamics requiring attention include restoration of the damaged environment, better management of resources and resource scarcities, halting environmental degradation, and forming policies and controls on biological threats like COVID and HIV. Man-nature conflict has negative outcomes for both and solutions need to be sought as global priority. Personal security requires adequate efforts are taken to deter, delay, and provide warning before any possible calamity or disaster and to give assistance and prepare for the possibility of disaster in a constructive manner. How do governments ensure adequate and timely spread of information and communication to its citizens? How can governments support their citizens in preparing for disasters and calamities effectively and efficiently? What mechanisms of control, management, and social media applications can provide better personal security? Communication emerges as the most effective early warning systems with a combination of top-down and bottom-up interaction with citizens. Other factors include cooperation between agencies, coaching and procedural training of vulnerable populations, and preparation of adequate tools by the government for meeting citizen crisis. While communities and groups are often the target of security, individual variations, and specifics need an assessment as well. A secure community exists at the international level, among states, or at the local level, which develops peaceful norms for the regulation of conflicts (Adler and Barnett 1998). The questions for a secure community include what should be the nature of consultation and agreements among members of a community, and between communities, on standards of democracy and human rights, to promote community security? How do nations ensure peaceful dispute settlement and prevention of violent conflicts? Agencies have stressed on development of international accountability and norms, socialisation and teaching of norms to all communities, and development of a collective transnational identity to offset wars and boundary conflicts, at the international level. The pandemic has aggravated physical and psychological stress at the community level and we see increase incidences of violence within and between communities. An enquiry on the impact of COVID on community security becomes imperative. Protection of human rights and well-being of all people remains a universal political security call and includes protection against people from state repression such as freedom of press, freedom of speech, and freedom of voting. We ask the following questions: how can states ensure a consensus and majoritarian based political rules and development of shared political practices? What procedure and practices will encourage political learning at the social level and promote human rights based political thoughts? Political security demonstrates the nature of the socially constructed shared values and identity of a region. Promoting fair values and promoting freedom of speech and voting becomes an essential tool for promoting human rights. These indicators are an prerequisite for world peace and should have global priority.

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Conclusion

COVID-19 crisis has hit hard on all the key dimensions of human development including health, socioeconomic, food security, education, and environment all over the world, and has the potential to remain disrupting these dimensions if corrective measure are not taken immediately. However, authorities across the world have realised this aspect of the pandemic and are taking effective steps largely by leveraging the advancements in the digital technologies. The larger potential of digital technologies gets revealed, as a vital tool to alleviate the adverse effects of the pandemic. Given the indispensability of digitisation in every aspect of human development, making the advanced technologies accessible to each and every individual across the globe forms a universal challenge in all domains, be it economy, education or healthcare. Thus, in addition to adopt large-scale utilisation of technology, governments across the world should ensure proper accessibility to technology particularly for impoverished and low-income populations in order to tackle the adversities of pandemic. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has explicitly exposed the carelessness of the humankind all over the world towards the sustainability of the planet by ruining the wildlife habitat, polluting, and overexploiting the existing natural resources. Moreover, the world is continuing to see mass wasting of food, disposal of plastic gloves and masks, thus making the situation even worse. Authorities across the world must ensure sustainability of the planet, ignorance of which might lead the world to another pandemic before the current one ends.

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Wheatley D (2012) Good to be home? Time-use and satisfaction levels among home-based teleworkers. N Technol Work Employ 27(3):224–241. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-005X. 2012.00289.x WHO (2010) Key components of a well functioning health system. World Health Organization technical report series. WHO, Geneva, p 2 WHO (2020) Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation reports updates 27 September 2020. World Health Organization technical report series. WHO, Geneva, pp 1–23. https://www. who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200928-weekly-epi-update.pdf? sfvrsn¼9e354665_6 Woodhill J (2020) Responding to the impact of COVID-19 on rural people and food systems. Foresight4Food. https://www.foresight4food.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Impact-ofCOVID-19-on-Rural-Poverty-and-Food-Systems-V2.pdf World Bank (2020a) COVID-19 will hit the poor hardest. Here’s what we can do about it. World Bank, New York, NY. https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/covid-19-will-hit-poor-hardestheres-what-we-can-do-about-it World Bank (2020b) Educational challenges and opportunities of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. World Bank, New York, NY. https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/educationalchallenges-and-opportunities-covid-19-pandemic World Bank (2020c) Rebuilding tourism competitiveness. World Bank, New York, NY. https://doi. org/10.1596/34348 World Health Organization (2020) COVID-19 disrupting mental health services in most countries. WHO survey. World Health Organization, Geneva, pp 2–5. https://www.who.int/news/item/0510-2020-covid-19-disrupting-mental-health-services-in-most-countries-who-survey World Justice Project (2020) Fundamental rights and the Covid-19 pandemic. World Justice Project, Washington, DC Wright KB, Abendschein B, Wombacher K, O’Connor M, Hoffman M, Dempsey M, Krull C, Dewes A, Shelton A (2014) Work-related communication technology use outside of regular work hours and work life conflict: the influence of communication technologies on perceived work life conflict, burnout, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. Manag Commun Q 28(4):507–530. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318914533332 WSIS (2020) The coronavirus (COVID-19) response. WSIS, Geneva Yang S, Fichman P, Zhu X, Sanfilippo M, Li S, Fleischmann KR (2020) The use of ICT during COVID‐19. Proc Assoc Inf Sci Technol 57(1):1–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.297 Zbinden-Foncea H, Francaux M, Deldicque L, Hawley JA (2020) Does high cardiorespiratory fitness confer some protection against proinflammatory responses after infection by SARSCoV-2? Obesity 28(8):1378–1381. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.22849

Chapter 3

Co-evolution of Pandemic, Human Security, and Technology Sakiko Kanbara and Rajib Shaw

Abstract COVID-19 pandemic has placed a huge burden on the healthcare system, and mainly on healthcare workers who have faced the biggest challenges and concerns in their health profession toward the unprecedented outbreak of coronavirus worldwide. Science and technology for handling a pandemic has always been there in some form in different countries. This chapter presents key lessons from various community-based activities where technologies have been widely used and emphasizes the importance of interfacing science policy practice to sustainable development. Relative importance and emphasis of science and technology for human security gets mentioned as well. Further, case studies of a few nations illustrate the existence of a good partnership of science technology groups and different other stakeholders. However, the need to strengthen this partnership with a clearer direction and strategy for implementation as a mechanism to foster collaboration across global and regional mechanisms and institutions for the implementation and coherence of instruments and tools relevant to Human Security and Health for all. Keywords Human security · Information and Communication Technology · People-centered approach · Primary healthcare

S. Kanbara University of Kochi, Kochi, Japan e-mail: [email protected] R. Shaw (*) Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_3

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3.1

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Introduction

Digital technologies are being used to support public health response to COVID-19 around the world, including population surveillance, case identification, contact tracing, and evaluation of interventions based on mobility data and communication with the public. Simultaneously, traditional technologies and emerging technologies are also being used to respond to and recover from pandemics. There are several positive lessons, innovation widely reported in various parts of the world during the last several months. The global pandemic has shown us the importance of primary healthcare (PHC), ranging from the individuals, families, and community level. However, some challenges continue, such as the digital divide and the age/gender gap in social, cultural, scientific, or economic attainments that affect the smooth development of technologies and their utilization. This chapter presents key lessons from various community-based activities where technologies have been widely used and emphasizes the importance of interfacing science policy practice to sustainable development. In the sustainable development goals (SDGs) era, striking attention to solidarity, equity, and resilience emerged, and the word “transformation” has become more significant.

3.2

Harmonizing Public Health and Human Care

The good health of a population remains vital for social cohesion and stability. This section describes focusing on care and cure, science and technology with human security, public health perspectives on human security, and the need for technology. In fact, some people in low- and middle-income countries suffer from severe poverty by increasing health costs. At least 400 million people do not have access to one or more essential health services, a striking evidence of human health itself existing out of health service. Considering the many rapidly evolving global health problems, first of all, to reduce preconceptions from the words and meanings, which are often the origins and consequences of a word or concept being used by different speech communities in the different stakeholders in global public health and human security.

3.2.1

Definition of Health

Health is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The bibliographic citation for this definition is preamble to the constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, June 19–July 22, 1946; signed on July 22, 1946, by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered

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into force on April 7, 1948. The definition has not been amended since 1948 (WHO 2008). Public health is described as the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities, and individuals (Winslow 1920; WHO n.d.). Health security often gets limited for global health security on public health issues which includes protection of national populations from external health threats such as pandemics (Aldis 2008; Whitehead and Dahlgren 2006). On the other hand, Human Security Unit emphasizes an important dimension of human security, as good health is “both essential and instrumental to human survival, livelihood and dignity.” (Trust Fund for Human Security 2009).

3.2.2

Definition of Cure and Care

The basic aspect of health service is cure and care, and are often used in the composition of medicine and nursing. The cure is a biomedical approach to diseases by medical treatment and evaluated based on recovery from morbidity, the disappearance of symptoms, and prevention of recurrence (International Council of Nurses 2012). Meanwhile, care is a holistic approach to patients suffering from illness, which sometimes highlights the characteristics of nursing (Japanese Nursing Association 2007). From the definition of both cure and care, nursing gets defined as an integration of care and cure that we must continue asking what benefits and risks will result from this conjunction. However, patients need the perception of recovery when they feel “healed” as well as disappear from the illness (Yamane 2006). Care has traditionally been used primarily as a term for physical care that promotes support of daily life interaction with the people. Caring is mutual relationships with the subject on the ideals, ideas, ethical attitudes, awareness, and consideration of people’s protection and value. Furthermore, caring brings about personal growth for both the giver and the taker. Theory of Caring forms the foundation of being human and to self-actualization.

3.3 3.3.1

Historical Approach of Epidemic and Human Security Implications Beginning of Science Technology for Epidemics

At the beginning of public health, in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution led to a rapid influx of workers into the city. However, no a common system for all people was developed to secure health and well-being. The standard of living for low-wage workers is dire and threatens human security. The Crimean War broke out in 1854. Incapable of dealing with many injured and sick soldiers, soldiers were left

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injured on the front lines untreated. As a result, many died of infectious diseases, infectious diseases, and starvation rather than the fight itself. In November of the same year, Nightingale reached Scutari. Nightingale paid attention to cleaning the toilet which was not under the jurisdiction of any department in the hospital. Nightingale’s idea of hygiene and unsanitary is probably visual and olfactory. The ideas provided a simple sense of cleanliness that is essential, looks beautiful, and does not have a foul odor. By addressing basic hygiene and food to care for injured soldiers, the mortality rate of injured soldiers, which was 42% at the time of her arrival, dropped to 5% 3 months later. From her experience in the Crimean War, Nightingale devised a pie chart called “bat wings” or “chicken combs” when there was no infographic, data visualization, even pie charts or bar charts. The graph identified the unsanitary conditions (infectious diseases that spread) in the hospital. John Snow, called the father of epidemiology, discovered in 1854 that “people who drink contaminated well water suffer” and the epidemiological method of elucidating the source and route of infection, biological factors (pathogens, etc.). Even if unknown, the epidemiology of infectious diseases was stopped by observing social factors and situations. Modern epidemiological studies are essentially no different from Snow’s behavior. It was 30 years before Robert Koch discovered Vibrio cholera. The comprehensive PHC strategy described in the Alma Ata Declaration (1978) was later succeeded by the Ottawa Charter on Health Promotion (1986), which called for more specific action on “Health for All by the year 2000 and beyond.” The Alma-Ata Conference mobilized a “Primary Healthcare (PHC) movement” of professionals and institutions, governments and civil society organizations, researchers, and grassroots organizations that undertook to tackle the “politically, socially and economically unacceptable” health inequalities in all countries. The PHC is essential healthcare based on practical, scientifically sound, and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost that the community and country can afford to maintain at every stage of their development in the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination.

3.3.2

Remaining Issue From MDGs

Structural violence remains a high-ranking cause of premature death and disability, directly and indirectly. Any new diseases have quickly become diseases of the vulnerable people, and the development of effective policy may have a perverse effect if we cannot use them where they are needed most (Galtung 1969). The World Health Organization (WHO) defines social determinants of health as the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems. In 2008, the WHO pointed out unequal growth and unequal

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outcomes. The significant inequities in human health, especially between developed and developing countries, are politically, socially, and economically unacceptable, as inequities within countries. Therefore, inequities form a common concern for all countries (Korc et al. 2016; Mudida 2015; Nilsen 2015). A review of health systems was advocated, emphasizing returning to the core values of PHC: health equity, universal access to population-centered care, and healthy communities, rather than the false trends of hospital-centricity, commercialization of health services, and fragmented healthcare (Uehara 2012). Currently, people tend to have better distal tools, including vaccines, diagnostics, and large effective therapeutic kits. The rudimentary social analysis only takes place on the ground and at the margins of the biomedical review locally in an emergency. However, health inequalities exist in social forces, including racism, pollution, poor housing, and poverty, which shape their paths in individuals, families, and populations. In this struggle, equity in healthcare is the responsibility of human security (Caballero-Anthony 2002). All those involved in clinical and public health practitioners are aware of this, especially when they serve populations living in disasters and threatening human security (JICA 2010). The bio-social aspects of a pandemic need to be immediately understood by the public as input for our understanding of the distribution and consequences of the disease, as well as reconsidering and re-socializing aspects and dimensions of health technology. The approach of “Health and well-being for all” need to link in initiating virtuous social cycles, before the end of a pandemic and sustainable community next era.

3.4

Fostering Science Technology for Individual Human Security and Health

Science and technology have enhanced the capacities of human beings in utilizing and transforming environments to meet their needs. In the past few decades, scientific and technological advances have caused very rapid changes in human societies. We can say that science and technology speed up development, and in turn development catalyzes science and technology advancement. Developing science, technology, and innovation capacity form a key enabler that promotes the ability of countries to deliver essential public goods, such as greater food security, access to health for all, climate mitigation and adaptation, and access to energy for all. In this context, promoting access to new and appropriate technologies helps to achieve steady improvements in living conditions, which can be lifesaving for the most vulnerable populations. The development of evidence-based healthcare, and the rapid growth of the knowledge base in many specialties, has provided essential tools to make healthcare more consistent, practical, and cost-effective. The development and technology for community health needs to strengthen further on the aspect of “transformation”

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toward institutional development, sound systems, and smart governance by inspiring and empowering the people themselves and responsive approach to security threats. The only evidence-based practice may not be enough in the clinical setting. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Be roughly correct rather than making small mistakes.” Clinical practitioners already know social and environmental forces will limit the effectiveness of the cure. Scientific and technological innovations bring alternative possibilities of human care to answer these questions needs on human security rather than only infection control. Health monitoring using the Internet of things (IoT) makes near-human testing creates timely and cost-effective opportunities for the improvement of diagnostic accuracy. Information and communications technology (ICT) creates opportunities for more thorough and consistent documentation of decisions at the point of care, better continuity of care, and more effective communication between organizations and sectors. Threats to human security are often mutually reinforcing and interconnected to both threats and responses when addressing these. The technology should be developed in the personalities of the people who are observed rather than making vulnerable groups that exist in the minds of observers.

3.4.1

Technology Dimension of Pandemic

Identifying and implementing innovative medical technologies, or new ways of organizing professional work, may not be the last bottleneck but the beginning of new possibilities for people. Policymakers, administrators, professionals, and patients all face challenges when trying to put innovations into practice. Assessing outcomes alone may not be enough; we need process evaluations that help us understand how these impacts occur. To prevent the community and government underwhelmed by the reality of digital transformation, and lead to success, human development on the storming stage must be actively engaged as well. The stages of Tuckman’s theory are used as an analogy between digital transformation and group transformation. The transformation needs four stages: (1) forming—marked by getting acquainted, confusion, and uncertainty (2) storming—disagreement over priorities, tension, (3) norming— growing consensus, establishing trust, setting standards, (4) performing—successful performance, flexibility, and task orientation. COVID-19 is much more than a health crisis. COVID stresses every one of the countries and has the potential to create devastating social, economic, and political crises that will leave deep scars. In the decades and centuries past, the outbreak of the infectious disease was often limited to the local location where it was firstly reported. However, the pace of global travel, migration, and commerce has increased dramatically in recent decades, and that increase poses an increased global risk of disease. When a pandemic emerges, countries are competing in technology to find the cure. These technologies notably include methods to collect and communicate information about infectious disease outbreaks more effectively and quickly than ever

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before. The fast worldwide information of the outbreak can result in better and fast response to anticipate them. COVID-19 gives us the opportunity for norming and performing. Technology must be accessible to those who are challenged to explore its benefits, people should be empowered to master the tools and skills they need. In order for people to grow, face challenges, solve problems, find solutions, plan jobs, how trends will eventually become the norm, that these phases are needed to deliver results. Yet, in an environment where citizens have experienced self-isolation and restraint, and have kept their distance from others, ethical perspectives such as people’s dignity and autonomy may be ignored. Clearly, support for protecting people’s peace and dignity in comprehensive care for people is essential. Applied this theory to digital transformation, most vulnerable people have been ignored in the first stages. The forming stage should hear the needs for digital transformation, especially of people whose literacy and availability are not so highly regarded as ineligible and have little chance to challenge. In the storming phase, as surveillance using indicators failed to see expected results due to poor data integrity, a lack of appropriate infrastructure, and a lack of fundamental understanding, makes the selective bias to feasibility. Public services using technologies are organized and deliver the quality of life of regular citizens. The platforms can be used differently by different groups of individuals. Internet-based platforms face several challenges. Vulnerable communities would always be offline because of Internet connectivity in uncertain areas, lack of access to Internet-enabled devices, or challenges of Internet capacity. To solve this, both offline and online versions of the tools should be essential at first. Highlighting the thousands of children and challenged people who did not have access to broadband or a device, becomes essential.

3.4.2

Rethinking of Community

To adopt the current and future situation, the traditional family and community are no longer the prevailing living unit. One of the most important cultural developments reveals many populations living in one-person- or nuclear families in an insufficient society to care for. In other words, people no longer help each other in the community but as “consumers” in virtual society globally and mass gatherings in the area. In addition, both in developed and developing countries, we find an increasing daily medicalization creating other diseases. We live in a “risk society” with ecological (climate change, water, and food safety), socioeconomic, and individualization risks. More and more people live with a chance of poverty when they have an “unstable” livelihood. This has consequences for the demands and expectations at the point of service delivery (JICA 2010). From a human scientific point of view, the definition of high-risk group and health behavior for better health becomes difficult to identify, in order to coordinate the quality of care for the patient with multi-morbidity and risk against guidelines

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created for the management of single diseases and disaster events. Integrating the framework with market-driven “for profit” stand-alone facilities forms a significant challenge as well. It is harder to get involved in continuous care from the cradle to the grave. People are constantly on the move and have access to different cultural and social groups, considered with racism, gender, generation inequality, poverty, political violence, large-scale social forces, and conflict. Determining who falls ill and who has access to care and the related policies becomes a challenge as well. A definition and categorization are always a risk for getting support from society more or less at the expense of life’s individuality. According to the classical view of categorization which has dominated typological thinking concepts label proper sets of attributes that are single necessary and jointly sufficient to define some category. Each of these defining attributes must be present in every instance, giving the category an “all-ornone” quality. Human attributes are not generally diagnosed in a positive-or-negative, or normal-or-abnormal manner, but are continuously distributed over an infinite series of gradations, even gender. The claim of continuity holds true for other strictly physical dimensions, such as height, girth, skin color, and income. The case for psychological, care, and wellness attributes is significantly higher. Many individuals display the features of many categories, such as diseases and need work, and are poor and high educated. This harsh judgment is inevitable in the face of conflicting typologies. Certainly, neither of these typologies, which are so diverse in conceptions and scope, can be considered final because nothing overlaps the others.

3.4.3

Technological Literacy for Human development

The term “technological literacy” refers to one’s ability to use, manage, evaluate, and understand technology. More than just knowledge about computers and their application, it involves a vision where every person has knowledge about the nature, behavior, power, and consequences of many aspects of technology from a real-world perspective. People need to understand technology in terms of its works, how technology shapes society, and in turn how society finds security in technology through literacy and learning. Acquiring a new digital for better preparation of the workforce and future livelihoods becomes critical. The generation that is still in school also needs to be trained and retrained. The technologically literate person has some abilities to do technology that enables them to use their inventiveness to design and build things and to solve practical problems that are technological in nature. Consequently, people spend some of the extra time to learn a new lifestyle, new language, and learn new difficult skills for them to re-enter the workplace after the crisis if they lose jobs and need a steady income. Not only technological aspects of the challenges but also people had tremendous psychological and economic stress, more or less on their day to day as they manage the time to these events with their family in place of isolation of home, quarantine, lockdown, shelter, and cause various other illnesses. In fact, highly literate persons

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feel comfortable and objective about the use of technology, not afraid or infatuated with it. Various forms of remote work and distance learning have been experienced around the world, many in-person activities and spaces from open offices, to travel and events as the government worked on COVID-19, and digital transformation has a good impact on a business. These changes can never go back before this crisis. Human security refers to freedom without disturbing human choices. Human development is expanding human’s choices to build confidence that we will not lose them in the future. If people meet the minimum requirements and are given the opportunity to live, they will be released, develop their abilities, and contribute fully to the development of communities. In addition to the development of science and technology, strengthening to utilize services through social change becomes necessary as well, that can flexibly respond to participation in formulating measures in the region and improve literacy. In order to make decisions at the individual and community level, creation of a code of conduct that is acceptable to stakeholders and residents becomes necessary, especially in terms of gender diversity and inclusiveness, and that is close to real-time information and social systems. As a peoplecentered concept, human security places the individual at the “center of analysis.” Consequently, human security considers a broad range of conditions that threaten survival, livelihood and dignity, and identifies the threshold below which human life gets intolerably threatened.

3.5

Cases

This section comprises several illustrations of interventions where the technological approach applies to address human security and its threats. Some of these are case studies chosen to intend to provide examples of how the principles of human security outlined above are being applied in actual life. Each case demonstrates various events and stages of health risk. Therefore, not all the case analyses can show an actual impact on the target communities. Nonetheless, the cases provide some insight into how technologies are related to human security on pandemic at the community level. By addressing the full range of insecurities faced by the targeted communities, the project promotes responses that are community-driven, preventive, and sustainable. Through a culture of local prevention and empowerment, the projects help to further strengthen the preventive and coping capacities of the communities as well as improve their long-term growth and sustainable development. Human-care-related data should focus on the basic self-care needs to improve health status which in turn builds family and community resilience and provides the foundation for responding to emergencies. During emergencies and disasters, hygiene systems and sanitation facilities are limited for populations and health facilities and increase the risk of other waterborne and vector-borne infectious diseases. Food security forms a key dimension as well, and undercooked foods can lead to disease. Consequently, a person with malnutrition will be more likely to contract communicable and noncommunicable disease as well as less likely to

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survive the physical toll of any infectious disease. Furthermore, persons living with disabilities are less likely to receive the aid they need during a humanitarian crisis and are also less likely to recover in the long term. Common experience reveals that persons with disabilities are more likely to be left behind or abandoned during evacuation in disasters due to a lack of preparation and planning, as well as inaccessible facilities and services and transportation systems. Most shelters are not accessible and people with disabilities are many times even turned away from shelters due to a perception that they need complex medical services. For such situations and conditions, having more data and information available during times of disaster may be an overwhelming situation if the healthcare provider does not know communication how to be decisive. Healthcare system should purposively be designed to demonstrate responsibility in dealing with human security through its own actions and leadership in developing national health adaptation plans. The variety of data available through the development of ICT means that researchers using a variety of methods can be exploratory and make new discoveries. Data scientists can help identify outliers, or cases of deviance, and the frontline field worker practitioner can investigate why these deviations are occurring. This can lead to the identification of variables of most minorities that have perhaps been overlooked observation of real-world seeks causal mechanisms that may underlie the correlations and patterns observed in statistical studies. In other words, we can understand whether what appears to be a correlation is a possible causal relationship, and to show in detail how the hypothetical causal mechanism works. Alternatively, if case studies lead to the identification of new variables or the refinement of concepts, we can verify whether the causal mechanisms assumed in the mathematical model are actually working. The variables and concepts developed in the case study can be used for mathematical modeling. To change societal behavior, reforms in institutional policies, and procedures must co-evolve with health environment changes related to people’s beliefs, norms, and values that provide a motivating force for a particular type of behavior. Routine health security monitoring and emergency report based on public health: Resources are often limited and do not allow monitoring tools to incorporate all of the reporting sources. The government requires to coordinate the interoperability of rapid assessment with other data services for further cooperation with other sectors, such as infrastructure, energy, transport, and water, and close partnerships with a local volunteer. Most of the data sets of health statistics were not originally collected for human security but as a result of diseases, and therefore the accuracy of the data and the sequence among the data are difficult to deeply examine the vulnerability, and miss the social divide, people at high risk (Murai et al. 2005, 2011). Simply having a huge data volume may be an undeveloped collection of data, and using the data effectively requires is to understand where the sources that represent real-world data are located and visualized. In general, the larger the scope and quantity of data to be analyzed, the more difficult it becomes to make a reasonable assessment of the quality of each individual data. In order to make full use of large-scale data, the challenge is not only in handling large volumes of data mechanically but also to evaluate the population and reliability of the data. In addition, we need to consider technical aspects of information processing

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as well as the protection of personal information and the establishment of rules for the secondary use of data. This project provides a proof of concept for interoperability among several information systems including electronic medical record, government disease surveillance system, social media data in twitter, weather information. This provided evidence that data from different sources can be streamlined for data management as well as for modeling disease and movement of people. Affordable and accessible predictive models are rare on the top priority health risks, particularly during extreme emergencies and post-disaster situations. Gaining more relevance in these scenarios, particularly as a source of validation on community-based events, are data coming from unstructured reports originating from the Web and social media—better known as crowdsourced information. The significance of this project is to provide new and localized models for epidemiological outbreaks based on real-time information sourced from existing surveillance systems that collect data on the disease as well as other sources of data related to the disease. The prototype of a participatory data collection system was developed and deployed in pilot sites. SHEREPO (shelter reporting) is a crowdsourced web and mobile real-time reporting system developed in Japan 2014 focusing on Human Security variables (food, water, clothing, sanitation, medication, safety, and capacity) lessons learned from the Great East Japan Earthquake. The project provided an open framework that can easily provide application programming interfaces (APIs) for integration with other systems as well as provide APIs for data integration and data sharing to disease surveillance system such as SPEED after typhoon Hyian. In the Philippines, e-Bayanihan is composed of a preparedness reporting tool (e-HANDA) which collects and monitors the capacity of a community, real-time volunteer reporting (e-Bayanihan), and post-disaster reporting component (e-ULAT), all running on web, smartphones, and SMS-based versions for feature phones making it technology inclusive. The e-Bayanihan aims to capture the human dimension of disaster in order to create predictive models in the future. Project NOAH gets integrated in e-Bayanihan and provides access to visualization of multihazards. The system proposed to create rapid analytic tools based on machine learning algorithms but delivered in layman terms for first responders. Pioneering the implementation of e-Bayanihan-SHEREPO is the Municipality of Bauang in La Union, Philippines. Nepal earthquake, also known as the Gorkha earthquake, killed over 8600 people and affected more than 5.6 million individuals. The project also dared to start from an “open tool kit” that is composed of a simple software such as excel spreadsheets delivered in layman’s terms to Nepali nurses who perform the monitoring by using a paper and an ICT tool (Kanbara 2016). The toolkit was developed to provide application program interfaces for data integration and sharing with other health agencies such as the ministry of health and WHO. This program was supervised by a committee whose chair was the Ministry of Science and Technology, Nepal, to carry out research/investigation that contributes to the collection of scientifically important but short-lived data, speedy restoration after disasters, and improvement of disaster preparedness in the future. A periodical shelter to shelter visits by volunteer nurses in

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affected areas to conduct communicable diseases risk assessment with the use of EpiNurse Center and health status assessment tools, as well as relief, needs inventory for community members and the monitoring of cases with potential risk of communicable diseases outbreak is of utmost importance at the post-disaster recovery phase; such events should be reported to governmental agencies and health clusters as well, so that they can be informed about real living conditions and health needs of disaster-affected communities in remote areas. The results showed that accessibility and response rates differed depending on geographical and social context vulnerability. Capacity building for participants becomes crucial to coordinate the effective actions and interventions as well as periodical onsite risk assessment. Traditional paper and telephone methods were used by nurses for data collection which took more time. Mobile application was developed with the collaboration of a local NGO, that collected data and information of shelter such as location and timestamps, geo-tagged photos, and specific questionnaires with location information by the geo-tagging function. Initially, a relatively low commitment was seen to the continuous monitoring, but the use of mobile application increased the health professionals’ sense of responsibility toward the care they provided. All the living environment data and health information as per questionnaire sent by the local nurses were monitored for accuracy in the EpiNurse Center NAN (Nursing Association of Nepal) and the information was shared with the government, donors, and concerned authorities. Lack of geographic information, unavailability of IT infrastructure, and lack of knowledge of nurses in information technology were the issues faced during monitoring and data collection. However, mobile application was useful for EpiNurses in reporting epidemiological health security information regardless of timing and systems. Disaster risk reduction literacy in civilian and professional populations is one outcome, and the development and ongoing enhancement of resilience in the communities selected is another. The cultural gaps between the civilian populations and the healthcare professionals will require implementing a flexible tool. Many national governments may not have the capacity to analyze and use data, even if they have the means to collect them. Development actors and the private sector have the capacity, but the true dividends of interoperable, convergent data, and analytics are missed. A disconnect exists between “knowing” something, making it “available and accessible” and “applying” what is known. It is critical that momentum is not lost and that coordinated, integrated global and national efforts strengthening data. To solve this problem, we developed new application collaborated with the local NPO and company. The cloud service works as a one-stop platform at which all of the data and information of the epidemiological data can be accessed. The cloud infrastructure with flexible extensibility, within the provided financial resources and further development and expansion along social change, should be used. This system development and action engagement process was designed to engage local nurse in the quality improvement process. These team responsible for rapid assessing each emergency should exist in a sustainable community for health security. Routine monitoring and communication are essential in ensuring to adapt over time to changing social context, environments systems and technology. At a minimum communication and regular social capital

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evaluation should be undertaken. Through engaging practitioners in research, care improved, the quality of reporting changed, nurses responded flexibly, and the nursing association was provided with information. This study showed that identifying shared information and engaging domestic community nurses and stakeholders in practical activity to achieve this goal can bring about sustained community health improvement. Initially, people found relatively low commitment among the participating local nurses to continuous monitoring. But the use of Apps increased the health professionals’ sense of responsibility toward the care they provided. As an improvement of case study above, one prototype of interactive health monitoring application has been developed and released in Japan during COVID-19 for communication in real time and supplies relevant information. The mobile application contains daily use of individual logbook like a diary for health management with location information by the geotagging function and online mapping party of community information. In other words, these data consisted of community health data by indicators and structured text data location and timestamps, geo-tagged photos. The data convert to anonymous open data enabling its emergence as crowdsource community risk mapping, collected health data and shelter information, such as location and timestamps, geotagged photos to secure health on emergency.

3.6

Technology for Health: Global Responsibility to Protect and Provide Individual Care and Mobility for All

There are various global efforts in technology development that have been made available to the public. Advanced medicine and emergency care need to be concentrated in hospital facilities, but unless a shift to prevention and risk reduction measures takes place at home and in the community, the strain on healthcare and the growing burden of disease will continue to worsen. Demographic changes and crises have led to multiple imbalances in both burden and demand sharing in the short- and long-term. One neglected and under-reported area resulted from risk management of these conditions in the community and the impact of slow-onset events or health problems outside the hospital. Universal access to health services for equitable health, the establishment of healthcare systems and human-centered health services, human resource development, and global health must be promoted on a global scale. The people most affected by lack of universal access to health are those who live in conditions of greatest vulnerability. Apart from economic disparities, power fragmentation, the importance goes to the role of community. As another challenge, diversification of lifestyles and changes in social structure have weakened the mutual support functions that families and communities used to have. Uncertainty in community health crisis management requires comprehensive knowledge, practice, and renewal of individual self-care and communication that will change people’s values and

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behavior patterns. Although research and development on infrastructure development for technology utilization and information infrastructure development to enable common use of diverse data is underway, the weaker parties that contribute to the community and regional development and private investment considerations require a participatory transformation from the forming stage. Through the operation of IoT and communication, the lifelong health status and medical information of local citizens can be visualized to meet their basic health and well-being. In self-care, individuals can manage their basic health by providing their own PLR (Personal Life Repository) and take detailed measures that consider the needs of each individual’s human rights. Generally, healthcare services for people involve a wide variety of organizations, and not uncommon for patients to receive treatment at multiple medical institutions during the same period. Care must be taken in handling the data of such patients. Medications prescribed at other facilities cannot be recognized as concomitant medications. When a patient gets admitted to another institution or dies at another institution, it is not possible to evaluate only the data of their own institution. The data registered as basic patient information and profiles differ greatly from one hospital information system to another. Standardization of data is becoming more and more difficult in an increasingly diverse society. Basic patient information and profiles from various information systems has difficulty of access. If unique IDs are introduced and a research environment using these IDs is established, these problems may be solved. In the medical field, the data to be obtained get stored as structured data by describing medical examination articles using templates. The support person observes, selects, and inputs the data, but if this can be done with selfcare, the data can be more detailed and timelier for oneself. In addition to blood pressure, pulse rate, smoking history, drinking history, etc., which are necessary for personal management, the records of people’s life reconstruction can be used to understand the situation by text mining if the contents are specified and organized in a document format, and they can be converted into grades. In this context, promotion of the secondary use and operation of data becomes important as well to analyze by gender and to find alerts for high-risk people and threats to human security. The data can also reduce the time and geographical burden of rapid health crisis management and care tasks in the hospital. This notion of interoperability applied to systems will reduce redundancy in recording information, will make the processing of information more efficient, and will consequently allow for data-driven decision. The data can also lead to social innovation for social inclusion that transcends differences in language, culture, religion, and beliefs.

3.7 3.7.1

Way Forward Importance of Implementation Science

Identifying and implementing innovative medical technologies, or new ways of organizing professional work, does not form the last bottleneck but the beginning

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of alternative possibilities for people. Policymakers, administrators, professionals, and patients all face challenges when trying to put innovations into practice. Assessing outcomes may not be enough; we require process evaluations that help us to understand how these effects occur. The new hazard definition has clearly identified different types of hazards and its relation in the changing risk landscape (UNDRR ISC 2020). Whether it is human security or the SDGs, measures to ensure that no one gets left behind must be taken on a person-centered, individual basis. As the “what” becomes clearer, implementation science is needed to answer the question of “how” evidence can be effectively and efficiently incorporated into daily life to improve the quality of healthcare. Co-design and co-delivery are needed from the perspective of working together. As a process issue, the implementation of new ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in healthcare needs to be considered. These are also important issues for researchers and technologists. To understand implementation and integration, we need to focus on the dynamic processes by which innovations become embedded in daily operations. For technology to ensure human security, the living conditions and care for all need to be recognized and accepted as a collective obligation. With legitimacy, we need to introduce technology as a civilization, instilled in our culture. Further work is required on how to actually use the technologies we create for individuals, communities, and systems to affect behavior change and health, and how to enhance interventions and implementation outcomes such as interest, adaptation, and sustainability from an implementation science perspective.

3.7.2

Disseminate Lessons Learned at the Regional Level and Implement Standing Agreements Between Regional, Provincial, and District Institutions to Promote Sustainability

This involves two parallel and overlapping approaches to designing and developing interventions that provide a critical perspective. These two approaches include Human-Centered Design (HCD) in the engineering, design, and technology industry and Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) in public health. Both of these approaches have been used in a variety of fields. They provide a common ground and a place for direction and create opportunities to advance the implementation of behavioral interventions. Social implementation could be done by paying attention to the similarities and differences between the research on both sides. For example, significant amount of work is available on dissemination and implementation research aimed at building a generalizable body of knowledge for the implementation of evidence, using a multidisciplinary approach, working with stakeholders, such as patients, health professionals, organizations, and communities. The research is based on a methodology that effectively and efficiently integrates and embeds evidence-based interventions (EBI) into everyday primary healthcare and

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self-care. The fields of healthcare, prevention, and technology are changing. Partnerships with technology experts in industry and academia need to be leveraged to advance implementation science (Kaneko et al. 2020). Most research on healthcare innovation has focused on the outcome of the innovation, with the development being the target of evaluation, as has been the case with drug development, randomized control trials also look at the effects. Researchers will try to help healthcare providers by quantifying the results and comparing the effects of these innovations. However, this does not always tell us what we need to know. There are also barriers when integrating systems of practice from existing organizational and professional systems. Applying the innovative approach requires organizing information flow and addressing the kind of collaboration required among government, medical, and private sectors to solve challenges of complex coordination and collaboration for an invisible indicator of various vulnerabilities in the living environment (Shaw et al. 2020). This effort requires collaboration of various organizations and groups for human security. However, with restrictions on data sharing, especially among agencies, interoperability becomes a challenge and results in information gaps. The gap analysis shall start from requirements of visualization of the end-user side, with requirement specifications of information delivered to decision-makers. Analysis of visualizations through discussions on what input and analysis are required for the required visualization. In cases where the data processing is cooperated by multiple players, the interface between collection-analysis and analysis-visualization must be reviewed. The requirements shall be analyzed by pre-impact, impact, and post-impact phases because of notable differences in a time scale to process data. For example, pre-impact phases do not need real-time acquisition while impact phases should be with real-time processing because of rapid changes in disaster situations. After formulating requirements, available resources in technologies and human capacity shall be reviewed to compare with requirements. In cases where the available resources do not satisfy requirements, the difference between requirements and availability are the gaps to be filled by new solutions including technology applications and human capacity development. Because data collection forms a major constraint in the data processing stream, reviewing from data collection will lead to more realistic logics and discussions followed by reviewing available resources in analysis and visualization stages. Because of each technological method’s sophistication, it has become more difficult for a single researcher to acquire the most advanced theoretical and empirical knowledge in his or her own field and become familiar with multiple methods. For this reason, successful collaboration often involves researchers using different methods working together, or another researcher being more aware of the findings of a researcher using a different method. Effective collaboration requires researchers to become experts in each method and become familiar with other methods, recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and have a firm understanding of their substantive research results.

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Creating a More Networked Society and Enabling Greater Collaboration Among Citizens

Technology is changing the relationship between citizens and their leaders. All this has a wide-ranging impact on how public services are organized and delivered, and in turn, it determines the quality of life of the regular citizens. Ensuring inclusiveness and sustainability becomes imperative to prevent from ending up creating thousands of platforms without making any real difference for healthy people (Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2020a, b). For this, data of information and communication along the real world are critical to develop a platform rather than the system itself. Crisis management, infectious disease control, and public health in traditional governance tend to be convincing to the majority and the average rather than the individual issue (Alijani & Wintjes 2017; Kamradt-Scott 2018). But inclusive communities should emerge as well from disaggregated data using ICT and analytic tools. These developments offer many opportunities for improving health outcomes. There are concerns about the extent to which the needs of inclusion of community are taken into account in the setting of research agendas. All these developments are market-driven rather than needs-driven. The need for a more cooperative and comprehensive approach requires emphasis, in order to address security issues that have community-grown roots. Threats within a given country or area can spread into a wider region and negatively affect regional and international security. Human development and policies should be considered from the perspective of human security, not national and regional disparities. Participatory development requires human security, with the perspective of development being promoted worldwide with characteristics defined communication, interdependence, early prevention, human centricity, and social cohesion and stability. Residents often face a challenge to actively participate and be involved in human development, monitor environmental changes and the social system itself, and share correct information while designing and building partnerships for sustainability. In order for participation and involvement in the policymaking and implementation process to be interlinked and for the goal of evidenced-based policymaking to be achieved, the level of the program should be set at a level that can be operated by the local government, district officials at the living area level, and student residents. This will increase interest in program development, motivate capacity building, accelerate bottom-up participation activities, and enhance the quality of open governance, an inevitability in the future. The Ethical Code of International Council of Nurses (International Council of Nurses 2012) affirms human rights and the integrity and dignity of every person to guarantee adequate care for all people without any discrimination (Papastavrou et al. 2014; Stievano and Tschudin 2019). As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the difficulties nurses face, disasters, conflict, and political divisions all increasing the pressures confronting nurses. Changing technologies had made nurses new choices on social justice at the forefront. Besides reinforcing outlined in the latest version 2012 Code, new code will be released beginning of 2021 that equity and

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social justice, respect for the natural environment/climate, the impact to challenge unethical behaviors and, above all, the major role played by technology, digitized communication, and artificial intelligence in our ever-changing world. New emphasis will have to be placed on nursing responsibilities and accountability linked to transcultural work where nurses are informed of patients’ cultural values, needs and respect, and accept personal responsibility to maintain professional, and practical knowledge generally and specialty related. The theory that ignores the need for a model of human behavior, or a science and technology that avoids the task of analyzing the situation and uses assumptions to deal with it, may be dangerous. However, in order to further bridge the gap between theory and practice, researchers should be aware that the impact that science and technology can have on policy decisions is undoubtedly important, even if limited and indirect. Rather, it is most appropriate to conceptualize academic knowledge as an adjunct to, rather than a substitute for, the judgments that policymakers must make when choosing policies, which need to be input into measures on specific issues within government (International Council of Nurses 2012). Sometimes real policymakers must make judgments about which policy options best meet the criteria of analytic rationality, depending on cultural and social considerations. In thinking about the kinds of policy-relevant knowledge that should be developed, researchers should emphasize its contribution to the judgment of the situation in question, rather than on its ability to point to sound policy choices. In addition, the theoretical levels of knowledge/conceptual models, applicable knowledge, and behavioral models of specific actors are each necessary for policy relevance and for the analysis of policy situations. In any case, academic knowledge contribution to policymaking should be generally indirect and limited, but such contribution can be decisive in shaping and selecting sound policies.

3.7.4

Human Centric

Targets to achieve goals of global agenda are set and tested with indices in related fields. Health crises including pandemics are too diversified and complex to specify the root causes. Worldwide awareness of human security may increase but losses from crisis continue to rise significant short-, mid-, and long-term effects on the economy, society, health, culture, and the environment, such as new risks arising from damages accrue faster than remedies for vulnerabilities (Richardson and Williams 2007; Desmet and Fokkinga 2020), recurrent and slow on-setting disasters and crisis account for especially large share of losses. Toward overcoming issues, the global agenda would focus on people, and their various cross-border relations should be understood in a more cross-sectional and comprehensive manner of community. All global citizens must be incorporated in a guide to accomplishing interdisciplinary and international and global policy through encouraging mutual understanding of stakeholders in the community. Especially local residents in the community work in the seamless community with their

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knowledge concern with building a healthy and safe society, including care at the local level, which depends on awareness and culture of community people. This ability must be displayed to the full at the time of emergency on disaster or crisis. Science and technology could examine issues based on human security, which does not depend on hazards and diseases, and take a role of gear for health and well-being. In this regard, humanist and social scientists as well as natural scientists, whose methodology is grounded in human scientific perspective, can also contribute to overcoming these shortcomings.

References Aldis W (2008) Health security as a public health concept: a critical analysis. Health Policy Plan 23 (6):369–375. https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/23/6/369/572074 Alijani S, Wintjes R (2017) Interplay of technological and social innovation. SIMPACT Working paper, p. 1–23. http://www.simpact-project.eu/publications/wp/WP_2017-03_AlijaniWintjes. pdf. Accessed 30 Jan 2021 Caballero-Anthony M (2002) Overview of health and human security case studies, p. 21–44. https:// www.jcie.org/researchpdfs/HealthHumSec/health_overview.pdf. Accessed 30 Jan 2021 Desmet P, Fokkinga S (2020) Beyond Maslow’s pyramid. Introducing a typology of thirteen fundamental needs for human-centered design. Multimodal Technol Interact 4:38. https://doi. org/10.3390/mti4030038 Galtung J (1969) Violence, peace and peace research. J Peace Res 6:167–191 International Council of Nurses (2012) The ICN code of ethics for nurses. ICN, Geneva. https:// www.icn.ch/sites/default/files/inline-files/2012_ICN_Codeofethicsfornurses_%20eng.pdf. Accessed 20 Dec 2020 Japan International Cooperation Agency (2010) Human security approach: features and case studies. Japan International Cooperation Agency, Tokyo. http://www.jica.go.jp/english/. Accessed 21 Dec 2020 Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2020a) Digital transformation promotional plan of municipality. Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Tokyo. https:// www.soumu.go.jp/menu_news/s-news/01gyosei07_02000106.html. Accessed 8 Jan 2021 Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2020b) Impact of COVID-19 on society. Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Tokyo. https://www.soumu.go.jp/ johotsusintokei/whitepaper/ja/r02/html/nd123000.html. Accessed 8 Jan 2021 Japanese Nursing Association (2007) Major term commentary for nursing: conceptual definition, historical transition, social context (in Japanese). Japanese Nursing Association, Tokyo. https:// www.nurse.or.jp/home/publication/pdf/guideline/yougokaisetu.pdf. Accessed 19 Dec 2020 Kamradt-Scott A (2018) Securing Indo-Pacific health security: Australia’s approach to regional health security. Aust J Int Aff 72(16):1–20. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 328299766_Securing_Indo-Pacific_health_security_Australia’s_approach_to_regional_ health_security Kanbara S (2016) Participatory surveillance on evacuation site by local nurses and ICT in Nepal. In: Shaw R, Izumi T, Shi P, Lu L, Yang S, Ye Q (eds) Asia Science Technology status for disaster risk reduction. IRDR, Future Earth and ASTAAG, Beijing, p 83. http://www.irdrinternational. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85%E5%87%8F%E8%BD%BB% E7%81%BE%E5%AE%B3%E9%A3%8E%E9%99%A9%E5%90%88%E4%BD%9C%E7% A0%94%E7%A9%B6%E4%B8%AD%E5%BF%83%E7%99%BD%E7%9A%AE%E4% B9%A6%E8%AE%BE%E8%AE%A120160821.pdf. Accessed 30 Jan 2021

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Kaneko K, Nakamura Y, Minamitani K, Nakata K (2020) Osaka declaration at joint congress on global health 2020. https://www.gh2020.jp/. Accessed 5 Dec 2020 Korc M, Hubbard S, Suzuki T, Jimba M (2016) Health, resilience, and human security: moving toward health for all. PAHO, Washington, DC. https://iris.paho.org/handle/10665.2/28286. Accessed 30 Dec 2020 Mudida R (2015) The security development nexus: a structural violence and human needs approach. In: New Faces Conference 2007. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ 274077330. Accessed 20 Dec 2020 Murai S, Madeleine V, Uehara N (2005) Research on date quality in health information systemstaking the Philippines Field Health Services Information Report (FHSIS) as an example. Kokusai Hoken Iryou (J Int Health) 20(Suppl):104–104. (in Japanese) Murai S, Lagrada LP, Gaite JT, Uehara N (2011) Systemic factors of errors in the case identification process of the national routine health information system: a case study of Modified Field Health Services Information System in the Philippines. BMC Health Serv Res 11:271. https://doi.org/ 10.1186/1472-6963-11-271 Nilsen P (2015) Making sense of implementation theories, models and frameworks. Implement Sci 10:53. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-015-0242-0 Papastavrou E, Efstathiou G, Lemonidou C, Kalafati M, Katajisto J, Suhonen R (2014) Cypriot and Greek nurses’ perceptions of the professional practice environment. Int Nurs Rev 61:171–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.12083 Richardson S, Williams T (2007) Why is cultural safety essential in health care. Med Law 26:699–707 Shaw R, Kim YK, Hua J (2020) Governance, technology and citizen behavior in pandemic: lessons from COVID-19 in East Asia. Prog Disast Sci 6:100090. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2020. 100090 Stievano A, Tschudin V (2019) The ICN code of ethics for nurses: a time for revision. Int Nurs Rev 66:154–156. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/inr.12525 Trust Fund for Human Security. Human Security Unit Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs United Nations (2009) Human security in theory and practice: application of the human security concept and the United Nations. UN, New York, NY. https://www.unocha.org/sites/ dms/HSU/Publications%20and%20Products/Human%20Security%20Tools/Human%20Secu rity%20in%20Theory%20and%20Practice%20English.pdf. Accessed 30 Dec 2020 Uehara N (2012) Agenda for the health service systems in 21st century and the roles of medial profession. Tohoku Med J 124:1–3 United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction International Science Council (2020) Hazard definition & classification review. UN, New York, NY. https://www.undrr.org/publication/ hazard-definition-and-classification-review. Accessed 24 Nov 2020 Whitehead M, Dahlgren G (2006) Concepts and principles for tackling social inequities in health: levelling up Part 1. In: World Health Organization: studies on social and economic determinants of population health, vol 2. WHO, Geneva, pp 460–474. https://www.euro.who.int/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0010/74737/E89383.pdf. Accessed 30 Jan 2021 Winslow CE (1920) The untilled fields of public health. Science 51(1306):23–33. https://science. sciencemag.org/content/51/1306/23 World Health Organization (1986) Ottawa charter for health promotion. WHO, Geneva. https:// www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/129532/Ottawa_Charter.pdf World Health Organization (n.d.) Social determinants of health. WHO, Geneva. https://www.who. int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab¼tab_1. Accessed 30 Jan 2021 World Health Organization. Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (2008) Social determinants of health in countries in conflict: a perspective from the Eastern Mediterranean Region. WHO, Geneva. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/119883. Accessed 20 Dec 2020 Yamane J (2006) From cure to care – significance of “care” at clinical environment. Sohyou Soshiorogosu 1:1–7. https://doi.org/10.24676/rslogos.1.2_1. (in Japanese)

Chapter 4

Fiscal Policies and Post-COVID-19 Development Challenges: An Overview Azreen Karim, Andrew DeWit, and Rajib Shaw

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis. The pandemic poses a significant threat to human security and existing developmental challenges, compelling emergency spending on saving lives and securing livelihoods. Despite being in the ongoing traumatic phases of the global pandemic, the world is further expected to face undue developmental challenges due to the fourth industrial revolution and climate change. In a massive effort to save the global economies and protecting livelihoods, national governments had been obliged to announce stimulus (fiscal) packages and create local and regional funds to boost up domestic production and ensure food, water, and energy security. This chapter intends to provide a broader overview of the implications of fiscal stimulus toward sustainable recovery and address post-COVID-19 developmental challenges in a cross-country setting. Although expectantly incentivizing through fiscal policies will mobilize food security, public health, climate security and environment, migrant worker and urban resilience, gender, education, and facilitate attainment of the respective sustainable development goals (SDGs); sustainable recovery could largely vary based upon national resilience and the extant developmental framework. Keywords Fiscal policies · COVID-19 recovery · SDGs · FEW security · Resilience

A. Karim Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh A. DeWit Faculty of Economics, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan R. Shaw (*) Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_4

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Introduction

The concept of “development” had been facing staggering challenges for centuries with adjacent human security crises. These challenges were characterized by revolutions and the concept of “sustainability” became pivotal in all spheres of human security including peace. The twenty-first-century concept of human security goes beyond ensuring food, water, energy security toward safety from disasters, diseases, and climate change issues. Therefore, the achievement behind human security principles involves human development, economic, and other developmental challenges making it imperative to realize the sustainable development goals (SDGs). A global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic posed a significant threat to human security and existing developmental challenges leaving no one toward an unavoidable choice between saving lives and securing livelihoods. Despite global, pandemics are also not an equal opportunity menace to development and so do its policy responses to nations, being local. The basic human security principles and the sustainable development agenda are highly affected by COVID19 pandemic worldwide, irrespective of the nation’s geographical positioning, diverse, socioeconomic profiles, and welfare status. The national responses depend on governance and policy framework, technological innovation and outreach, people’s perceptions and behavior among many others. Evidently, countries that have failed to activate their public health protocols in the pandemic setting are found largely struggling to control the crisis. In response to the adoption of a balanced policy to protect lives and livelihoods; national governments had been obliged to announce stimulus (fiscal and monetary) packages and create local and regional funds to boost up domestic production and ensure food, water and energy security, etc. The occurrence of the pandemic has been suspected to be a one in 100-year event with the sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression in the 1930s. This crisis is also expected to be unique compared to other centurial financial crisis, e.g., the global financial crisis in 2008 due to its dual blow at both creations of demandside stagnation and supply-side disruptions. The projection of the expected loss in the global economy comes to nearly USD 8.5 trillion in output over the next 2 years; along with a sharp reduction in global demand and global supply chain disruptions.1 To combat the unprecedented holistic scenarios created by health, social and economic crisis, and minimize its livelihood impacts; governments across the world have rolled out large fiscal stimulus measures equivalent to an estimated 10% of gross domestic product (GDP). Poverty gets is likely going to get a huge blow with an additional 130 million people along with an estimated 34.3 million people in 2020 to join living in extreme poverty by 2030. Trade composition and debt sustainability particularly made the implementation of the crisis recovery stimuli extremely difficult for both the developed and developing nations and their vulnerable communities. Despite aggravated poverty and inequality, interesting shift in development 1

See World Economic Situation and Prospects (2021).

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trends is also likely to be expected in the new normal era; toward more digital economic integration, enhancement of public health systems, scaling up productive domestic investments, stronger institutions, multicrisis preparedness, and resilience framework and so on.

4.2

Fiscal Stimulus: An Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic had created an unprecedented and multifaceted crisis with a unified multitiered lockdown or shutdown policy across the globe primarily to save lives. Human security had been the hardest hit all over endangering livelihoods creating utmost development challenges affecting the SDGs. Recent evidences struggle to find a threshold in the trade-off between saving lives and protecting livelihoods and this questionable choice appears to be extremely complicated among nations to adopt singular undertaking policies like lockdown. Till date, 192 countries and territories have been affected by the pandemic and almost all affected countries have announced fiscal stimulus packages to stimulate demand and protect livelihoods (Bivens 2020; Gopinath 2020). Despite fiscal stimulus packages had been announced both by the developed and the developing nations, the types and patterns of the incentives seem to vary according to the development composition and economic growth. For developed nations, fiscal measures ranges from temporary VAT cut, one-off payment for every child, support fund and loan for big and small firms, lower tax receipts for struggling municipalities, fund for particular development projects, such as climate change, innovation, solar, and wind power, digitization, development of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, offshore wind, hydrogen energy and electric cars and buses, aid for assistance in the preliminary relief efforts of the COVID-19 outbreak, response toward global health program, international disaster assistance, additional unemployment benefit, emergency food assistance, increased unemployment pay-outs and direct payments for the business sector, pandemic emergency unemployment compensation program, pandemic unemployment assistance program, relief for the severely distressed sector, distributing financial relief through targeted loan packages, paycheck protection program, economic disaster loan program, etc. These types of fiscal stimulus packages had been observed in OECD countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States. Irrespective of the developed countries, developing countries such as Bangladesh and India have also announced moderate levels of fiscal stimulus packages to protect the lives and livelihoods of their mass population. The fiscal boosting schemes announced by their central government(s) primarily have been mostly emergency food assistance and cash support, loan support program with the minimal interest rate for the MSMEs, prioritization for local enterprises over foreign companies, tax year deadline extension, prioritization of development projects, etc. In addition, specific guidelines targeted to enhance job employment; such as increasing opportunities for returnee-migrants, incentivizing domestic investment to boost domestic

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production, focusing on manufacturing, export, and agriculture, as well as investing in biotechnology. Despite the fact of all pandemic affected countries being offered a considerable amount of fiscal boosting schemes irrespective of their welfare status; substantial differences were observed in the offerings among the developed and developing nations as percentage of their GDPs. For example, as of December 2020, Japan’s total COVID-19 fiscal stimulus forms 54.9% of GDP. Comparatively, the proportion of fiscal stimulus for Bangladesh and India had been approximately 4.3% and 2% as percentage of their GDPs. Moreover, a bigger portion of these packages of the developing nations had been targeted for emergency assistance due to the global lockdown and hence economic downturn and sustainability of these schemes primarily depends on the extant developmental framework. Interestingly, Japan’s fiscal boosting has increasingly being directed into sustainability through public–private collaboration and national resilience planning.

4.3 4.3.1

Fiscal Policies and Stimulus Packages: Case Analysis Germany

Gross domestic product of Germany grew 0.6% in 2019 compared to 2018. This rate is 9th–10th of 1% less than the figure of 1.5% published in 2018. Germany placed 4th in the ranking of GDP of the world. The GDP per capita of Germany in 2019 was around $46,000. To view, the evolution of the GDP per capita ranked 15th in the world. Exports of goods and services in Germany were reported at about 47% in 2019, according to the World Bank collection (the percentage in Japan is around 20%). Compared to Japan, Germany relies more on exports. This means the German economy can be affected by other country’s economy easily and a lot. A tax-to-GDP ratio gauges a nation’s tax revenue relative to the size of its economy as measured by GDP. The ratio provides a useful look at a country’s tax revenue because it reveals potential taxation relative to the economy. The OECD’s report found the tax-to-GDP ratio in Germany increased by 0.6% from 37.6% in 2017 to 38.2% in 2018. If the number is high, the financial situation is considered healthy. The number in Germany is high, meaning the country has a “healthy financial situation.” After the pandemic, Germany decided on two fiscal packages, one for the EU and one for Germany. The leaders of the European Union agreed in March on a €750 billion package to help members’ economies recover from COVID-19. In June, Germany has unveiled a €130 billion package of tax and spending measures designed to boost the country’s economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis. Temporary VAT cut: Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to reduce the German VAT rates from 19% to 16% (regular VAT rate) and from 7% to 5% (reduced rate) for the period from July 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. The government’s plans were revealed after economic data demonstrated industrial production fell to record

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lows in April as the coronavirus pandemic forced manufacturers to shut down. Further, unemployment has risen to 6.3% from 5.8% over the past month. €300 one-off payment for every child: Families in Germany should all receive a one-off payment of 300 euros per child. It has been styled as a kind of “thank you gift” to the millions of parents who, after the closures of kindergartens and schools across the country, had to take over childcare and teaching responsibilities— disrupting their working lives and causing a fair amount of stress. Single parents have been even more drastically affected by the coronavirus crisis since they have even bigger problems with organizing childcare—and so the government has promised them extra support. For the years 2020 and 2021, the amount you can additionally deduct from tax (tax relief) will be increased. €50 billion fund for some industries: Germany unveiled another coronavirus stimulus package with €50 billion for a raft of projects addressing climate change, innovation, solar and wind power, and digitization. Inside the package, a stimulus for “future technologies” includes funding for the development of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, offshore wind, hydrogen energy, and electric cars and buses. The package includes €7 billion for hydrogen energy infrastructure. The program includes an extra €2.5 billion for e-charging infrastructure and €1 billion for cleaner aircraft. To give electric car makers a boost, tax exemptions for purely electric vehicles are extended for a further 5 years, to 2030. A state financial incentive to buy an electric car has been doubled to €6000. Planned investment in AI projects rises from €3 billion to €5 billion, with some of this money for upgrading supercomputers. The government will also “immediately commission” the construction of “at least two” quantum computers. To accelerate the expansion of renewable energies, the expansion target for offshore wind power will be raised from 15- to 20-GW capacity by 2030. €25 billion loan support program for small firms: A €25 billion loan support program for small firms who have experienced sales drop by more than 70% compared to a year ago. Those companies could get up to 80% of their fixed operating costs reimbursed, leading to a boost for bars, restaurants, hotels, event management, and other hospitality businesses. €10 billion for municipalities struggling with lower tax receipts: Municipalities, which cover a large share of public investments in Germany, will receive fiscal support from the federal budget amounting to an additional €4 billion per year through higher federal payments into social housing schemes. A so-called Municipal Solidarity Pact 2020 will be launched to cover all losses in the corporate taxes accruing to municipalities; the estimated cost of the measure to the federal budget will be €5.9 billion. Municipal public transport systems, which suffered large revenue losses through a decline in passenger numbers, will receive additional grants from the federal budget of €2.5 billion. Gross domestic product of Germany grew 8.2% in the third quarter of 2020 compared to the previous quarter. The GDP figure in the third quarter of 2020 was around $980,000 million, leaving Germany placed third in the ranking of quarterly GDP of in the world.

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Japan

Japan remained the world’s third-largest economy in nominal terms on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a GDP of JPY 555.8 trillion (about USD 5 trillion) in 2019. However, in late 2019 the Japanese economy was entering into recession due to the impact of a consumption tax increase, extreme weather events, and the general deterioration of the global economy. Japan was thus undertaking fiscal stimulus even before the onset of the pandemic. For example, a December 2019 fiscal stimulus of JPY 26 trillion aimed at National Resilience, SME competitiveness, measures toward realizing Society 5.0/SDGs, and other objectives (Japan Cabinet Office 2019). As of March 1, 2021, the impact of the COVID-19 shock had led to a contraction in Japan’s GDP to JPY 529.2 trillion. Japan’s COVID-19 cases totaled just over 430,000 by early March 2021, with approximately 7930 deaths. At the same time, Japan’s total deaths from all causes declined by 0.7% in 2020, reflecting reduced respiratory illness, traffic accidents, and other sources of mortality (Japan Times 2021). Thus up to March 2021, Japan’s direct human cost of COVID-19 was far lower than was initially feared, particularly given the country’s very high rate of ageing and population density. On the other hand, the total pecuniary cost of COVID-19 remains to be assessed. Future research concerning Japan’s fiscal countermeasures can be expected to address such factors as the productive effects of resilient infrastructure investment and “digital transformation” versus relief to businesses that may have expanded the number of so-called “zombie” firms. As to the crisis and its onset, Japan’s first case of COVID-19 was officially declared on January 16, 2020. Confirmed cases increased gradually afterward, breaching 1000 on March 22, 2020. During the period, the country’s policy shifted from efforts to contain the pandemic, such as via entry bans, to initiatives to prevent its spread and treat the infected. Deliberation over whether to declare a state of emergency began on February 5, followed by increasingly comprehensive measures to protect public health, build capacity for treatment, and underpin the economy. Our focus of concern here is fiscal countermeasures. These began with a February 12, 2020 package of JPY 500 billion emergency lending and local guarantees for small and medium-sized enterprises. Subsequent actions included a March 5 announcement of JPY 270 billion withdrawal from FY 2020 reserve funds for coping with the pandemic and additionally, its effects on the economy. However, as the crisis worsened, the Japanese government shifted to large-scale fiscal stimulus. The Japanese government finally declared a state of emergency in the major prefectures on April 7, 2020 (and nationwide from April 30), giving regional authorities the power to order school closures, request for citizens to stay home, and otherwise reduce movement. In tandem with the April 7 declaration of a state of emergency, the central government adopted a JPY 117.1 (21% of 2019 GDP) Emergency Economic Measures to Cope with COVID-19. Within this fiscal

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package, the government included the remaining elements of the December 2019 stimulus plus the initial COVID-19 spending initiatives of February and March. The April 7 fiscal package was revised on April 20, and stressed an “emergency support phase” and a subsequent “V-shaped recovery phase.” The package focused on five objectives. First were measures to combat COVID-19 per se and bolster treatment of the infected (JPY 2.5 trillion, or 0.4% of GDP); second were measures to extend emergency relief to businesses and workers (JPY 30.8 trillion, 15.8% of GDP); third were expenditures to rebuild economic activity immediately after the emergency (JPY 3.3 trillion, 1.5% of GDP); fourth were investments in a resilient economic structure (JPY 10.2 trillion, 2.8% of GDP); and fifth was the establishment of contingency funds to prepare for future challenges (JPY 1.5 trillion, 0.3% of GDP). Importantly, these measures were a mix of direct fiscal expenditures and financial supports such as loan guarantees (IMF 2020; Japanese Cabinet Office 2020a). As the crisis worsened, the Japanese government soon after announced a second major COVID-19 package on May 27, 2020. This second package was a supplementary budget to the initial 2020 FY budget and was approved on June 12, 2020. Similar in scale to the first major COVID-19 stimulus, this second stimulus totaled JPY 117.1 trillion (21% of 2019 GDP). Also similar to the first stimulus, this second package was a mix of direct fiscal expenditures and financial supports. This second stimulus was primarily composed of wage subsidies and loans, targeted at preventing bankruptcies and unemployment from the economic effects of COVID19 (IMF 2021). Again in 2020, Japan implemented a third major package of COVID-19 countermeasures. This third package, passed on December 8, was called the Comprehensive Economic Measures to Create a Future with Security and Growth. Its total size was JPY 73.6 trillion, or 13% of 2019 GDP. The package comprised three pillars: fighting COVID-19 and its economic effects (JPY 6 trillion), building postcrisis sustainability through structural transformation (JPY 51.7 trillion), and bolstering national resilience against disaster risks (JPY 5.9 trillion) (Japanese Cabinet Office 2020b). Through these three stimulus packages in 2020, Japan put roughly 55% of its 2019 GDP into combating COVID-19 while also investing in disaster risk reduction, Society 5.0 industrial policy, SDGs, and digital transformation. Assessment of the long-term costs and benefits of Japan’s massive fiscal mobilization remains to be seen. But the short-run benefits would appear to include very low unemployment, bankruptcies, and other fallout. We have already seen that the overall economy only shrank JPY 555.8 trillion (about USD 5 trillion) in 2019 to JPY 529.2 trillion in 2020. In addition, Japan’s economic growth in 2021 is expected to be over 5%, according to provisional estimates by the IMF. As for job losses, unemployment in Japan only marginally increased from an average of 2.4% in 2019 to 2.8% in 2020. However, unemployment among 15–24-year-old increased to 5.1% in December 2020 (up 1.9% from a year earlier), as firms and policy measures sought to protect the already employed rather than new entrants to the labor market. By March 19, 2021, the COVID-19 crisis had led to 1177 bankruptcies (Teikoku Databank

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2021). But the number should be seen in perspective, as there were 8354 bankruptcies in 2019 and 8063 in 2018 (Teikoku Databank 2020). The degree to which Japan’s fiscal packages saved not just livelihoods but also lives remains to be seen, as research will have to tease out the drivers of low rates of COVID-19 mortality as well as the decline in excess mortality. The extent to which Japan’s COVID-19 countermeasures have led to enhanced disaster risk reduction, Society 5.0 industrial policy, SDGs, and digital transformation, forms a subject for future research. Our summary of the fiscal packages shows many trillions of yen earmarked for these initiatives, but the final data are not yet available. One reason being 2/3 of Japanese public spending gets implemented by subnational governments. These agents received substantial support from the central government to spend in the various areas of resilience, sustainability, and economic transformation, but measuring the effectiveness of the support will require at least another fiscal cycle. Clearly, the number of Japanese subnational governments building their own local National Resilience plans increased from 203 cities and towns in July 2019 to an impressive 1608 cities and towns as of March 2021. In other words, virtually all of Japan’s 1741 cities and towns are now assessing their specific climate, seismic, and other disaster vulnerabilities and responding to those threats in collaboration with civil society and higher levels of government.

4.3.3

United States

Currently, the United States has the world’s highest COVID-19 caseload with a total of 14.9 million confirmed cases, accounting for 20% of the total 60 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University. The 7-day average in the United States was 189,000 cases and an average fatality of 214,026 as of December 5. The United States confirmed its first COVID-19 case on January 20, with a mass outbreak occurring around mid-March to April. Following the mass outbreak, the individual states announced strict lockdown and containment measures, closing all economic activities except essential services. The second wave of pandemic occurred during midsummer with ease of travel restrictions and re-opening of the economy. With the cold winter coming in, the United States currently faces the third wave of infection, with cases spiking up in mid-September and continuing an upward trend as of mid-November. Several literatures have discussed the fiscal issues in detail (U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General 2020; Goto and Manabe 2020; Imbert 2020; McCarthy 2020; Richter 2020; Routley 2020; Eaton 2020; Bea 2020; Konish 2020; Rogoff 2020; Lawder 2020; Moore 2020). The US Federal Government responded to the COVID-19 economic crisis by launching a large fiscal stimulus package. The fiscal stimulus consists of four phases or acts, illustrated in the timeline below (Fig. 4.1).

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Fig. 4.1 Timeline of the four US fiscal stimulus acts (Kaiser Family Foundation 2020)

4.3.3.1

Phase 1: Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act

The first act was on March 6, known as the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, an $8.3 billion aid, for assistance in the preliminary relief efforts of the COVID-19 outbreak. The pie chart below shows the breakdown of the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act. Of the 8.3 billion, 75% went to the Department of the Health and Service, mainly for health emergency prevention, preparedness, and response activities against COVID-19. The rest of 1.6 billion or 20% went to international response, while 6% went to telehealth for remote delivering health care services and information (Peron 2020a, b). International Response includes global health programs, international disaster assistance, economic support funds, and US Embassies (Peron 2020a, b).

As seen, the first act mostly focuses on the immediate relief efforts toward the health sector, which was severely devastated by the pandemic. The pie chart below further breaks down the 6.7 billion of the total 8.3 billion to the Department of

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Health and Service. Within the Department of Health and Service, the Department of Public Health and Social Service receives the largest share of 50%, totaling 3.4 billion, for the development of vaccines, such as the purchase of vaccines and other necessary medical supplies (Peron 2020a, b). The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention receives the second-largest share, representing 28% of the funds, including funds for the state and local response and the replenishment of the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund (Peron 2020a, b). The rest goes to the National Institute of Health (NIH) as well as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the development of virus testing, therapeutics, and diagnostics (Peron 2020a, b).

4.3.3.2

Phase 2: Families First Coronavirus Response Act

The second act is known as the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, launched on March 18, effective from April 1 through December 31 (Peron 2020a, b). Compared to the first act, the second act has five main aspects. The first forms the mandatory 2-week paid sick leave of up to $511 per day. The 2-week paid leave becomes applicable for those under COVID-19 isolation/quarantined or are taking care of someone under COVID-19 (Peron 2020a, b). The second is the expanded Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows the employees to receive 10-weeks of paid family and medical leave in addition to the previous 2-week paid sick leave (Peron 2020a, b). The extended paid sick leave is worth 2/3 of the employee’s regular rate, and employees can receive up to $200 per day (Peron 2020a, b). These provide financial support for employees rearing a child, with schools and childcare closed down during the lockdown (Peron 2020a, b). The third is the additional unemployment benefit of one billion to states for

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unemployment insurance. Fourth is the expanded nutrition/food assistance to alleviate food-security issues, such as the $400 million emergency food assistance program (Peron 2020a, b). Lastly, phase 1 provides free FDA-approved COVID19 testing for all Americans, regardless of insurance status or the ability to pay (Peron 2020a, b). Both the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act provide around 1% of the GDP and mainly function as automatic stabilizers for the initiate fiscal response.

4.3.3.3

Phase 3: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)

The third act enacted on March 27, known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES act), is a $2.3 trillion stimulus package aimed to alleviate the economic hardship for those working on the front line of the pandemic, such as individuals, business, and healthcare providers (Tax policy Center 2020; Preston 2020; Sorensen et al. 2020). Similar to the previous two acts, the CARES act acts as an emergency relief program, providing short-term relief to address the more immediate fallout against the pandemic. However, the difference comes in the CARES act is the largest economic stimulus package in the US history accounting for 13% of the GDP with increased unemployment pay-outs and direct payments for the business sector.

Of the estimated 2.3 trillion economic relief package, individuals and households receive the largest share of roughly $603 billion. The primary reason for such a large allocation to individuals/households reflects the slow delivery of individual loan

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support during the Global Financial crisis in 2009, lingering the economic impact on the unemployment rate and personal spending (U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics 2020). Therefore, allocating large amounts of money for direct payments toward individuals prevents the same mistake from occurring during the 2009 recession. The $603 billion allocated to individuals and households have two aspects. The first is the $300 billion Economic Impact Payments providing a one-time direct cash payment of $1200 for every adult and $500 for every child in the United States to individuals or families whose income of $75,000. For example, a family of four earning less than $150,000 can expect $3400 from the Economic Impact Payment. Second is the $260 billion expanded unemployment benefits, for those who receive regular unemployment compensation to receive an additional $600 per week for 4 months until the end of July. The idea is to ensure continued financial support for the unemployed since the earlier unemployment benefit during phases 1 and 2 was expired. The expanded unemployment benefit also includes the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation Program (PEUCP) that allows workers who have exhausted their unemployment compensation benefits to receiving 13 more weeks of unemployment benefit. Further, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program (PUA) expands the unemployment insurance eligibility to independent contractors, self-employed, and gig-workers, who are, otherwise, unqualified to receive unemployment benefits. While each state sets its standards and weekly payments, the law increases those payments by $600 a week per recipient (Shierholz 2020a, b, c; Bivens et al. 2020; Ordonez and Winn 2020). The second-largest portion of the stimulus package is allocated to big businesses, specifically focusing on economic stabilization and relief for the severely distressed sector. The airline industry, such as the commercial and cargo airlines, is the largest recipient of the relief targeted toward the severely distressed business sector, billion for commercial, and cargo airlines. Another characteristic of the economic relief attributed toward big businesses is the employee retention credit, which allows employers to defer payroll tax with 50% of payroll tax payment due in 2021 while the remainder 50% is in 2022 (Sorensen et al. 2020). The payroll tax deferral is an immediate cash benefit for employers throughout 2020, with the purpose to ensure companies can retain or pay their employees even if the company is partially or fully closed due to the pandemic (Sorensen et al. 2020). Small businesses receive the third-largest portion of the CARES act, totaling 377 billion. Specifically, the Small Business Administration (SBA) is responsible for distributing financial relief through two targeted loan packages. The first is the Paycheck protection program, which is new legislation set up for the pandemic that provides low-interest and short-term loans under the small business allocation of up to 2.5 times their average monthly payroll, and a maximum of ten million to any qualified organizations of less than 500 employees (Sorensen et al. 2020). The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) takes up $349 billion of the estimated $377 to cover the operational expenses such as rent and utilities or to retain employees on the payroll during COVID-19 closure by providing favorable, federally guaranteed loans (Probasco 2020). Second is the Economic Industry Disaster Loans program, a pre-existing program by the SBA for providing loans for small businesses in

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disaster zones. The EIDL is a $10 billion worth of emergency grants providing a maximum of $10,000 to each company to cover immediate operating costs (Sorensen et al. 2020).

4.3.3.4

Phase 4: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)

The fourth stimulus act is a $483 billion stimulus package for providing loans and guarantees to help small businesses known as the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act. As the name suggests, the act expands the Paycheck protection program for small businesses, enacted by the CARES act (Probasco 2020). The act extends the deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program from July 31 to the end of December. Therefore, the fourth act provides an extended loan for small businesses and includes further assistance for the health sector with US$75 billion for hospitals and US$25 billion for expanding virus testing.

4.3.4

Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s 50th year of independence could have been marked with a GDP growth rate surpassing 8.0%, with a sustained economic growth of 8.2% in 2019 as evident. The other growth indicators of the economy also include foreign exchange reserves exceeding USD 43 billion. Moreover, the poverty rate declined to 20.5% from 40.0% in 2005 with women empowerment playing a crucial role in entrepreneurship and employment generation. The economic prosperity of the past decade (FY 2009 till FY 2019) has also indicated the per capita income increased from USD 754 to USD 2064, life expectancy increased from 67 years to 73 years, adult literacy expanded from 58% to 75%, poverty incidence fell from 35% to 20.5%, and extreme poverty rate declined from 18% to 10.5%.2 Bangladesh is among one of the fastest-growing nations in the world, is expected to formally graduate from the Least Developed Countries (LDC) status in 2024, and forms one of the remarkable achievements for Bangladesh in her post-independence era.3 Meanwhile, the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic attributed to a significant drop of 5.2% in the last fiscal year, 2019–2020. However, with the current economic policies in place and the fiscal boosting, the projections state Bangladesh is going to achieve a GDP growth rate of 6.8% in 2021. The other macroeconomic indicators, e.g., current account balance (as percent of GDP) and government lending/borrowing (as percent of GDP) has been forecasted to be
0.816 (2021) from
2.167 (2020); and
5.977 (2021) from
6.425 (2020). As 2 3

See 8th Five-Year Plan (2021). See 8th Five-Year Plan (2021).

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of September 2020, the total amount of fiscal stimulus is 15,717 million USD (Ministry of Finance 2020). According to the eighth Five Year Plan (July 2020–June 2025); Bangladesh’s economic development is mainly based on six core themes, i.e., (1) rapid recovery from COVID-19, (2) GDP growth acceleration, employment generation, and rapid poverty reduction with a broad-based strategy of inclusiveness, (3) a sustainable development pathway resilient to disaster and climate change, (4) sustainable use of natural resources and successful management of the inevitable urbanization transition, (5) development and improvement of critical institutions, and (6) attaining SDG targets and coping up the impact of LDC graduation. These six themes are absolutely vital in dealing with the upcoming challenges created by the global pandemic and ensuring human security principles. Importantly, the realization of effective medium to longer-term development planning along with proper synchronization with the visions and missions of the government as outlaid in other plans (e.g., Vision 2021, Perspective Plan, and Delta Plan) would be the key to mitigate the threats toward human development and reduce poverty. Despite agriculture has been dominant in the sectoral composition of the country’s domestic production, the earlier development plans of Bangladesh (sixth and seventh FYP) is evident of significant sectoral shifts, i.e., from agriculture to industry and services sector. In 2019, the share of agriculture in Bangladesh’s gross domestic product was 12.68% whereas industry and services contributed approximately 29.65% and 52.85%, respectively.4 Evidently, rural economy had been transforming from a pre-dominantly agriculture-based production structure toward more nonfarm-based production activities, such as livestock, poultry, dairyproducts, fruits and vegetables, and flowers leading up to new sources of rural income and employment. This forms a crucial shifting trend contributing to the economic growth through the demand side advancements in the service sectors, e.g., construction, housing, trade, transport, schooling, health, and other services. The economic growth in the past decade has largely been facilitated through infrastructure development (e.g., rural roads and electricity) and technological advancements (e.g., ICT network and related services). In addition, the transformation will support both growth and income distribution by increasing average labor productivity in the economy.5 Since independence, the economic policies of Bangladesh had primarily been focused on the agriculture sector. However, Bangladesh had observed a sustained GDP growth rate over the past few decades with the changing pattern from agriculture to the manufacturing sector and the recent upsurge in the services sector. This consistently higher growth rate has been particularly accrued due to the massive growth in the ready-made garments sector and remittances from overseas employment. Despite the share of agriculture showing a declining trend in the national growth-share; the global challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have

4 5

See 8th Five-Year Plan (2021). See 8th Five-Year Plan (2021).

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re-focused the importance of domestic food production and thereby underscoring the need to update the existing agriculture policy in Bangladesh. Therefore, as explained earlier, it has perhaps become pertinent to analyze the shifting trends inside the agriculture sector, i.e., from farm to nonfarm activities re-emphasizing transfer of surplus labor in rural and urban areas and the changing pattern to diversify agriculture for retaining current and future food security in the context of climate change and the global pandemic. This may perhaps be of utmost importance to ensure human security from the development perspective in the changing pattern of globalization as well. Continuing in the line of harmonized discussion with the eighth FYP; the prospects of the manufacturing sector in Bangladesh need to be coherent with the current challenges of the global pandemic and the short-term recovery plans of the government. Due to the global lockdown and massive supply chain disruptions, Bangladesh’s export sector has been severely impacted by a sudden decline in demand for the ready-made garments (RMG) sector. This has further re-emphasized the importance for product diversification as to be the primary medium to longer-term challenge underscoring employment generation along with satisfactory manufacturing growth. Re-analysis of the current investment initiatives of the government of Bangladesh (GOB) form a pressing need, in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) in the context of sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Ministry of Finance, as of November 2020, the government had announced Tk. 121,353 crores worth of stimulus packages, equivalent to 4.3% of the gross domestic product of the country. Among them, 80.7% (3.5% of GDP) is of liquidity support and 19.3% (0.8% of GDP) is of fiscal stimulus. As discussed earlier, Bangladesh’s stimulus packages have been provided in the form of low-cost loans to affected micro, small, medium, and large industries and services (MSMEs), food security, social protection, special allowances, and incentives. The other sectoral preferences had mainly been the agriculture and the export sector and resulted due to the pandemic-induced shutdown that had crippled the economy, destroyed millions of jobs, and generated the “new poor.”

4.3.5

India

Prior to the pandemic causing “Corona-shock,” India has seen great economic growth since its independence, being recognized as the seventh largest economy and the third largest in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Literature highlights the adoption of the New Economic Policy as a turning point in India’s economy, in 1991, where new policies implemented a system to open their economy to the world. These policies included the changes in aspects such as exports, where many export sectors were opened for agricultural goods, and the shift from traditional industries to high-technology industries. Today, some of the top thriving sectors in the country are agriculture, industry, service, food processing, and manufacturing sector. The

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Government of India has the structure, referred to as the quasi-federal form of government, called the union or central government. With this government structure, in implementing strategies for developments, in economic aspects as well as others, cooperation between the two parties becomes cruciale. Micro-, small-, and medium-enterprises (MSMEs) are recognized as India’s accelerator in their economy, as it accounts for about 30% of the country’s GDP; moreover, MSMEs are a significant sector in the supply chain and contribute about 40% of the nation’s exports. Not only do MSMEs support the economic advancements of the country, judged by the numbers, they form a key factor in sustaining livelihoods for many people living in India. MSMEs employ nearly 110 million people across the country, which is about 8% of the whole population. Also, as many of the MSMEs operate outside the capital cities, in many rural areas, the sector becomes a key factor in providing opportunities for people. Literature highlights India’s economy as seeing a slowdown in recent years, after its rapid growth from 2003 to 2008. The weakening of the economy was due to factors such as wearing in private consumption growth, increasing unemployment, increase in the rate of poverty, and stagnation in rural wages. There have been three main stimulus packages announced by the central government, the first in May and another in November. The stimulus packages for COVID19 recovery is a part of the larger scheme of the nation’s economy development project called, Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, which means “self-reliant India” in direct translation. The economic development project was announced by the current prime minister and was launched in May 2020, amid the pandemic (Ahmed and Verma 2020; Gupta and Sud 2020; Shukla 2020; Mulye 2020; Redbus 2020; World Bank 2020). The first stimulus package announced in May was an amount worth 266 billion USD, which is nearly 10% of the country’s GDP. The stimulus package was heavily focused on supporting local businesses, especially MSMEs, as the scheme included collateral-free loans for such MSMEs, granted for a 4-year period. Also, in order to support the local businesses, the announcement also included the regulation for foreign companies being prevented from tendering contracts with a value of up to 26.5 USD. Along with the announcement of the stimulus package, the government also announced a new definition of MSMEs. The new definition applies to both manufacturing and services and has been expanded to businesses that were not qualified to benefit from the support toward MSMEs. The second economic stimulus package announced in October, worth Rs 46,700 crore, an amount worth of about 6.3 million USD. The amount was about 0.2% of the nation’s GDP. The announcement of the second fiscal package had included cash vouchers for traveling, special festival advance for government employees, interestfree loans for states, and additional capital expenditure. As India was coming to the festive season, the stimulus package intended to directly support generating demand, in order to boost the economy. This package includes credit support for local farmers through the national banks, in order to sustain agriculture in rural areas of the country.

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The most recent stimulus package, the third in regard to COVID-19 impacts, was announced in November. The amount was worth 35 billion USD. The focus points of the package included aspects such as boosting job employment, consumer demand, agriculture, biotechnology, manufacturing, and export. Nine billion rupees, which is about 121 million USD, were to be secured for supporting research in developing COVID-19 vaccine. According to the prediction announced by International Monetary Fund (IMF), India is recognized as one of the most affected major economy due to the pandemic. They have had the worst contraction of GDP decline in the country’s history and the first economic recession in 1947, which was when the British had left the country. The prediction claims India’s GDP growth projections of 2021 to mark lower than
10%. The impacts on India’s economy, lead by causes of COVID-19 pandemic, are seen to have come in two phases. The initial impact was when the virus first started to spread in China and imports from and exports to India’s biggest economic partner curtailed, suddenly, and in a large scale. Following the initial decline in the economy, as the virus became more of a global concern and strict lockdown measures were imposed in the country, domestic activities were affected severely as well. These two phases have further impacted the economic growth of the country, affecting investor sentiment negatively, which has decreased international exports and remittance. The situation regarding the pandemic not only stopped the movements of large amounts of money, but it also influenced the consumer confidence of citizens and regular consumptions had also deteriorated. The fiscal boosting schemes in India announced by the central government had first emphasized the support for local enterprises over foreign companies, and for supporting the nation’s MSMEs, but with the situations of infections not improving and the battle with the pandemic continuing longer than first thought, the actual spending had not seen a great increase. Considering the situation, the two other fiscal boosting measures following the first focused more on increasing the demand and implementing measures in specific industries. The specific guidelines targeted increasing job employment, such as increasing opportunities for returnee-migrants, focus on manufacturing, export, and agriculture, as well as investing in biotechnology. In regard to how the fiscal boosting measures were actually taken out at the more local levels, the top-down initiatives reflect the characteristics of India’s governing structure. Upon the announcement from the central government on the fiscal boosting measures, each state, at the local government level has implemented different strategies to make use of the opportunity to sustain their states; some states have been more successful than others, depending on the dominating industry.

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Fiscal Boosting and Addressing Human Security Issues

According to the UNDP’s 1994 Human Development Report, the concept of human security should go beyond potential conflicts among states and needs to include seven security threats across development dimensions, i.e., economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security. The vital addition of “development” in the conceptualization is pivotal in our analysis as well to address the challenges of the emerging human security issues posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A need to understand the “people-centered” perspective of human development becomes important, indicating human vulnerabilities, natural and biological hazards, and other future uncertainties. Since the sudden global outbreak of the pandemic, one thing has become quite clear. Pandemics do not pose equal opportunity threats to development and so do its policy responses to nations and their governance framework. Therefore, identifying the human-centered development dimensions to design the pathway toward sustainable recovery becomes imperative to attain the global development agendas, i.e., the SDGs. The global challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic have been unprecedented and multifaceted through massive supply-side disruptions and public health challenges leaving an inevitable choice between saving lives and securing livelihoods. The impacts are mostly found to differ based on human vulnerabilities, resilience, and effectiveness of local responses. Policy responses toward any major shock, by definition, should include not only the supply side mechanism, documentation, and legal obligations in place but also the pathway exhibiting the clear connectivity with the demand side aspects to design a successful handling of the shock consequences with superior management and coordination. Evidence shows regardless of geographical positioning and diverse socioeconomic profiles, effectiveness of COVID-19 responses had varied significantly depending upon the national governments’ responses and effective handling of disaster risk management protocols and policies. In this context, the case of Taiwan and the State of Kerala in India could be highlighted as a successful model compared to the UK and many European countries.6 Besides the unavoidable choice to save lives and livelihoods with a sudden halt on globalization, the global communities had faced significant development challenges affecting their attainment of the sustainable development goals. This had particularly posed undue threats to human security hampering sustainable recovery and coming back to the pre-COVID equilibrium. According to United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2020), almost all of the 17 SDGs have got affected putting undue challenges on the global development agenda. For example, Bangladesh has achieved considerable success in poverty eradication in the past decade which allowed the nation to achieve indicative success in selective multidimensional poverty indicators (i.e., denoting success in vulnerability reduction and enhanced resilience) leading the country graduating to become a lower 6

France, Italy, and Spain are particular examples.

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middle-income country. Therefore, a hard hit from the pandemic overwhelmingly threatens the decadal success of poverty eradication policies of the government and its development partners. Although the aspect of surveillance and control is a public health safety issue, it has been clearly linked with Bangladesh’s sustainable development agenda and continuation of its decade-old poverty alleviation policy successes and sustained economic growth. According to a recent survey, Bangladesh will have 16.4 million “new poor” in 2020 as the income of the working-class in urban and rural areas have fallen sharply due to the lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19 pandemic severely affecting the SDG achievements. Therefore, to achieve the SDG targets by 2030, substantial policy interventions in the medium to longer term would be required in terms of local responses by the global communities. In this paper, we have outlined the economic measures of the national governments’ responses; in terms of fiscal stimulus’s, cash support, tax cut, one-off compensation scheme, loan support program, etc., and analyzed the implications of fiscal stimulus toward sustainable recovery and addressing post-COVID-19 developmental challenges in a cross-country setting. Irrespective of providing a broader overview on the types and amount of fiscal stimulus packages, our focus in the paper is further to justify the implications of fiscal boosting as a pathway toward sustainable recovery and mitigate the impacts of the global pandemic on human security through ensuring the sustainability of the global development agendas. Here, we argue that in the presence of a robust resilience-oriented development policy regime, fiscal boosting could facilitate as pandemic counter measures, ensure livelihood security, and hence could be a pathway to sustain human security principles. This could perhaps add as a “new dimension” to understand the nexus between security, peace, and development as well. In this context, we have highlighted Japan’s Society 5.0’s policy arms and termed fiscal measures as transformative investment to meet the challenges of COVID-19 and associated global risks of the fourth industrial revolution and the unfolding impacts of climate change. Although, expectedly, incentivizing through fiscal policies will mobilize food security, public health, climate security and environment, migrant worker and urban resilience, gender, education, and facilitate attainment of the respective SDGs; sustainable recovery could largely vary based upon national resilience, governance structure, debt vulnerabilities, and the extant developmental framework.

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Shierholz H (2020c) The economy President-elect Biden is inheriting-More than 26 million workers—15.5% of the workforce—are being directly hurt by the coronavirus downturn. Working Economics Blog. Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC. https://www.epi.org/ blog/the-economy-president-elect-biden-is-inheriting-more-than-26-million-workers-15-5-ofthe-workforce-are-being-directly-hurt-by-the-coronavirus-downturn/. Accessed 7 Dec 2020 Shukla N (2020) Uttar Pradesh: ecotourism hit by Covid restrictions: Lucknow News - Times of India. TNN, Mumbai. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-ecotour ism-hit-by-covid-restrictions/articleshow/79465038.cms. Accessed 19 Dec 2020 Sorensen T, Teague W, Peron S, Parker B, Madden B, Speights P, Titus K (2020) CARES ACT what’s included and how are healthcare providers impacted? vol 2. VMG Holdings LLC, Tomball, TX, pp 1–14. https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/1863187/CARES%20Act_Whats% 20Included%20and%20How%20are%20Healthcare%20Providers%20Impacted_VMG% 2 0 H e a l t h - 1 . p d f ? _ _ h s s c ¼1 2 1 8 9 9 9 2 4 . 4 . 1 6 0 8 7 7 1 2 3 5 8 7 9 & _ _ h s t c ¼1 2 1 8 9 9 9 2 4 . 4503bb111ec2e6461d3f0c09894be421.1608771235878.1608771235878.1608771235878. 1&__hsfp¼2557645469&hsCtaTracking¼3c36e440-39e5-4ea8-a85c-ce58f0a5e7a5% 7Ce1fe7dfe-eb77-4cff-8463-6c2dea23b3a3. Accessed 5 Dec 2020 Tax Policy Center (2020) Briefing book- what are automatic stabilizers and how do they work? Tax Policy Center, Washington, DC. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-areautomatic-stabilizers-and-how-do-they-work. Accessed 29 Nov 2020 Teikoku Databank (2020) Japan’s business failures during January to December 2020. Teikoku Databank, Tokyo. https://www.tdb-en.jp/news_reports/backnumber/brr20nen.html Teikoku Databank (2021) COVID-19 bankruptcies total 1,177. Teikoku Databank, Tokyo. https:// www.tdb.co.jp/tosan/covid19/pdf/tosan.pdf (in Japanese) U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics (2020) The employment situation — November 2020. BLS, Washington, DC. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf. Accessed 6 Dec 2020 U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. 2020. Pandemic response oversight. U.S. Department Of Justice Office Of The Inspector General. Washington, DC. https://oig. justice.gov/coronavirus. Accessed 1 Dec 2020 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2020) Shared responsibility, global solidarity: responding to the socio-economic impacts of Covid-19. The United Nations, New York, NY United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2021) World economic situation and prospects. UN, New York, NY. https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/ uploads/sites/45/WESP2021_FullReport.pdf World Bank (2020) Report. India development 2020. World Bank, Washington, DC. https:// openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34367/India-Development-Update. pdf?sequence¼1&isAllowed¼y

Part II

Development

Chapter 5

Climate Change and Human Security in the Context of the Global Pandemic: Emphasising Responses that Maximise Synergies Sivapuram Venkata Rama Krishna Prabhakar, So-Young Lee, and Masashi Tsudaka

Abstract COVID-19 has changed the way we understand risk and vulnerability. The pandemic provides a more in-depth understanding of how systemic risks work and how they affect lives, livelihoods and economies at a broader scale. Consequently, a range of impacts was observed, including loss of human health, livelihoods, loss of general wellbeing, protracted poverty and loss of developmental gains. The pandemic has exacerbated social and economic inequalities as most affected are vulnerable groups of people, including the elderly or part-time workers with low-income jobs. The impacts of the pandemic on political decision-making resulted in security consequences spanning national and regional scales. The pandemic directly affected human security as people’s ability to live peacefully, free of fear and live with dignity has been severely affected. These pandemic experiences call for revisiting the concepts of human security in developmental planning. With this background in view, the chapter evaluated the nexus between human security, climate change and pandemics. It also provides essential pointers that can help identify suitable policies and practices to promote human security while mitigating climate change and pandemics. Keywords Human security · Climate change · Pandemics · Causal loops · PESTLE framework

5.1

Introduction

The COVID-19 has emerged as a critical pandemic during recent years with impacts spanning from local to national and international levels. The pandemic has affected millions of people’s lives and livelihoods and has disrupted the economies at the

S. V. R. K. Prabhakar (*) · S.-Y. Lee · M. Tsudaka Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Hayama, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_5

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Fig. 5.1 The nexus of climate change, pandemics and human security. (Source: authors)

local, national, regional and global levels. The pandemic’s overarching impacts have exemplified COVID-19 as a systemic risk. They have raised the debate on the importance of understanding and addressing systemic risks for sustainable human development and human security. The pandemic has challenged us to look at human security with a renewed perspective. Some parlance can be drawn between the impacts of the pandemic and climate change impacts. The most important parlance being both are systemic risks, and both can impair and threaten the decades of developmental gains achieved. The emerging evidence also suggests both affecting human security negatively. The relationship between pandemics, climate change and human security can be seen as multi-directional (Fig. 5.1). Climate change can exacerbate the pandemics by affecting the environment of vectors and hosts of infectious diseases, and it can affect human vulnerability to contagious diseases. Climate change can affect human security by affecting other securities such as food security, water security, livelihood security and national security (Prabhakar 2021). Similarly, pandemics can affect climate change in terms of human responses to pandemics. Emerging evidence indicates the impact of the COVID-19 responses on climate change as mostly positive. The current societal reactions have primarily been green even though the long-term implications of human responses to the pandemics are yet to be seen. Some environmentally positive trends include reduced demand for fuel due to curtailed economic activity, reduced travel and transportation, curtailed

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consumer demand and reduced resource consumption. As a result, incidences of reduced air pollution have been reported throughout the world. However, some negative trends were also reported, such as increased reliance on home-delivery of consumer goods, increased use of plastic and increased medical waste. Pandemics can also affect human security by affecting their livelihoods, health, access to resources and services, sense of safety and confidence about their future. Human security could also affect both climate change and pandemics. As shown in Fig. 5.1, the choices made for achieving human security in terms of developmental decisions and policies affecting the environment, food, energy, livelihood, security and safety of individuals, society and countries could affect climate change pandemic outcomes. Hence, climate change, pandemics and human security can be thought of as outcomes of human developmental actions. For the above-discussed nexus, the relationship between climate change and pandemic deserves a systematic analysis to draw responses with synergies of climate change adaptation and pandemic risk mitigation leading to the enhancement of human security. Keeping in view the above context, the chapter evaluates how the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change affect various dimensions of human security and identifies synergic actions promoting human security while mitigating climate change and pandemic outcomes.

5.2

Causal Loops of Human Security, Climate Change and Pandemics

The section provides a background to the emergence of human security in the global development and environmental fields. It also discusses the interaction between human security and climate change, and human security and pandemics to show the nexus. The literary meaning of security is the state of being free from fear, danger and or threat, also denotes safety from various risks. As widely known, the concept of human security emerged when UNDP published the Human Development Report, entitled, ‘New Dimensions of Human Security’ in 1994. The report envisaged that human security aims to afford people ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’, and is ‘concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their many choices, how much access they have to market and social opportunities—and whether they live in conflict or peace’. Human security remained a concept for an extended period after the paradigm of human security was brought into the development discourse. It remained far from being implementable as a concrete policy area or a tangible outcome. The transition from a conceptual understanding of human security to something practical and implementable has not been straightforward. The initial efforts to operationalise the concept of human security have focused on dissecting human security into smaller and implementable parts. This has contributed to the understanding and

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addressing human security risks at individual, society and country levels. The idea to think of human security as a collection of securities such as food security, water security, health security, economic security, environmental security, individual security, community/social security, political security and national security has enabled the implementation of human security concepts meaningfully. Among these, national security is considered a traditional area as the understanding of security was initially and primarily applied to the national context. The national security dealt with the risks emanating from outside its borders, primarily. Over the years, as the external threats to national security subsided significantly after the Cold War, at least for most countries, widening the concept of national security towards more intrinsic factors gained attention. Here, the emphasis has been on the multifaceted factors that affect countries’ security and individuals not limiting to external military-related factors. Security factors emanating and influencing the government and individuals within the national boundary such as food, water, energy and political stability have gained attention in determining countries’ overall security. Factors such as globalisation have further stressed the need to diversify security from different angles rather than from the traditional notions that dominated the security paradigm in the beginning. As a result, the concept of human security encompassed various factors apart from external threats to a country. Consequently, with the specialisation in the discourse, the security concepts have been applied to other areas of risks such as food, water, energy which constitute the non-traditional security areas. Several dimensions of human security have been proposed in the literature showing a complex web of causal loops connecting various aspects of human security with climate change and pandemics (Fig. 5.2). Nef (1999) has proposed five dimensions of human security: environmental, personal and physical security; economic security, social security, political security and cultural security. All these securities affect human security and are mutually connected. Here, environmental security refers to the threats posed by the ecological changes, including climate change and the necessity to provide a safe environment to fulfil individual life and health. Economic security refers to the conditions of livelihood where individuals can fulfil their material needs. Social security refers to being free from discrimination due to one’s social, economic, gender or ethnicity and form groups and associates with others. This means the need to provide safety nets and information necessary to fulfil one’s social security requirements. The right to representation, autonomy and ability to express different opinions comprises political security, combined with legal and judicial aspects of security. Cultural security demands all groups to be treated equal regarding their unique cultural identity, needs and differences. Health security has also been considered as one of the dimensions of human security (WHO 2002). Health security denotes the need for freedom from health problems to fulfil other dimensions of human security. As discussed in the previous paragraphs, health security gets affected by other human security dimensions as well and cannot be seen in isolation. Determining and understanding threats to these different dimensions of human security helps identify solutions with synergies to address all these dimensions of human security.

Fig. 5.2 Causal loops between climate change, pandemics and human security. (Source: authors)

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With the diversified understanding of security to a variety of facets of human development, human security concepts have enabled organisations such as United Nations to address cross-cutting issues, to enable thinking development as a holistic concept and to implement programs that are inter-and multi-disciplinary in nature cutting across different sectors and contexts.

5.2.1

Human Security and Climate Change

Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’ (Ruttinger et al. 2015) as it exacerbates natural disasters, environmental degradation, extreme weather patterns, disrupt crop harvests, changes in agriculture, food crop yields, erode livelihoods, spur infectious diseases/hazards threats to health; lead to a dramatic rise in migrations/displacement; and spark conflicts by resource scarcity. The developing and climate-sensitive countries experience more socioeconomic impacts with human security implications and add to existing burdens than the developed. The most significant climatic impacts are observed in emerging countries affecting the most vulnerable segments of societies. The impact of climate change becomes more acute in vulnerable regions facing multiple stresses simultaneously, i.e. existing conflict, persistent poverty, unequal access to resources and weak institutions. The most vulnerable population groups are children, women and persons fleeing their homes due to climate change. Climate change implications for human security can be seen in the case of climate refugees. These are represented by those who fled due to the lack of sustainable living by the drying Aral lake in Central Asia, abandoned farmland due to the fast increasing temperature in Niger, and those seeking asylum from rising sea levels in Kiribati. In June 2020, U.N.H.C.R. reported that of the 79.5 million who were displaced at the end of 2019, 45.7 million were people who had fled to other areas of their own countries. The rest were people displaced elsewhere, 4.2 million of them being people awaiting the outcome of asylum requests, while 29.6 million were refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their country (UNHCR 2020). These environmental problems concerning climate change have affected all development dimensions in economic, social and political to every corner of the region. Agriculture and food security forms one of the major sectors facing climate change-created vulnerabilities (Karapinar 2019). Heat waves are the direct threat that reduces the yield of crops along with frequent droughts. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD 2015) underlined that climate change has led to, noticeably, ‘wheat and maize yield reductions’ and has threatened not only food security but also led to the price changes of food and displacement. These impacts become the severe causes of economic, social and political conflicts and consequences to the unstable society. In Haiti, for example, as there were frequent meteorological disasters due to global warming, residents already have been struggling with climate change impacts and became vulnerable to its political instability (Webersik 2010).

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Another threat of global warming that brought out immediate temperatures rising has affected human health through the transmit disease, i.e. malaria, to the regions of Africa’s highlands where yet to be suffered. The UN University (Webersik 2010) recalled that the findings of 30,000 more cases of malaria reported in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. There could be more extended climate-related disease and hazards and unprecedented pandemic recurrent, including current COVID-19. Dokos et al. (2008) identified nine threats of climate change that could bring out international insecurity. Those are ‘conflict over resources, economic damage and risk to coastal cities and critical infrastructure, loss of territory and border disputes, environmentally induced migration, disrupted access to and intensified competition over energy supplies, situations of fragility and radicalisation, pressure on international governance, risks for global economic development and risks of growing international distributional conflicts between the main drivers of climate change and those most affected’. As the range of climate change threats is extremely wide, they could trigger tensions in any sectors, countries, regions. Huntjens and Nachbar (2015), therefore, defined it as a ‘threat multiplier’ requiring highly integrated and collaborative strategies to manage effects to the people. Significantly, as a threat multiplier climate change creates multiple vulnerabilities that add to the pre-existing burdens such as persistent poverty in emerging countries. Most developed countries and those high-income segments of developing societies are responsible for the cause of climate crisis due to their heavy material consumption. This attention has been raised since the realisation that those who made no contributions and impacts to the climate crisis eventually become subject to its adverse effects (Lee and Zusman 2019; O’Brien and Leichenko 2000; Parks and Roberts 2006). Hence, climate change issues cause the most significant sources of inequality and climate-driven injustices. That became the significant economic and social impacts in the implication of human security, and eventually created a burden to domestic policymakers and international political mechanisms to handle the matter more comprehensively.

5.2.2

Human Security in International Climate Change Discussions

The consideration of human security or any security threat concerning climate change was not well recognised in many countries until recent years. The issue of human security itself and even the linkage with climate change impacts was utterly missing in the early stages of international discussions including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 attention and reference to human security. One of the significant shifts in how the implications of climate change have been communicated has happened by the securitisation of climate change (Zervaki 2018). This happened as the international community has seen the security implications of

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climate change. Signifying this, the Security Council has included climate change in its agenda due to its potential implication for energy, conflicts, water and food (UN Security Council 2007). In 2007, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WGBU) mentioned climate change could ‘trigger national and international distributional conflicts’ and identified a few cases of threats such as fragile countries and increased migration resulting from climate change. Following in 2008, the European Commission published its paper with details of the ‘climate changedriven threats related to security issues’ (IISD 2015). In 2011, UN Secretary-General Mr Ban stated that ‘climate change not only exacerbates threats to peace and security but forms a threat to peace and security as well’. Subsequently, the Security Council concluded that the responsibility for both climate change and sustainable development should be recognised and discussed further in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Then, the UNGA’s resolution reaffirmed the role of UNFCCC as the powerful mechanism covering the issues related to climate change. Those progressing recognitions were out from the understanding the human-induced environmental and climate change deliver negative impacts especially to vulnerable individuals, communities and countries; eventually notified within the UN climate regime (Mason 2013; O’Brien et al. 2010). Since then, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the UNFCCC delivered its assessment report addressing the human security chapter for the first time conducted by the Working Group II on Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation (IPCC 2007). The report addressed climate change as increasing people’s displacement because of resource shortages and extreme weather events, especially in developing countries, potentially increasing further risks of violent conflicts. The IPCC report framed the vulnerability to climate change as causing unexpected socioeconomic and political conditions (Adger 2006; Leary et al. 2008). Further, the report suggested more effective national and international governance to manage those conflicts in an integrated and collaborative manner. The findings of the report confirmed, in short, the commitments of UNFCCC to respect the concept of human security concerning the climate change impact and its governance; nonetheless, there remains no policy endorsement, formal declaration, or governance authority on human security in climate change mechanism including UNFCCC despite the statement delivered by the UN Secretary-General. Yet, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) began to cover and highlight concerns of climate change as a threat to human security in the development report as well as in its funded climate adaptation initiatives. The UNDP defined human security as ‘safety from chronic threats . . . as well as protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life’ (UNDP 1994). Now UNDP recognises climate change as the biggest threats to reduce poverty and human development; hence, the UNDP in its 2007–2008 Human Development Report (UNDP 2007) emphasised the protection of the poor and vulnerable households especially from the climate change impacts. Apart from UNDP, human security issues with climate change and environmental problems have been covered by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security. The UN Trust has funded programmes strengthening ‘the capacity of communities to cope

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with and recover from climate-related threats, while simultaneously reducing related food, health and economic insecurities’ (UN Trust Fund for Human Security 2017). The projects they have conducted develop and improve local and national protection, i.e. early warning systems, and enhance active participation of local and community that help identify best solutions to the risks they face now and future.

5.2.3

Climate Change and Pandemics

Climate change can exacerbate the vulnerabilities predisposing societies to pandemics. Though no conclusive evidence exists on whether climate change has a direct impact on the spread of COVID-19, one can opine that climate change may have certainly exacerbated the underlying vulnerabilities of people, societies and institutions making them predisposed to the negative impacts of the pandemic. Literature highlights some of the root causes of climate change as having played a facilitative role in making the pandemic severe (McNeely 2021; Robert et al. 2020). Some of these causes include deforestation and large-scale habitat loss which work indirectly in abating pathogens, vectors that carry pathogens, etc., with associated changes in the dynamics of the pandemics. Ample research demonstrates the health impacts of climate change-related to vector-borne diseases as climate change can alter the distribution of pathogens, vectors and other key drivers of pandemic impacts (Robert et al. 2020; Anthony et al. 2006). One of the key drivers of pandemic impacts includes the loss of livelihoods. For example, climate change can severely affect the livelihoods of people who are depending on such livelihoods that are directly affected by climatic vagaries and these sections of society are predisposed to be disproportionately affected by the stress caused by pandemics on the economy and society. Human nutrition forms another key driver of climate change for pandemics. As climate change affects food production in major parts of the world, access to nutrition will be hampered and could result in reduced immunity to diseases predisposing these populations to various kinds of vector and non-vector borne diseases and pandemics. Thirdly, climate change can negatively impact the ability of governments and other institutions to respond to health emergencies. Climate-related extreme events can quickly debilitate institutions to respond to health emergencies when they coincide with climatic emergencies such as floods, typhoons and droughts. In this context, it may be worthwhile for governments and other stakeholders to focus on dual disasters, cascading risks and systemic risks. These events provide an excellent example of the nexus between climate change and pandemics. Slow onset events such as droughts in the Horn of Africa, and fast onset disasters such as heat waves in Europe, floods, typhoons and mudslides in Asia, wildfires in North America and Australia, and cyclones in the Caribbean have coincided with the COVID-19 challenging the resilience and capacity of communities and governments to respond to dual emergencies. The COVID-19 also disproportionately impacted the communities that are already vulnerable to climatic impacts. The pandemic

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disproportionately impacted farmers who lose entire harvests in Africa; women and children who do not have access to nutritional supplies in South East Asia; indigenous people who are involuntarily forced to abandon their natural habitats in Latin America; small island countries that face existential threats in the Pacific.

5.2.4

Human Security and Pandemics

Health security has been identified as one of the human rights by most constitutional experts and constitutions (WHO 2002). They are upholding health security remains one of the essential objectives of the developmental agenda in most countries. However, threats to health security are abounded and are rapidly rising. Significant threats to human security include poverty, unemployment, unsafe working conditions, food safety, natural hazards, conflicts, climate change, social and economic inequality and exclusion (WHO 2007). While many of these health threats have been traditional sources of risks, more non-traditional health risks are emerging during recent years. These modern risks are underlined by factors such as complex interaction of human developmental interventions with the environment with consequences such as loss of habitat and spilling of zoonotic diseases into human societies. The rate of zoonotic disease incidence in humans has been on the rise during recent years, and many of the zoonotic diseases are behind the recent pandemics and epidemics. As a result, zoonotic diseases are reported to constitute 58–61% of communicable diseases worldwide (Adekunle et al. 2016). Diseases and pandemics are a significant threat to human security. Annually cardiovascular and respiratory diseases kill a substantial number of people globally. In 2019, lower respiratory infections, including bronchitis, tuberculosis and influenza, formed the fourth most leading cause of death in the world (WHO 2020). However, the number of people killed by lower respiratory infections on are on the decline during the past decade. Epidemics and pandemics have shown a distinctive trend over the years. The health risks and human development are closely linked. The evidence indicates that the people in low-income countries have a high likelihood to be killed by infectious diseases, as communicable diseases form 6 out of 10 leading causes of death in low-income countries. Pandemics exacerbate societal inequalities and can magnify geopolitical tensions. The health and economic disaster triggered by COVID-19 has revealed some situations where the developed countries made efforts for developing countries. Unlike the Ebola crisis, the uniqueness of the COVID-19 crisis lies in its effect on most countries in the world. The Global North makes utmost efforts in stabilising the situation for the citizens. Hence, human security is no more the reason for foreign assistance nor the social requirement to treat refugees in Europe humanly; amid the European refugee crisis, lack of human security for migrants and refugees was reported (Sørensen et al. 2017), but it became a norm to use to protect their citizens. However, we should acknowledge the unequal impact of COVID-19 on world

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citizens. The pandemic disproportionally affected the most vulnerable, particularly in conflict-ridden countries and the least developed countries in the Global South. The world realised the hardest hit by COVID-19 are the most vulnerable in fragile countries, but the resource distribution of countermeasures remains and will continue to be unequal as several challenges are accumulating: the speed of vaccine production, the cold chain to transport the vaccines, etc. Critics argue that the impact of COVID-19 on rich nations has inspired them to produce the vaccine in less than a year while a vaccine for other infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue and Ebola located in the Global South causing significant loss of life has not resulted in definite cure in years. The trends follow the trends in the global unequal distribution of resources and access to resources in disparity in the development and deployment of anti-COVID-19 vaccines.

5.3

Maximising Human Security Outcomes

This section describes various stakeholders’ responses, including policy responses by governments, for strengthening human security while mitigating the climate change and pandemic impacts. The aim here being to identify any synergies between climate change, development and pandemics in order to maximise human security. Human security thinking provides us with an integrated framework for developing holistic programs and projects in climate change, health and development domains. The framework should enable a cross-cutting view across different sectors and development domains, and it should be practical for easy implementation by various stakeholders. Operationalising human security also provides us with an opportunity to bring additional resources to existing health, climate change and development strategies. Some of the early examples of using human security to usher sustainable development include creation of the UN Trust Fund for Human Security (UNTFHS) in 1999. The Fund has assisted over 220 projects in more than 90 countries around the world (UN Trust Fund for Human Security 2017). One of the momentums was 2012 when UN General Assembly resolution 66/290 shared the common understanding of human security as, ‘the right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair’. Human security concept contributed to theoretical and practical evolution in development planning and implementation. Development agencies and institutions promoted human security as the ultimate goal to achieve at the end of various projects. Some scholars tried to use the human security perspective to re-evaluate cultural values embedded in the society (Bayu et al. 2015; Ajdari and Asgharpour 2011). Other scholars have used the Human Security Index to quantitatively analyse countries’ development in terms of achievement and trend (Hastings and Raghavan 2015). The evolution of the conceptual framework of Human Security turned out to become a tool not only for the implementation of development projects but also for researchers and policymakers. The Human Security Index sheds light on the

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Fig. 5.3 PESTLE framework for enhancing human security. (Source: authors)

academic perspectives on development-related topics. The index comprised economic, environmental and social fabric; each was measured in different data sets. Although some might view the index as a tool to compare countries on which country is performing better or worse in the global ranking, the usage of importance contributes to policy analysis and the way forward to policymakers and institutions. In that sense, it was worthwhile looking at each fabric to analyse what is met and what is not (e.g. Werthes et al. 2011), so that the policy could be better directed. The index was applicable not only on a global scale but also on the regional and prefectural level if specific data and statistics were given. Hastings and Raghavan (2015) gave an analysis of ASEAN cities by using the index and introduced strategic opportunities for the status-quo, particularly in Thailand. Such an attempt to narrow down the investigation of the Human Security Index at the community level forms a part of the human security forum trend. Thus, the concept of human security has contributed a new perspective in the academic—particularly development-related— community and generated a wide range of analyses and theories. We present a PESTLE framework to propose a set of actions enhancing human security while mitigating risks such as climate change and pandemics (Fig. 5.3). The PESTLE framework consists of political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental actions and a combination of these actions to enhance human security while mitigating the pandemics and climate change threats. Though this is a more straightforward framework, many of the actions implemented aftermath of the COVID-19 can be stated as highly integrated and includes many elements of the PESTLE framework.

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Socioeconomic and Political Initiatives

Major socioeconomic and policy measures and responses during the COVID-19 period can be found to have human security implications. These responses include the provision of food, livelihoods and health services. The experiences suggest monitoring, analysis and response to pandemics should match the multi-faced nature (Schnabel and Pedrazzini 2014). Similarly, many responses to climate change threats, including climate change adaptation and mitigation have strong human security outcomes (Table 5.1). As depicted in Table 5.1, evidently, many of the measures have direct relevance to human security. Broadly, two kinds of socioeconomic measures can be observed during the COVID-19, short-term relief-oriented and medium- to long-term recovery measures. The economic stimulus to small businesses enabled them to retain employees for more extended periods and expand the business after recovering from the financial shock. In addition to loans to businesses at a lower interest rate, some countries have introduced subsidies to organisations that retained employees during the pandemic. Sustaining employment keeps the demand for goods and services, which in turn stimulates larger businesses to survive. In the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when the virus was found in Wuhan, China, several Chinese migrants at the Myanmar border fled from fearing the infection. Due to the overwhelming need to quarantine the cross-border passengers and keep vital trade between the two countries, some community efforts were Table 5.1 Major socioeconomic measures to enhance human security while mitigating climate change and pandemics S. No. 1

Measures Relief and recovery packages during COVID-19

2

Climate change adaptation

3

Climate change mitigation measures

Elements with human security implications Reduced taxes, the extension of employment schemes, food, direct benefit transfer, provision of cooking gas, health insurance for health workers, support to MSMEs, employment subsidies and low-interest loans to businesses Climate-smart agriculture, watersaving techniques, water harvesting, agroforestry, mangroves, protecting cultural identity and indigenous knowledge Rural electrification with RE, REDD+, various normative dimensions of mitigation (e.g. equity, precautionary principle, etc.)

Human security implications Economic security, food security, health security, energy security, environmental security and health security

Food security, water security, environmental security and safety

Human rights, energy security, environmental security and equity

Source: Based on Prabhakar and Issar (2020), KPMG (Government Response—Global landscape, 2021), Zervaki (2018)

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seen, such as a hotelier association providing shelter for Chinese ‘pandemic refugees’ in the border towns of Myanmar. It was a good example demonstrating threat to Human Security can be mitigated by a sense of solidarity at the community level even in such an unexpected situation. The most recent trend shows the safeguard of Human Security for various types of migrants needs being considered as well. Several of the short-term economic stimulus measures were targeted at the MSMEs that are the engines of economic growth in many Asian countries. Targeting the power utilities enabled them to be operational during the pandemic withstanding the reduced demand and revenue. Short-term relief measures such as the supply of food, reduction of taxes and other health-related measures directly address the food security, economic security and health security that are important components of human security. These measures are short-lived, but their human security implications can be long-term since buffering the socioeconomic impacts during the peak stress periods can have significant long-lasting effects. The long-term socioeconomic measures include greater reliance on sustainable, circular, self-sufficiency, planned urbanisation and resilient infrastructure. Many medium- and long-term recovery plans have significantly focused on the small and medium enterprises, rural sectors, agriculture and food and health. Health, though has not received the priority in long-term investments in the proposed recovery measures, the sector will receive a significant influx of resources that will be beneficial in strengthening the health sector in the years to come. The proposed investments in research and development and health care, in particular, are highly needed to enhance the health sector in many countries. While these measures are top-down, several organic and bottom-up measures and trends also emerged that have sustainability implications. Some of these measures and implications include greater reliance on local food as the long-distance transport of food, and other goods and services were severely impacted during the COVID. The demand for local food has a significant impact on the local economy, positive environmental implications such as reduced emissions from long-distance transportation. Due to the global supply chains’ impact, many businesses have started procuring locally with similar economic and environmental benefits. The second important trend and measure include the greater reliance on teleworking due to social distancing measures implemented in many countries and organisations. Though these measures have reduced the demand for transportation and fossil fuel consumption, the impact on electricity demand at a macro-level remains unclear. Though the above discussed socioeconomic measures and trends may or may not continue to sustain beyond the COVID period, but they can have a significant impact on the economy and society if these measures trigger systemic changes with long-term impact in the upstream including the changes in the enabling policies and governance environment. Considering the synergies between climate change, human security and development, several interventions have considered holistic approaches emphasising human security and not just focusing on technical interventions. These interventions have relied upon the empowerment of communities and societies. Some of these examples include empowering people to cope with environmental devastation in Uzbekistan;

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developing comprehensive strategies to reduce multiple risks in Vanuatu; partnerships with local communities boost resilience in the face of drought in Kenya; reducing vulnerability improving agriculture, food security and health in Lesotho.

5.3.2

Technology Initiatives

In the past, human security was undermined during the pandemic because of a lack of means to engage the public in various activities. Countermeasures could not be initiated in the absence of timely assistance. The COVID-19, unlike most previous pandemics, has seen the explosion in the technological applications that have enabled the continuation of essential societal functions despite the severe impact of the pandemic on most aspects of societal life (Table 5.2). During the pandemic, drone technologies and 3D printing and service delivery at the doorstep have enabled in sustaining the supply chain of essential goods in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. In Wuhan, the ground zero of the pandemic, robot delivery vehicles were deployed for the first time in China to reduce human contact in delivering medical supply. Vulnerable people in Somalia were reached with assistance by a humanitarian organisation’s E-shop app to assure food security—another essential element of human security. These technologies make it possible to protect people’s lifeline without physical contact remotely. These examples highlight that technology can help sustain health and human security during pandemics. The pandemic has made communication between members of society difficult. Communication of early warning that usually happens through social contacts was severely hampered during the pandemic. The creation of an emergency response platform to announce the early warning and respond to the disaster was possible in Uruguay. Such dual disasters abound during the pandemic in Asia and elsewhere, and these double disasters have stressed the need for local governance and disaster risk management systems. The Government of Japan and UNFCCC joined an initiative to create an online platform to redesign the society to keep the community’s shape at the international level (MOEJ 2020). The initiative was to send a strong message to all the governments not to build back our society with massive GHG emissions but to respond, recover and redesign sustainably to mitigate the climate crisis at the same time. The ministerial meeting was held online on 3 September 2020 with nearly 100 countries representatives, which was a remarkable outcome by using technological measures. Indonesia provides another interesting example. A smartphone app to verify the ‘safe’ drivers and connect with female users was developed to travel safely. After the pandemic started, the app upgraded its service to add a health element in the verification because the ‘security’ for women does not just depend on a reliable driver. Still, a healthy driver equipped with sanitiser and other infection prevention measures was found essential for women’s safety. Other examples of smartphone applications for enabling a safe society were also reported in India (Aarogya Setu) and Japan (COCOA). Such apps have been instrumental in ensuring social

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Table 5.2 Major technological measures to enhance human security while mitigating climate change and pandemics Sr. No. 1

Measure title 3D printing of masks

Country Cameroon

2

Use of drone for medical assistance

Rwanda

3

WFP’s first home-delivery campaign

Somalia

4

Emergency response platform

Uruguay

5

Utilising safe zones as health and safety points for women

Indonesia

6

Robot delivery vehicles deployed to help with COVID-19 emergency

China

Main feature UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is collaborating with the Ministry of Health, Engineering School Polytechnique and the Israeli Embassy to support the 3D printing of masks and respirators for health workers and facilities The company Zipline uses drones to deliver medical products in Rwanda and to bring testing samples to labs in Ghana With the WFP E-Shop app, people can redeem their WFP cash-based assistance online: they fill a shopping cart at participating grocery stores, select home delivery and check out The National Emergency System and the UNDP created the Comprehensive Risk and Impairment Monitor (MIRA) which allows the central recording of information on emergency events Based on a research project ‘After Dark’ conducted by UN Women and Pulse Lab Jakarta, Gojek, one of the leading super apps in Indonesia, safely navigate women and driver-partners, and is now equipped with features to ensure infection-free by introducing preventive measures such as checking drivers and customer’s temperature upon entering the safe zones With a partnership between UNIDO’s Investment and Technology Promotion Office (ITPO) in Shanghai

Reference Government of Israel (2020)

Jerving (2020)

Stablein (2020)

UNDP (2019)

United Nations (2020)

Arthur and Shuhui (2020) (continued)

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Table 5.2 (continued) Sr. No.

7

Measure title

The Platform for Redesign 2020—Online Platform on Sustainable and Resilient Recovery from COVID-19

Country

Japan

Main feature and the Beijing-based White Rhino Auto company, unmanned vehicles were set to work at Wuhan’s Guanggu Field Hospital Minister of the Environment of Japan and UNFCCC Secretary called for a virtual ministerial meeting to gather information on states’ measures for response, recovery and redesign from COVID19 and the data were enshrined to the online platform website

Reference

MOEJ (2020)

Source: Compiled by authors

distancing, regular communication of emergency information and better linking the governments with the citizen. As shown above, many new technologies were developed and deployed during this pandemic to address health, food security, disaster response, climate change mitigation, the physical integrity of women, all of which are important to realise human security. Indeed, the pandemic is a challenge to humankind for survival, but technology will be a key factor to maintain livelihoods.

5.3.3

Environmental Interventions

The Aral Sea, one of the world biggest lakes, has been suffering from the worst environmental disasters that caused it becomes a desert. As results, local people in Uzbekistan are left in various environmentally induced insecurity including decreased crop yield and worsen health condition due to dust storms, lack of water and quality and salinised land-produced food insecurity. As the environmental devastation causes multiple consequences in all dimensions of health, food, economy and so forth, comprehensive measures and coordination are essential, especially with those directly affected poor communities in the area. UN Trust Fund for Human Security has worked with local authorities to ‘local authorities improve the quality of services and infrastructure, resulting in better access to water and sanitation services, basic health care and energy supplies. Support for local communities to improve their livelihoods has boosted productivity on small farms and increased the production’.

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There are comprehensive strategies implemented against risks of existence that called for human security approaches. Such approaches are mainly helpful for communities and countries facing extreme existential threats in the face of climate change. Many small islands in the Pacific are vulnerable to climate change because of the poor resilience of people’s livelihoods against climate risks. The rising sea levels threaten the physical existence of the islands. Comprehensive strategies and multidimensional disaster risk reduction measures are urgently required to build these countries’ resilience, including plans to relocate to distant safer locations without threatening these societies’ social and cultural fabric. Relying on human security and human rights approaches while searching for suitable adaptation solutions can help alleviate some of the negative consequences of potential solutions being offered to the threatened island countries. Environmental governance plays a large role in achieving human security. Notably, there are some reports produced to measure the outcome, which claims some environmental governance systems did not bear as many fruits as expected or made things worse for human security in a particular context (Johnson 2019; Zervaki 2018). Environmental governance initiatives are sustained only when they are supported by strong local partnerships. Local partnerships and networks are vital for ensuring human security and sustainable development as challenges cannot be met by a single country, institution or entity. The application of partnerships and networks in providing sustainable solutions can be found in Costa Rica and Panama, where indigenous people of Panama regularly migrate to Costa Rica seeking work in coffee plantations. The absence of labour protection to migrants predisposes them to a range of threats that could be addressed by building stakeholders’ capacity, including officials, farm owners and service providers (United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security 2019). A similar application of partnerships and networks can be found in the promotion of solutions such as financial inclusion through self-help groups that strengthen the economic resilience of rural women, social security networks, group insurance schemes, early warning dissemination groups for flood and droughts in Asia, etc., and sustain these solutions by providing a robust framework of social support interventions and enhance the security and wellbeing.

5.3.4

Legal Interventions

One of the climate change response measures associated with more legal and legislative manner would be the climate adaptation measures that promote forest carbon sequestration aligned with forest governance arrangements following the REDD+. The UNFCCC (2010, Decision 1/CP.16) in Cancun Agreements announced the guidance for the conservation of forest ecosystems as well as protection of people at risk; therefore, parties were requested to adopt these social and environmental safeguards for protecting the forest resources that provide livelihood to the poor in developing countries. The safeguards ask for the REDD+

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activities to ‘promote and support the participation of relevant stakeholders; respect the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities; and, more generally, enhance ‘social benefits’ (Savaresi and Bouwer 2019)’. The way how to interpret and implement the safeguards follow the domestic law in each state. A notable international law governing human security includes Article 3 of the UN Human Rights Declaration that guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of a person. The advocates of human rights have stressed the need for human dignity and worth. The translation of these normative principles into legally binding laws and rules has been the international community’s major achievement (Boyle and Simonsen 2004). The concepts of human rights and human security have been defined separately, but authors such as Boyle and Simonsen (2004) argue for linking these two concepts, as these two concepts support each other and strengthened the approach taken by international organisations such as the United Nations. The convergence between human rights and human security has taken place over the years. They argued that such convergence has largely contributed to the human rights interventions leading to some of the co-benefits of human security and vice versa. Protection and empowerment are seen as essential elements of human security, that have commonality with human rights goals. With the relationship between human rights and human security established, one can list several human rights laws that can be argued to have human security implications. One such international instrument is Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that guarantees the right to an adequate standard of living for oneself and their family including food, clothing and shelter as well as to the continuous improvement of living conditions (UNHR 1966). The covenant references national security, social security and measures to ensure the protection of the family, health, environment, education, etc., which have strong synergies with human security. The Kathmandu Declaration of the 18th SAARC Summit in 2014 emphasised the climate change impacts and food security issues and the member states agreed to collaborative work to solve the challenges (SAARC 2014; Wijenayake 2018). Here, human security has provided a unified framework for a diverse set of countries in South Asia. Some countries, especially the Global North, e.g. Japan, have successfully incorporated human security concepts into the strategy of overseas assistance to the developing countries. Evidently, human security created a specific pathway to fight poverty and achieve sustainable development (SDG) targets as it provides a unified and cross-cutting framework that appealed to donor and recipient countries. It offered a potent formulation to draw mutual and common interest among diverse stakeholders. Climate risk management provides a holistic approach to address the nexus between human security, climate change and pandemics. Climate risk management solutions combine climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development strategies into a single synergistic solution package. Financial sector forms one of the major areas of climate risk management, where we face limited understanding of how climate change affects the financial wellbeing of the society and what solutions work under what conditions. The climate risk management here

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includes building the capacity of stakeholders to understand the impact of climate change on financial wellbeing, designing financial tools for the vulnerable sections of the society including through inclusive financial products and services and conducting climate risk assessments for the financial sector taking into consideration the cascading and systemic risks. Risk insurance also can be strengthened with updated risk assessments with impacts of multiple disasters. This could have implications for the insurance premium prices and hence a need to identify innovative means of making insurance affordable becomes necessary. Combining health, income and asset insurance could be one of the areas to look into.

5.4

Conclusions

Two monumental crisis have colluded in the form of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the importance of understanding and addressing the systemic risks for sustainable development, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Consequently, several responses were initiated to address the problems of climate change and pandemics. However, a unified framework can make sense of a diverse set of initiatives. The need of the hour is to avoid duplication while enhancing the synergistic actions. Human security principles can provide a unified framework for ensuring diverse goals, including climate change adaptation and pandemic risk reduction. Despite the perceived potential with human security as a policy goal and as a process, it remained a fundamental principle with limited application for most human security discourse. However, the landscape is changing now with more stakeholders see the commonalities and linkages between goals such as human security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown an additional challenge to these goals and questioned these frameworks for their robustness in addressing the pandemic’s vulnerabilities. The chapter has provided some evidence of how various approaches, including pandemic-centric and climate change-centric, can have human security synergies. Though the goals and frameworks associated with climate change and pandemic risk reduction are operating at different timescales, they have co-existed in policies and practices implemented by various stakeholders. This is especially visible in the medium to long-term recovery plans initiated to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter has demonstrated diverse goals can be targeted by a collage of different players’ policies and practices. A range of solutions implemented as a part of climate change adaptation and pandemic risk reduction have significant human security synergies, even though these measures do not cover all facets of human security. Cross-cutting interventions such as promoting community-driven plans to reduce climate change impacts and programmes based on local context to understand multidimensional climate change impacts are found to provide holistic human security benefits that sustain over a longer term.

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With its broad definition, human security can be employed in policy research in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, in other words, with both objective and subjective indicators. Human security research’s methodological evolution has produced significant studies and led to a comprehensive understanding of the multi-layered society. Relatively newly emerging topics are gender-based violence, peer-to-peer violence, workplace violence, arms control and migration. Out of these contexts, migration and human security are a unique and important subject, increasingly relevant to the current demographic status we live where 1% of the global population is displaced. As discussed in the chapter, human security was researched, measured and analysed within certain boundaries, be it sovereign country, state, prefecture, city or community and compared vis-à-vis other entity on the same scale. However, the current global developmental patterns show that measurement of human security as one entity falls short for investigating the insight into situations that societies face daily. Hence, a need to apply human security concepts in a cross-cutting fashion becomes imperative, instead of confining them to geographical or thematic issues. Acknowledgements Authors are grateful for the support received from IGES senior administration in drafting this paper. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support received from the IGES SRF grant, and the financial support by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-1801) and the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-2102) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan.

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Chapter 6

Global Pandemic and Human Security: Using Health-EDRM Risk Assessment Framework to Enhance Technology Support for DRR Emily Ying Yang Chan and Chi Shing Wong

Abstract ‘Biological hazard’ is regarded as a major human security threat to people’s well-being and development. In the era of globalisation and rapid technological development, COVID-19 pandemic once again revealed how an emerging communicable disease might impact not only health but also the socioeconomic ecology of people globally, while the related health risk can be mitigated by the employment of appropriate technology. The chapter examines how the latest World Health Organization Health-EDRM framework (2019) may inform the conceptualisation and assessment of health risks and proposes a Health-EDRM assessments framework for biological hazard. A case study of how health risks and vulnerability associated with home care may be reduced by employing technology in non-standard living context during pandemic and a case study of community resilience and community engagement are also included. The discussion also puts Health-EDRM framework into a human security perspective. Keywords Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health-EDRM) · Biological hazard · COVID-19 · Human security · Risk assessment

E. Y. Y. Chan (*) The Chinese University of Hong Kong, JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong, China GX Foundation, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] C. S. Wong The Chinese University of Hong Kong, JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_6

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E. Y. Y. Chan and C. S. Wong

Introduction

‘Biological hazard’ is regarded as a major human security threat to people’s wellbeing and development. In the era of rapid globalisation and technological advancement, COVID-19 pandemic beginning in late 2019 once again reminded how an emerging communicable disease might impact not only health but also the socioeconomic ecology of people globally. The chapter first provides the background to the COVID-19 pandemic and outlines the recent World Health Organization Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health-EDRM) framework (WHO 2019) for the conceptualisation of health risks in biological hazards. A Health-EDRM health risk assessment framework is later proposed for the assessment of various components of health risk of biological hazards and how technology and innovations can facilitate the assessment process. Sharing many core principles like multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach and a concern over the holistic human well-being in crises, the proposed Health-EDRM framework can complement the traditional human security framework by providing additional focus on risk-based, all-hazards and whole-of-health system-based approach.

6.2

COVID-19 Pandemic as a Biological Hazard

Hazard refers to ‘a process, phenomenon or human activity that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, social and economic disruption or environmental degradation’. Hazard may include ‘the latent property or the inherent capability of an agent or substance which makes the agent capable of causing adverse effects to people or the environment under conditions of exposure’ (UNGA 2016; WHO 2009; emphases added). Biological hazards are those ‘of organic origin or conveyed by biological vectors, including pathogenic microorganisms, toxins and bioactive substances’. Examples of biologically hazardous agents include bacteria, viruses or parasites, as well as venomous wildlife and insects, poisonous plants and mosquitoes carrying disease-causing agents (UNGA 2016). A viral pneumonia of unknown cause was identified in Wuhan, Hubei province, People’s Republic of China in December 2019. As a biological hazard, the virus and the disease caused were officially named as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The World Health Organization (WHO) first declared the biological hazard a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020, and stepped up the global alert by declaring COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020. As the worst biological disaster experienced in the recent past, the unprecedented speed and spread of COVID-19 have affected most parts of the world. As of 28 January 2021, more than 100 million people across 224 countries/territories have been infected by COVID-19, with more than 2.15 million deaths (WHO n.d.). Noted by

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its high transmission ability, COVID-19 gets mainly transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets released during coughing, sneezing or talking and from a contaminated environment contaminated by these droplets (Shereen et al. 2020; WHO 2020a). As a result, keeping a minimum distance between people of at least 2 m and social distancing have been recommended as key public health preventive measures (WHO n.d.). COVID-19 gets distinguished by its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission ability as well and individuals who are asymptomatic or showing very mild symptoms can transmit the virus, which increases the difficulty in transmission control (Bai et al. 2020; Gandhi et al. 2020; WHO 2020a). Older people and those suffering NCDs like cancers, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypertension and respiratory diseases are at a higher risk of developing severe illness, while the case fatality ratio increases with age (Liang et al. 2020; Verity et al. 2020; Yang et al. 2020; Zhou et al. 2020). The resulting soaring attack rate of the biological hazard has created an overwhelming burden on health systems in many countries (Armocida et al. 2020; Black et al. 2020). The lack of effective treatment continues to pose challenges to managing the disease although vaccination programmes have begun in some countries by end of 2020 (Department of Health and Social Care UK Government 2020; Sanders et al. 2020; United States Food and Drug Administration 2020). As an important milestone year for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (the Sendai Framework), and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (the Paris Agreement), the year 2000 was overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only affected the health and economic securities locally and globally but also hindered the achievements of various sustainable development goals. The global COVID-19 pandemic, together with disease outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of Korea and Saudi Arabia in the past decade, highlighted that no country is immune from biological hazards and foregrounding the health sector becomes important in an all-hazard framework of emergency and disaster risk management at national and international levels. There is an urgency to re-evaluate the adequacy of preparedness, drill and response mechanisms against interacting and cascading risks arising from biological hazards, as well as scale-up risk-informed public health actions to reduce biological hazards, exposures and vulnerabilities and build management capacities and resilience to protect communities against health emergencies (Shaw et al. 2020). Disaster risk management planning and response strategies have yet to better reflect the non-linear transition of biological hazards, particularly pandemics, which can emerge in consecutive and overlapping waves and the community must enter a response phase before the previous recovery phase gets completed (Shaw et al. 2020). In fact, a successive wave of outbreaks looks more like a protracted emergency, ‘in which a significant proportion of the population is acutely vulnerable to death, disease and disruption of livelihoods over a prolonged period of time’ (WHO 2017). The non-linear nature of pandemics has further rendered various human populations vulnerable to protracted crises which increase the communities’ vulnerability to the cascading risks of multi-hazard to generate complex secondary hazardous events (UNDRR 2017b). While the WHO Health Emergency and Disaster

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Risk Management Framework to be discussed below has touched on the issue by recommending as follows ‘[h]ealth systems will also be required to plan and implement strategies to support, strengthen and restore local capacities during protracted crises. . .’ (WHO 2019) and response to protracted emergency in general looms large in the WHO Emergency Response Framework (WHO 2017), a huge gap remains in the resilience and preparedness strategy, planning and building vis-a-vis a protracted biological hazard.

6.3

WHO Health-EDRM Framework

The Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health-EDRM) framework is a response to the challenge of the health impact of emergencies and disasters by putting people’s health at the centre of emergency and disaster risk management (Chan and Shaw 2020; WHO 2019). The framework echoes the strong emphasis of the Sendai Framework on the need to build resilient health systems through integrating disaster risk management into the provision of healthcare at all levels and ‘to enhance cooperation between health authorities and other relevant stakeholders to strengthen country capacity for disaster risk management for health’ (WHO 2019). The International Conference on the Implementation of the Health Aspects of the Sendai Framework (held in Bangkok of Thailand in 2016) resulted in Bangkok Principles, which call for including the health sector in disaster risk reduction by developing or revising multi-sectoral disaster risk reduction plans and policies and recommend greater participation of health sector representatives in disaster risk reduction platforms and committees at all levels. The Health-EDRM framework developed thereafter emphasises the centrality of prevention, preparedness and readiness, together with the more traditional focuses of response and recovery, to save lives and protect health, as well as the need to collaborate in a multisectoral way. The vision of the Health-EDRM framework is the ‘highest possible standard of health and well-being for all people who are at risk of emergencies, and stronger community and country resilience, health security, universal health coverage and sustainable development’, and the expected outcome is as follows ‘countries and communities have stronger capacities and systems across health and other sectors resulting in the reduction of the health risks and consequences associated with all types of emergencies and disasters’ (WHO 2019). The framework originates from the recognition of the current fragmented approaches to different types of hazards, the over-emphasis on reacting to instead of preventing hazardous events and preparing properly to be ready for response, and gaps in coordination across the entire health system and between health and other sectors have come together to hinder the ability of communities and countries to achieve optimal development outcomes, including those for public health. As a first step, the framework aims to remedy the problems by putting forward a common language and a comprehensive approach for adaptation by all health and non-health

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actors working to reduce health risks and consequences of emergencies and disasters. The comprehensive approach emphasises assessing, communicating and reducing risks across the whole risk reduction continuum of prevention, preparedness, readiness, response and recovery, and building the resilience of communities, countries and health systems. Derived inter-disciplinarily from risk management, emergency management, epidemic preparedness and response, and health systems strengthening, Health-EDRM helps align policies and actions for global agendas of health security, disaster risk reduction, humanitarian action, climate change and sustainable development (WHO 2019). Guided by the health-centred, comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach, Health-EDRM functions are organised under the following components: (1) policies, strategies and legislation to define the structures, roles and responsibilities of governments and other actors for Health-EDRM and strengthening Health-EDRM capacities; (2) planning and coordination to achieve effective coordination mechanisms for Health-EDRM planning and operations; (3) human resources planning for staffing, education and training across the whole spectrum of Health-EDRM capacities from prevention to preparedness, readiness, response, recovery and resilience building at all levels; (4) financial resources; (5) information and knowledge management in risk assessment, surveillance, early warning, information management, technical guidance and research; (6) risk communications across health and other sectors, government authorities, the media and the general public; (7) health infrastructure and logistics focusing on safe, sustainable, secure, and prepared health facilities, critical infrastructure (e.g. water, power), and logistics and supply systems; (8) health and related services; (9) community Health-EDRM capacities focusing on strengthening local health workforce capacities and inclusive community-centred planning and action; and (10) monitoring progress towards meeting Health-EDRM objectives and evaluating the implementation of Health-EDRM strategies, related programmes and activities (WHO 2019). As a multi-sectoral effort, Health-EDRM requires joint planning and action by government ministries of health and non-health, the national disaster management agency, the private sector, communities and community organisations, supported by the international community. The core outcome of the Health-EDRM is a strengthened health system with a strong emphasis on community participation, and resilience built for effective prevention, preparedness, response and recovery for all types of hazardous events including biological hazards. As a small step, the WHO HealthEDRM framework proposes priorities for action in the following areas: (1) surveillance, early warning and alert systems; (2) emergency preparedness for response across all hazards, the health system and all sectors; and (3) resilient, safe, secure and sustainable hospitals and health facilities that can continue to function in emergency or disaster situations (WHO 2019; WHO Regional Office for the Western Mediterranean 2010; WHO, HPA and Partners 2011).

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Health-EDRM Assessment Framework

The design of Health-EDRM policies, strategies and programmes requires strategic health emergency risk assessments, assessments of capacity and resilience across Health-EDRM functions and reviews of existing plans and past experience (WHO 2019). Health emergency risk assessments can be conducted by dissecting risk into its four components under the disaster risk formula, namely hazard, exposure, vulnerability and manageability/resilience (Chan 2017; Rand 2008; Shaw et al. 2020). Appropriate technology and innovations can then be employed to support relevant assessment tools and related surveillance, early warning and alert systems for disaster risk reduction.

6.4.1

Biological Hazard Assessment

The risks of biological hazards within health-centred and prevention-focused HealthEDRM framework can be assessed using three approaches based on different purposes: (1) strategic health risk assessment catering to pre-event phase and helping in planning for prevention, preparedness, readiness, capacity development and medium- to longer-term risk monitoring and evaluation; (2) rapid health risk assessment for planning response interventions based on risk associated with detected events; (3) post-event health risk assessment for planning recovery and updating and strengthening the overall risk management system. For the purpose of HealthEDRM risk assessment and management, biological hazards can be classified as existing and emerging biological hazards based on available knowledge and differentiated into non-emergency and emergency biological hazards based on their potential to cause a pandemic. Health risk assessment of existing biological hazards with potential of resulting in an emergency (for example, diseases like malaria, cholera, etc.) can be pre-emptively undertaken due to the availability of ample knowledge on causes, transmission, treatment protocols and potential impact. Pro-active Health-EDRM planning for prevention, preparedness, readiness, capacity building and surveillance can be made based on strategic health risk assessments as a result. In contrast, for emerging biological hazards like COVID-19, conducting strategic health risk assessment becomes difficult due to the uncertainty involved. Nevertheless, risk assessment of emerging biological hazards at the interface between animal, human and ecosystem remains possible since 75% of emerging pathogens are zoonotic (Taylor et al. 2001; UNDRR 2017a; WHO 2003). While conducting a strategic risk assessment may not be very meaningful nor most urgent once an outbreak emerges, a rapid risk assessment becomes useful to inform immediate measures of mitigation and prevention of secondary disasters. Consistent with the multi-disciplinary approach of Health-EDRM, a rapid health risk assessment is better conducted by a diverse team of experts like epidemiologists, virologists, biotechnologists, health practitioners, surveyors, decision analysts and

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disaster risk reduction specialists. The multi-disciplinary team can provide crucial integrated information such as mode and medium of transmission (air-borne, waterborne, surface contact transmission, soil-borne, vector-borne, animal to human, ventilation, drainage and sewage system, etc.); phases of transmission like appearance of disease, cluster transmission and community transmission; incubation period; rates of transmission, severe symptoms, recovery and mortality; differential impact of hazard for different age groups, genders, pregnancy, disabilities and prevailing health conditions; occupational vulnerability; chances of reoccurrence for a recovered patient; possibility and frequency of pathogen mutation; and existence of detection protocol, treatment and vaccines. The cooperation, coordination and information sharing of a multidisciplinary hazard assessment team can be facilitated by emerging real-time information and communication technologies like web conferencing and webinars.

6.4.2

Exposure Assessment

Non-emergency and emergency-causing biological hazards also vary in their scale of exposure and impact on different sectors: exposure to the former is mostly limited to affected individuals, households, communities and occupations, while exposure to the latter is often extensive in reach and duration. Direct exposure of people to biological hazards often occurs via various modes of transmission of the concerned pathogens across a geographical area and can thus be assessed based on transmission-related factors identified during hazard assessment. The exposure thus varies from hazard to hazard as different biological hazards involve different modes and mediums of transmission and impact different segments of the community diversely (depending on gender, age, comorbidity, pregnancy, disabilities, occupations, etc.). Various factors like dosage, frequency, duration and location of exposure play critical roles assessing populations at risk of exposure of transmission. Depending on the phases of transmission of the biological hazard, dosage and frequency of direct exposure may vary across time and location and thus may require scenario planning and modelling for predicting and tracing the exposure. In addition to mode of transmission, indirect exposure to a biological hazard may vary based on the strategies and measures deployed to control the transmission. Compared with the complete lockdown of an area, a partial lockdown and continuation of essential services and economic activities may exhibit a very different pattern of exposure to a biological hazard for different groups in a population. A scenario planning exercise employing different containment and control strategies and measures in different phases and waves of transmission can help officials predict geographical zones, populations and sectors at higher risk of exposure in various types of locations (urban, suburban, rural, geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas). Based on the results of this exercise under short-, medium- and long-term scenarios, together with the biological hazard assessment, multi-sectoral inter-disciplinary teams can estimate potential pattern of exposure of individuals of different

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background to prioritise geographical areas, populations, infrastructure and services for containment, quarantine and response measures. Big data and AI technologies and stronger computational power now make modelling and tracing possible and efficient.

6.4.3

Vulnerability Assessment

With a strong emphasis on community participation, the Health-EDRM framework provides a useful starting point in vulnerability assessment by highlighting the need for communities to be in the driving seat as biological hazards usually disproportionately affect those who are the most vulnerable, including the poorest, women, children, people with disabilities, older people, migrants, refugees and displaced persons and people with chronic diseases (WHO 2019). However, in addition to vulnerable groups and sectors pre-identified and known in many hazards (e.g. older people, people living with disabilities, children, women, and marginalised ethnic and cultural minorities), the impact of biological hazards on groups of diverse and changing characteristics can vary and it might be difficult to identify all vulnerable groups in advance, particularly for emerging emergency biological hazards. The changing control and containment strategies and measures employed in different phases and waves of transmission may also affect the vulnerability of different groups and sectors. All of these should be taken into account in vulnerability assessment for biological hazards. The vulnerability assessment of populations, functional sectors and social systems to biological hazards may vary depending on the nature of the biological hazard. Guided by the multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach of HealthEDRM, the assessment of vulnerability thus requires consideration of all relevant characteristics of these various populations, sectors and systems and their interaction with different biological hazards. These vulnerability-affecting characteristics may be grouped as health-linked (e.g. immunity status, co-morbidity and experience of previous outbreaks); occupation-linked (e.g. occupations with high exposure like first responders, caregivers and healthcare workers; occupations with human-animal interface like butchers in zoonotic biological hazards); public health-linked (e.g. nutritional status, water and food systems and sewage and waste disposal systems); socioeconomic conditions-linked (e.g. overcrowding and suboptimal living conditions, poverty, employment status, income sources, social and financial protection systems, migrants, social stigmatisation and respect for human rights including health rights); behaviour-linked (compliance with regulations and control measures, hygiene practices and safety precautions); and environment-linked (natural and built environment favourable for the development and transmission of the biological hazard).

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Case Study: Alleviating Vulnerability by Technology for Marginalised Groups During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people living alone face additional challenges, especially for the marginalised and vulnerable groups like older people who had to stay indoors, which might be alleviated by employing new technology. In a New Zealand example of community-based intervention, the government promoted a ‘buddy system’ for people living alone to overcome isolation, which involved one person who lives alone buddying up with another person living alone in their community to visit each other but no one else through the initial lockdown period (The New Zealand Herald 2020). Assisted by technology, the buddy system could be stepped up to enhance home care for vulnerable people living alone during the COVID-19. Online platforms could be set up and portable devices used to assist people requiring home care but living alone to team up with a suitable buddy in the community. For example, a resident in Dubai of the United Arab Emirates offered assistance on her social media pages to older people and people suffering from chronic conditions and having special needs in the pandemic, which eventually developed into the online initiative UAE Buddy system to connect people willing to help with those who need help during the COVID-19 (Nag 2020). The widespread adoption of social distancing and lockdown measures across the world has shown the critical role information and communication technology could play in enhancing communications, maintaining a sense of togetherness and mental health and assisting home care at different levels, and thereby help build community resilience and reduce vulnerability particularly among marginalised groups. Governments should thus develop effective digital technologies and disseminate portable digital devices to support the use of information and communication technology by the community, particularly the marginalised groups, to combat the pandemic (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2020).

6.4.4

Manageability and Resilience Assessment

Manageability refers to the organisational response to the hazard and the ability of the population to respond to it. Assessment of manageability should locate and assess existing resources, plans, infrastructure and services related to detecting, responding to and managing the biological hazard. These biological hazard management capacity can include diagnostic facilities, testing facilities, tracing mechanism, specialised hospitals treatment capacity, availability of staff protective equipment and supplies, trained essential service providers, existing biological hazard protocols, public awareness and hygiene behaviours. Manageability gaps and loopholes should be identified in the assessment to ensure the implementation of an effective and efficient management of a biological hazard. Scenario planning

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corresponding to different phases of transmission can help assess the effective capacities of the resources needed for these phases of transmission and subsequent waves of transmission. Scenario planning should consider aspects such as the ability of critical and essential services to operate with limited human and technical resources and partially disrupted supply chains. The effectiveness and efficiency of the scenario planning can be greatly enhanced by the technology and innovation of computer-aided simulation. The 10 components of Health-EDRM functions identified by the WHO Health-EDRM framework outlined in the previous section provide systematic and comprehensive guidelines for manageability assessment to ensure no essential functions and capacities are neglected in the assessment. Beyond the more response-focused concept of manageability in the original risk formula, resilience highlighted in the Health-EDRM framework is preventive and interdisciplinary, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of the capacity of a community prior to biological disaster. Morton and Lurie (2013) suggested community resilience being comprised of physical resilience (i.e. the functionality of community buildings and infrastructure systems after an event, as affected by building codes, engineering standards, land use planning and environmental threats), physically and psychologically healthy individuals, organisational resilience of a community’s governance structure and its public and private sector entities, economic resilience, environmental resilience, as well as social capital and community engagement. Two recent studies underlined additional factors making a big difference to various countries’ resilience and response variations in the COVID-19 pandemic. Capano et al. (2020) highlighted similar experience in dealing with the outbreak and the subsequent readiness as important factors in various countries’ performance of COVID-19 response. Asian countries had similar experience in dealing with SARS, H1N1 swine flu and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and their public health and financial systems had the capacity to deal with emerging biological hazards. These countries were aware of their actual capabilities and the potential risks of an emerging respiratory disease, making them highly vigilant and able to implement control measures with greater swiftness and steadfastness. On the contrary, while European countries and the United States had efficient healthcare systems, they had little or outdated pandemic experience since the countries were minimally impacted by the SARS and swine flu earlier in the twenty-first century. Some countries might start with confidence in their ability to cope with emerging infectious diseases, but actually lacked the capacity they needed. Their responses tended to be slower, later and weaker than those of more experienced countries. For countries with both insufficient experience and preparation, such as some South American countries and Italy, they initially downplayed the outbreak, but were surprised to learn of the true nature of the pandemic and to realise their unpreparedness. They were unresponsive and heavily affected. The study of Yan et al. (2020) pointed to the importance of institutional arrangements and cultural orientations. Institutional arrangement refers to the systems and processes in which countries constitute authority, attention, information flows and

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relationships in addressing policy problems. They can be formal government structures or informal norms. Power being centralised or dispersed forms one of the key differences among various countries. Centralised institutions emphasise on the authority of the central government, which made implementation of top-down prevention and control strategies easier. On the contrary, decentralised countries share power among different levels of government, with actual decision-making authority being in the hands of local authorities. Such a decentralised system could easily lead to policy deadlock and multi-level government bargaining could limit the choice of prevention and control strategies. Yan et al. (2020) compared China, France, Sweden and Japan, where centrally centralised countries like China and France were more likely to impose stringent response measures across the country, while countries with disperse power, such as Sweden and Japan, tended to be more suggestive than coercive and have looser restrictions on individual freedoms. In addition to institutional arrangements, governments’ coping strategies also depended on citizen compliance and voluntary support. With reference to the pandemic response, the different orientations of national culture could be exemplified in the strength of social norms and degree of sanctioning within societies. Asian countries, such as China and Japan, are influenced by Confucian culture and have a ‘tighter’ and more collective culture. General societal consensus exists on compliance with the containment and closure measures to restrict the freedom of individuals in order to curb the spread of COVID-19. In contrast, countries with ‘looser’ cultures have a lower tolerance for these interventions. French and Swedish cultures see individuals as independent and autonomous entities, preferring to respond to the pandemic through self-regulation and self-responsibility. Although both France and China had governmental measures to restrict individual activities, China’s response measures relied more on authority-based coercive forces and social consensus and emphasised popular solidarity while the French response was more legal-based. Sweden’s response was a ‘nudge’ strategy designed to change behaviour to steer people in a particular direction, not to prohibit individual choices. This Nordic model was very different from the continental model. Although the Swedish parliament passed an emergency law allowing the government to impose stricter restrictions on its citizens, its strategies remained quite different from other continental countries. The Swedish government, for example, used persuasion rather than law enforcement to make nationals to use masks in crowded places, and schools could choose to suspend physical education classes for students over the age of 13 rather than mandated them. When many European countries had locked down several times, the Swedish government was still very restrained in its use of power. For Japan, which has a unitary government system, local level governments have a significant amount of autonomy. Hence, a boost strategy was adopted to foster people’s competence in regard to making choices by issuing basic policies documents and guidelines to provide information. With the necessary institutional basis in place for more effective use of policy tools to reduce the impact of the hazard, a community could have stronger resilience against biological hazards. Policy tools also need to be adapted to local cultural

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orientation, which makes public cooperation and voluntarily compliance easier. The implementation of standard measures should thus adapt to the national conditions. Case Study: Community Engagement and Resilience Building: The Case of COVID-19 in Urban Slums in Hong Kong In early 2021, confirmed COVID-19 cases were found in old buildings in the various inner city areas in Hong Kong during the fourth waves of outbreak in the city. The government issued mandatory quarantine and coronavirus testing orders for residents of these buildings. Later, lockdown measures for up to 48 h were introduced in some areas with clusters of these old buildings to facilitate coronavirus testing. The efficacy of these measures was partly hindered by the difficulty of obtaining a complete list of residents. Furthermore, the pandemic also revealed that the inner city areas were full of unsuitable dwellings of poor hygiene and sanitation. Although the inner city’s sanitary environment was suboptimal, this area provided basic shelter for vulnerable grassroots, many of whom were older people and migrants. Community engagement can be a means to manage and mitigate the vulnerability to biological hazards in these inner city areas by building community resilience. In addition to strengthening the functionality of community housing infrastructure, such as how planning and regulations of buildings and facilities can be beneficial to control a biological hazards, such as a pandemic, community engagement should get strengthened and social capital built up, so as to achieve better coordination of resources for clothing, food, housing and transportation and to assist people in different situations in the community to obtain correct and useful information during a biological hazard. With mutual trust and understanding, residents may be more willing to take the initiative to participate in and implement the government’s pandemic prevention and control strategies and engage in building management and maintenance of public health-related facilities, such as drainage and fire-fighting equipment. On top of the Health-EDRM framework (WHO 2019), community engagement was reiterated in a WHO guidance issued in May 2020 (WHO 2020b). Community engagement forms an important part of the biological hazard containment measures because it can rapidly disseminate public health information to community members, mobilise and coordinate various stakeholders in the community to participate in the control measures, and enhance the community’s resilience to prepare for and respond to biological hazard. Contacting the owners of the flats in these old buildings creates a problem because some owners have entrusted real estate agents to follow up on leasing matters and have no connection with the community. Repair orders from government departments issued to the flats cannot reach non-residing owners, making reduction in hazards and vulnerability difficult. Resident organisations (continued)

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can help connect residents to maintain buildings and keep good hygiene together, as well as unite residents by developing a sense of responsibility for the place they live, and pro-actively seek solutions to hazards and vulnerability in the community. The engagement and participation of the community can effectively reduce anxiety and insecurity during a biological hazard like COVID-19 pandemic. Residents will be more willing to pay attention to public health measures once they have developed a sense of belonging to the community and understood that observing the public health measures is a matter for the general public. The engagement of the community with healthcare professionals will also allow constant revision of public health intervention strategies within the community and create health programmes to meet the needs of residents and communities. Community organisations and networks have proven far more adaptable and responsive than outside agencies in responding to biological hazards (Morton and Lurie 2013). The difficulty of building community resilience in urban slums gets aggravated by the lack of relevant public health guidelines for handling COVID-19 such as those for home care (Chan et al. 2020a, b). Yet, while inner city may often be unfavourable community resilience environment, injection of public health awareness and consideration into the community’s daily life and building a community with mutual trust become important so that the community can respond quickly in the face of hazards.

6.5

Discussion: Health-EDRM and Human Security

Human security is an important theoretical and practical debate affecting health and emergency and disaster risk management at the international level in recent years. Human security has seven dimensions, namely economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political. The human security approach to emergency and disaster asks for the consideration of three main areas: (1) a multidisciplinary human security platform; (2) assessment of needs and identification of vulnerabilities; and (3) thresholds for action and measurement of human security. These conceptual developments help break down cross-disciplinary barriers and prompt a holistic consideration of well-being. Human security analysis provides an important tool to highlight how health problems in emergency and disaster might be addressed within a human security paradigm (Chan and Southgate 2014). Human security and Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management share many core principles and are both concerned with human well-being in crises (WHO 2007, 2019). Table 6.1 shows the comparison of the two frameworks. While sharing with Health-EDRM the multidisciplinary nature, people-oriented approach, a focus on prevention, and a comprehensive emergency management from prevention to recovery, the human security approach’s corresponding assessment

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Table 6.1 Comparison of ‘human security’ and ‘Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management’ frameworks Human security Health Emergency and Disaster Risk framework Management framework The four characteristics of human security People-oriented Inclusive, people- and communityapproach centred approach Universality Multidisciplinarity

Early prevention

Multisectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration

Public health tools used in practice Health promotion models, behaviour change models, measurement of social capital, health service delivery models, health equity audit The pathway of care model, the primary care approach, stakeholder analysis Health education and coaching, subsidisation, taxation and legislation

Prevention-based (3 levels of prevention: primary, secondary and tertiary) The seven key components of human security Economic security Focusing mainly on the health secHealth needs assessment of vulnertor, but noting the need for collabo- able groups, health impact assessFood security ration with many other sectors which ments, quality of life scales Health security make substantial contributions to epidemiology and biostatistics Environmental reducing health risks and security consequences Personal security Community security Political security The three phases Comprehensive emergency management of Health-EDRM of human security Prevention Prevention, preparedness, readiness Emergency/major incident plans, business continuity plans, training and exercising Response Response Health needs assessments Rebuilding Recovery Recovery plans Additional key principles of Health-EDRM Gaps in the human Risk-based approach security concept All-hazards approach Whole-of-health system-based approach Ethical considerations

tools with their wider range of outcome indicators could improve the allocation of resources for addressing preparedness and service gaps associated with biological hazards (e.g. mental health needs of patients and health workers), as well as the overall efficacy of the humanitarian medical response to address other emerging health needs. At the same time, Health-EDRM framework can complement the human security approach by providing additional focuses in risk-based, all-hazards and whole-of-health system-based approach, as well as ethical considerations. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the importance of

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ethical considerations in patient care, policy and research under the Health-EDRM approach, as discussed by Chan et al. (2019). All communities are at risk of biological hazards including those associated with infectious disease outbreaks, with potential devastating health, economic, political and societal consequences. Reducing the health risks and consequences of biological hazards is vital to local, national and global health security, as a crucial dimension of human security, and to build the resilience of communities, countries and health systems. Sound Health-EDRM policies and measures can work hand in hand with a human security approach to safeguard development and implementation of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement and other related global, regional and national frameworks (WHO 2019).

6.6

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the WHO Health-EDRM framework for the conceptualisation of health risks in biological hazards. The analytical framework helps delineate the various aspects of Health-EDRM and can be employed in assessing various components of health risk of biological hazards and guide the use of technology and innovations for disaster risk reduction. The chapter also describes how Health-EDRM framework can complement the traditional human security framework to biological hazards by going beyond health security to provide additional focuses on risk-based, all-hazards and whole-of-health system-based approach.

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Chapter 7

Those Above Poverty Line: Development and Vulnerability to the Pandemic Nimruji Jammulamadaka

Abstract COVID-19 pandemic has posed severe challenges to human security with unprecedented vulnerabilities to food, health and income insecurities. In India, as elsewhere, interventions to redress these insecurities have focused on the most vulnerable, those who are extremely poor and fall below the poverty line. This chapter looks at a section of people who are not the extreme poor but nevertheless experience food, health and income insecurity. This group lies just above the poverty line, are excluded from usual welfare targeting and benefits provided by the state, and, represents the gains of development interventions over the past two to three decades. The pandemic has adversely impacted the livelihoods of this group and sent them into a downward spiral of decline into poverty with economic and psychological consequences. The trauma of decline impacts the psychological resilience of these individuals. From a policy perspective, arresting such decline into poverty requires a dynamic and emergent classification of population to target relief interventions at these groups as they are invisible in routine and static categories of welfare targeting. Keywords Above poverty line · Pandemic · Vulnerability · Decline into poverty · Human Security

7.1

Introduction

Human development, well-being, and security have been on the global agenda ever since World War II. For the first time in 1994, The Human Development Report brought together the ideas of human development and human security under one

N. Jammulamadaka (*) Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_7

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umbrella.1 The Agenda 2030 of the Sustainable Development Goals2 reiterated the commitment. In recent years, the human security approach as articulated by the United Nations has emerged as a multidimensional approach for developing “more resilient societies where people are safe from chronic threats such as chronic poverty, hunger, disease, violence and repression, and protected from sudden disruptions in their daily lives” (HSU 2016: 5).3 The approach streamlined and adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2012 recognises seven different types of insecurities—economic, food, health, personal, community, political, and environmental; and suggests five principles for addressing these insecurities. These principles state that development and security-enhancing initiatives need to be people-centred, comprehensive, context-specific, prevention oriented and promote protection and empowerment (HSU 2016). The year 2019, as the 25th anniversary of the Human Development Report, could have been an appropriate moment of stock-taking and reaffirmation of the complex relationship between human development and achieving these various kinds of human securities. However, the events transpiring later in the year overshadowed everything else. COVID-19 (SARS-Cov. 2) was first reported in China during November/December. Neither the virus nor the timing of the infection was like anything the human race had encountered before. Riding on transnational flows of globalisation, in a matter of 2–3 months, the world plunged into the despair of a pandemic. The pandemic posed widespread human security challenges to the survival, livelihood and dignity of people. With obvious health security challenges, COVID-19 has also been responsible for at least two other kinds of human security problems—food and economic insecurity (HSU 2016). While the other kinds of insecurities such as personal or community insecurity may also be interlinked to the pandemic, the above three—food, health and economic insecurities are the most pressing and immediate challenges. Medical and pharmaceutical community raced against time to find ways of treating the infection; governments around the world resorted to one policy measure; shutting down the economy to prevent spread. Locking down the economy and restricting movement were used to “flatten the curve” of infections, as the health care infrastructure was overwhelmed, in developed and developing countries alike. With the onset of lockdowns, what had until then remained a health care problem mutated into a human security/vulnerability problem. Around, the world, one could frequently hear the refrain “either die from infection or die from hunger” from both poor and policy experts alike (Chen et al. 2020; Mishra and Rampal 2020). With the sudden freezing of economic activity, livelihoods, incomes and access to welfare

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https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/news-centre/speeches/2019/25th-anniversary-ofthe-human-security-concept.html#:~:text¼Echoing%20human%20security%20principles%2C% 20the,SDGs%20to%20promote%20human%20security. 2 https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda 3 https://www.un.org/humansecurity/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/h2.pdf

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was impacted, leading to grave food insecurities (Mishra and Rampal 2020). These lockdowns and socioeconomic disruptions were expected to increase global poverty for the first time since 1990 (Sumner et al. 2020b). Projections showed the number of people living in poverty could increase by 420–580 million (Sumner et al. 2020a). These estimates quickly underscored the need for social security policy interventions by governments to aid the populace in coping with the effects of pandemic lockdown-slowdown. Governments in different parts of the world responded through various types of stimulus and welfare packages. Economic depression and vulnerabilities brought on by the pandemic, on the one hand, are slowing down progress on development goals, but more importantly, they have been threatening the development gains achieved over decades. Development practitioners and policy experts understand that “. . .human development is difficult when the minimum conditions for human security do not exist. . .people concentrate their energies on basic survival, safety and protecting livelihoods and have little or no opportunity to . . .engage in the kinds of activities that will improve their overall quality of life.” (Busumtwi-Sam 2008: 15–16). Consequently, COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have singularly impacted human well-being and security, primarily, health, food and income security (Owen 2004) leaving vast populations vulnerable. Like in many other countries, lockdowns in India too have led to loss of livelihoods, declining income, reduction in food consumption and indebtedness among other things (Kesar et al. 2020). A Niti Ayog (2020) report found poverty in India to have grown since 2018. Given the reality of increasing poverty, any attempts to intervene and disrupt the decline into poverty requires understanding the complex dynamics of the security–vulnerability–development relationship involving individuals, families, communities and eventually nations. In this chapter, I provide an illuminating window of such individual and family dynamics albeit in a modest way, in some often taken for granted communities. The communities in question are from India, a country that has seen the strictest and the longest lockdown in the world (BBC News 2020). The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. I first describe an overview of pandemic and relief management in India. In the next part, after a brief discussion on the method, I provide narratives of four individuals who form the crux of the chapter’s exploration of the pandemic impact on the human security and vulnerability of those who are not the extreme poor. In the third part, I discuss the cases and conclude with a few insights and implications of these case studies.

7.2

Overview of Pandemic and Relief Management in India

COVID-19 pandemic was round the corner and was evident in India by late February–early March 2020. The government responded by restricting international travel and quarantining such travellers. However, within a matter of weeks, with case numbers inching up, and health care infrastructure being unprepared for the pandemic, government resorted to a complete and total lockdown from the 24th of

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March 2020 with just four-hour notice. A severe lockdown was enforced till May 31st, 2020, which was followed by gradual easing of restrictions on movement of people and economic activity at the national level. The easing of restrictions has given way to several local lockdowns and containments of activity of varying intensity and duration. The sudden and complete lockdown created a humanitarian disaster as millions of daily-wage labour and migrant labour were stranded with neither food nor shelter. About 90% of India’s workforce is employed in the informal sector and was rendered vulnerable by the pandemic lockdown (Sengupta and Jha 2020). Hundreds of thousands of jobless (and consequently displaced4) migrant workers and their families walked hundreds of kilometres to the safety and security of their homes in the hot summer months depending upon nothing but the charity of communities along the way. In the immediate aftermath of the lockdown, several private and community kitchens were started to provide food to the poor, daily-wage workers and displaced migrant labour. Eventually, state governments provided services for their transport. Nevertheless, the conditions had been very dire, and at least one group’s, i.e. migrant labour’s miseries had grabbed media headlines and even prompted suo-moto intervention by the Supreme Court of India asking the government to address their needs. The sudden shutdown, on the one hand, highlighted the need for stimulus packages to kickstart an economy brought to a grinding halt (BBC News 2020). On the other hand, the shutdown also threw the spotlight on the most vulnerable populations of the country (Kesar et al. 2021; Sengupta and Jha 2020), the informal sector workforce and the poor. Data highlights the lockdown having increased unemployment to 25% at least in India (CMIE 2020) and GDP as expected had shrunk. The government began its relief operations in several tranches. Central government announced an unprecedented relief package of approximately USD 282 billion distributed over a period of time and a variety of initiatives (KPMG 2020). One of the first relief measures aimed at the vulnerable poor was to provide free food grain through the public distribution system, direct cash transfers to the poor, insurance for frontline workers, subsidised cooking gas, etc. under various existing welfare schemes and new ones. Following the public outcry on migrant workers, various packages had been designed for unskilled daily-wage workers, construction workers, farm workers, etc. Claims by the government aside, others estimates demonstrated all relief provided by governments in India (state and centre) to be about 0.2% of GDP. The relief was extremely less compared to the nations in Western Europe and America of about 7.5% to 10% of GDP (IMF Tracker n.d.). Critics argued that large parts of the relief package (s) were relabelling of routine welfare measures under “COVID relief” and constituted an insignificant intervention, a case of too little, too late. The equivalent amount of relief per person becomes even lesser taking into account the population and average national income of India. The government also announced certain revival support for various industries. Under what were claimed to be relief

4

Often migrant workers are provided accommodation by the employers at the place of work itself.

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measures, poorly debated sweeping changes in legal and institutional frameworks governing industry, agriculture, finance, labour and a host of other sectors were introduced. The economic and welfare impacts of these changes remain questionable at best and unclear at worst. A second critical issue highlights these relief measures being accessed only by groups such as those below the poverty line (BPL), holders of Jan Dhan Accounts, slum dwellers, holders of NREGA cards, etc. Furthermore, many who were eligible and in dire need could not access such relief owing to government’s insistence on particular kinds of identification papers. For instance, documents proving the eligibility of migrant workers to relief goods, when they were en-route to their homes were often not on their person, but in their home villages, consequently impeding their access. At other times, the digital systems and apps launched were beyond the navigation capabilities of such workers. Supplementing the above government interventions, civil society strived to broaden the scope of attention to various other vulnerable groups—women who were witnessing an increase in domestic violence, home-based workers and artisans who had lost their livelihoods and were adversely impacted by the lockdown. Interventions were initially aimed at providing relief. They focussed on the distribution of food packets and dry rations. With a growing realisation of the slow pace of economic revival, interventions broadened beyond food relief. The focus of civil society organisations shifted to rehabilitating stalled livelihoods amongst impacted groups and communities (social media appeals by Traidcraft Services India, which works in this space). One of the aspects with minimal attention in discussions around pandemic’s impact and human development has been the differential impact of the pandemic on different strata of society. An academic analysis of impact of pandemic’s income shocks has of course underlined that different strata experience vulnerability differently. However, the point about relative vulnerabilities and relative securities requires our attention if we are to decode the impact of pandemic shock on human security and development. In describing the intricate relationship between human development and human security, Busumtwi-Sam (2008) explains how the threats posed to human security make people vulnerable resulting in their material deprivations and exclusions. According to the deprivation–vulnerability approach, three different kinds of threats are assessed based on their imminence, suddenness and severity; and, vulnerabilities get determined by exposure and sensitivity to the threats, as well as, the extent of resilience the individuals, families and communities carry. By this approach, the human security threat posed by the pandemic becomes sudden, severe and imminent, making the pandemic a large-scale threat even in theoretical terms. Similarly, vulnerabilities produced by the pandemic can also be expected to be serious, given the high degree of exposure of the population to the pandemic shock. However, communities are likely to differ in their sensitivity to the shock and the resilience they possess. Building on the idea of differences in sensitivity and vulnerability, I argue for the one category of people, who are not the extreme poor, but live a little above the poverty line, and are likely to be highly sensitive to the impact of the pandemic.

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Economic analysis suggests extremely poor as being least sensitive to the shock. Because of their poverty status, the group has had access to welfare measures even before the pandemic and this access, however patchy, continues to serve them even during the pandemic. Analytically, the perverse fact that the extreme poor have not been integrated into the wider economy moderates their sensitivity to the shock (Buheji et al. 2020). Expectantly, the shock would be most acutely felt by those who are not the extreme poor, by those who have managed to just rise above poverty levels—these are the people who would be highly sensitive to pandemic shock and would fall back into poverty and experience material deprivations and exclusions. The shocks to human security/vulnerability in terms of income, food, shelter, access to health and education would be most drastically felt by this group as their employment, livelihood and standard of living get directly tied with the functioning of the economy. Thus, experts tell us to distinguish the human security impacts on the extreme poor and, those just above the poverty line. However, relief and rehabilitation interventions of government and civil society do not seem to recognise this differential impact. Broadly speaking, relief and social security measures undertaken both by civil society and government remained focussed on the extremely poor and vulnerable. The oversight is particularly troubling since just above poverty line group does not have access to either government welfare measures or civil society support even during the pandemic. They are on their own, either in the normal course or during the pandemic. The implication of being on their own is in not having access to various social means of resilience. The pandemic makes this group highly vulnerable both because of their sensitivity and their poorer resilience. Understanding relative vulnerabilities suggests that ensuring development gains of the last couple of decades are not forfeited requires disruption of the falling back into the poverty, of those just above the poverty line. These interventions should enable such people to at least stay where they are. However, pandemic relief interventions are not aimed at this. Over the years, development practitioners, policy makers and scholars have figured out how to help move people out of extreme poverty. While we understand the mechanisms of growing out of poverty to some extent, our understanding of the dynamics of falling back into poverty under human security threats remains a little sketchy. If development practitioners and policy makers are to disrupt such falling back, insights and knowledge about the mechanism of falling back spirals are required. Through my case studies of four individuals (and families) who are “not the extreme poor”, in their family context, I suggest that the dynamics of decline and falling back are difficult and the individuals and families concerned do not automatically adjust to lower incomes. The relatively better economic status they had attained in the pre-pandemic era inserts them into formal and higher socioeconomic circulations. Such circulations then entail significant, economic, social and psychological consequences for those unable to continue their participation. These consequences are unlikely to be visible in the case of “extreme poor” they being peculiar to the “not so extreme poor”. The resilience that had enabled them to work towards rising out of poverty and find a better quality of life, fails them in the pandemic. The psychological trauma arising from the threat to livelihoods and health makes the

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experienced material deprivation that much more traumatic. “Falling back” I suggest is different from being “left behind”.

7.3

Method

The question I ask here is “How does falling back happen?” In my understanding, these questions are exploratory since neither has such a shock on such a scale been experienced before nor has it got adequate focus of popular media or experts. Consequently, I adopt a qualitative exploratory approach. I use narratives and stories as the means for understanding “falling back” for the following reasons. Stories and narratives (Boje 1991a: 106) are the “preferred sense-making currency”. They help us understand subjugation and deprivation, because “people tell stories to . . . to ask for an interpretation and to give one” (Czarniawska 2000: 2). The narrative methodology helps us understand how events are experienced in the everyday lives of people (Gabriel and Griffiths 2004). Narratives are sources of knowledge- cultural, social, historical and also personal, through which subjects locate themselves in sociohistorical-economic contexts. Given the multidimensional impact of the pandemic, narrative methodology suits the context because they help me capture complex experiences along with their social and cultural meanings (Gabriel 2000). My focus is not merely to represent impacts on not so poor, but to provide a deeper empathetic understanding of the impacts of the pandemic and their struggles in the hope of, somehow, interrupting the dynamics driving their falling back. The narratives I am seeking to understand are more in the nature of what (Boje 1991b: 4) Boje described as antenarratives, i.e. narratives in the “flow of experience” before the retrospective imposition of a teleology, structure and closure on them. As Boje explains, antenarrative is the answer to the question “what is going on here?, it is subject’s experience of “the ambiguity of sense making and guessing as to what is happening in the flow of experience” (p. 3). The sample of the subjects interviewed forms another important methodological issue. The sample is limited to antenarratives from four people with whom I got access and could uncover not just the socioeconomic facts but the emotionality and psychological quality of the experience. I acknowledge not pursuing data saturation or other related logics in selecting the cases. Instead, my case selection has been guided by the openness and honesty of the relationship built with the subjects over time, which gives access to their more private concerns thereby providing more illuminating narratives. Case study research permits a small sample size as the focus is on in-depth understanding of the critical issues of the research through exploring information-rich cases (Patton 2002: 46), rather than a statistical generalisation of the findings (Yin 1994). As Yin explains, theoretical understanding forms the focus of the analysis. I acknowledge scholars like Yin being related to a more positivist school of qualitative research, whereas scholars like Boje are related to narrative traditions of

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qualitative research (Rosile et al. 2013) and, thus, paradigmatic differences of ontology exist between them. For instance, the question of sample size assumes significance in the positivist approach, whereas narrative methodology renders the sample size unnecessary, given the ethically and ideologically privileged status of the subject’s experience and reality. In spite of this, I believe the two can be usefully brought together as has been done here for pragmatic reasons.

7.4 7.4.1

Antenarratives of Subjects Meena

Meena is a widow in her early 40s and mother to three sons. She works as a domestic caregiver and helper. She learnt caregiving and assisting patients on the job. The oldest son is married and separated from the family. Meena heads the household, the second son (19 years) and youngest one (17 years) live with her. They work in tailoring and do other odd jobs and fend for their needs while also contributing to the household income from time to time. Her second son had developed a relationship with a teenage (15 years) girl from the neighbourhood. Shortly before the pandemic, the need to avoid a scandal pushed both the families (boy and girl) to perform a quick marriage ceremony, denting Meena’s meagre savings. After marriage, her son and daughter-in-law rented accommodation and started living separately. Meena owns a small parcel of land, on which she has built a small one-room dwelling. She fights off regular attempts to deny her and her sons their rightful share of ancestral property, both by her natal family and her in-laws. While in-laws desired to take away the house, her natal family refused to give her a share of ancestral land. Notwithstanding the constant fights around this, Meena has been able to forge a comfortable standard of living for herself and her sons, equipping her home with an LPG stove, refrigerator, TV, cycle(s) and other similar things. The family was also able to spend on leisure activities such as out-of-town picnics, etc. from time to time. Meena’s net family income and access to property has meant that she does not feature in any BPL lists of the government or have access to welfare schemes. She was somehow able to access a subsidised cooking gas connection. One of the first impacts of the pandemic lockdown was both her sons losing their jobs. She now became the sole breadwinner of the family, even as her income was impacted due to reduced working hours. She had the responsibility of feeding not two but four mouths as her son and daughter-in-law moved back in with her. She could not disown the new bride’s responsibility because the girl also came from a poor family. But, this was only the beginning of her struggles. With the lockdowns continuing for several months and people being forced to stay at home, boredom soon gave way to the young girl becoming pregnant. Being unable to access medical facilities, neither the girl nor the family could terminate the pregnancy. With lockdown easing, Meena had to run from pillar to post to ensure her daughter-inlaw got the requisite medical attention. Hospitals refused her attention as the girl’s

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marriage was illegal. Meena had to deal with threats from police and imprisonment due to underage marriage. After a few months, her younger son was able to find work intermittently, earning about Rs. 80–90 per day. Her second son and the prospective father rarely found work. And when he did, he used the income for his leisure activities. Meena had to resort to borrowing from her employers to keep the cash flow going at home to ensure food and medical care were available. The unprecedented Amphan cyclone had destroyed her house and she had to dip into whatever was left of her meagre reserve and income to repair this house in time for the baby’s arrival. Luckily, she became eligible for a cyclone ex-gratia of Rs. 20,000 provided by the state government. She was able to use this and her savings to partially repair the house. The baby’s birth marked a large and sustained raise in expenses, for delivery and post natal care. The mother being quite young was not fully able to take care of the baby, forcing Meena to not only do household chores single-handedly but also take care of the baby, all of which created enormous stress on her. She could not be present at work at the proper hours. She ended up working longer hours to take care of the needs both at home and at work. Her expenses were rising constantly, debts increased, even as her income continued to stagnate. The new father, still jobless, did not participate and share in the financial burden. Intermittent work paid only for his leisure needs. Meena resisted the constant imploring by her sons to borrow money to maintain a certain standard of living. With the stress telling on her health, Meena was not sure she could bear the additional burden of a loan. Her resistance meant more fights at home as she was perceived as the unwilling head of the household. She fell severely ill for a month and eventually Meena was diagnosed as a diabetic. Meena recounted, “On Wednesday I could finally meet the doctor and get the medicines for my diabetes. I was so exhausted by the time I reached home at 10.00 pm. There was a lot of waiting at the doctor. And then to see that at home they had not even cooked dinner. They were waiting for me to come and do it. I was so dejected and depressed. I then cooked for them and served them. I went to bed without eating. This is my family”. Meena was overwhelmed by the loneliness she felt in managing all the demands on her. “I don’t know how I am going to manage. The medicines and doctor fees for diabetes itself now costs over Rs. 1500 every month. In Rs. 6000, what all will I do. Whom will I feed? And then the baby? What will I eat? We used to eat potato a lot since potato is cheaper. Now I am told I cannot eat potato. I can’t sleep at night. My sons asked me to renew the dish TV subscription. I said no. Luckily, my employer told me not to worry about repaying some of the loan. I am now pleading with my younger son, not to jump into marriage. To wait until he can afford raising a family.”

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Pradeep

Pradeep is in his 40s. He and his wife have a daughter and a son. They had been living in a joint family with his mother and younger brother near Delhi. Having lost his father at a young age, he learned how to drive and supported the family by driving since his teen years. His first break was given to him by his then-employer, who obtained a bank loan on his name but gave the vehicle to Pradeep for driving. Pradeep worked hard and repaid the loan. Owning such assets and having an income stream meant Pradeep had no access to any government benefits or welfare schemes as he was above the poverty levels. Since the first vehicle, using his entrepreneurial skills, he increased his vehicle fleet by expanding the customer base through word of mouth. Together with his brother, he was managing a fleet of nine vehicles (autos and cabs) for school transportation. He had purchased five of these vehicles on loan recently and had been quite regular with his loan repayments garnering for himself a good credit history with the banks. Meanwhile, his wife and daughter had moved to Allahabad for her daughter to access subsidised education in a government institution. He continued to stay near Delhi along with the rest of the family, by renting accommodation at Rs. 8000 per month. Through hard work, they had built a decent standard of living for themselves—they owned durables such as television, refrigerator and washing machine. His son went to an English-medium school. Things were moving pretty comfortably for Pradeep and he hoped to be able to provide those opportunities to his son, which he did not have for himself. . . until the pandemic. The pandemic dramatically changed his life. With the indefinite closure of schools and colleges, all his vehicles and school transportation businesses suddenly came to halt. From being a taxpayer to the government and a citizen with an extremely good credit rating, he had become an absconder being chased by the same financial agencies for loan instalments he was unable to pay because of lack of income and closure of business. All this while, he struggled to pay the rent for his home, his son’s fees and managing his day-to-day expenses. He describes his psychological distress in terms of the lack of opportunity despite having the willingness and capacity to work extremely hard. The only help he received during the times of distress included one or half month extra conveyance fees as support when the schools closed. With the easing of lockdown, he got occasional jobs that hired him as a driver. The meagre income provided was hardly sufficient to cover their living expenses, let alone other commitments. His debt continued to rise though. At the time of talking to him, his rent was overdue for 8 months! While his landlord had not pressurised him for rent because of their relationship, he already felt obligated and pressurised to pay back. The amount was adding up to a significant value. While the government-owned banks had been somewhat lenient in the pandemic and restructured his loans, private banks and other lending institutions had been extremely non-cooperative and humiliated him to recover the loan. They had him blacklisted for non-payment and had his vehicles seized and re-possessed by the

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authorities. He had to bribe them to get his vehicles back. He had invested all his savings along with borrowings from friends and relatives, as the down payment for the vehicles and had them modified to safely carry children. Therefore, he could not redeploy them for goods transport. Repossession of the vehicles would mean that he would be losing all the investment. He was now worried about not having saved anything for himself and the family and reinvesting everything into the business. He worried about how he would buy a laptop for his child whose classes were starting in April. He might have to borrow again from his friends and relatives to ensure that online education for his son did not suffer, and his aspirations were not consumed by the tragedy brought on the family by COVID-19. The worries also affected his health and the health insurance company declined to cover the hospital expenses citing COVID-19 as a common tragedy. He was disheartened that the insurance company did not keep its promise and yet he renewed the coverage because that was the cheapest one available and was the least he could do to keep his family secure. He describes his intense psychological pressure due to the increasing debt from his friends and family, along with the bank reminders, which get harsher and harsher every passing day. These are the same financial institutions whose representatives had come after him to request him to take the finance for his vehicles when the times were good. From being a poor person, he had experienced socioeconomic mobility, learnt to stand on his own feet, and aspired for a better life. But all he felt now was failure and humiliation, from having to constantly borrow and being unable to repay. The debt trap he was sinking into in the impossible effort to maintain a certain standard of living and protect his children from the pandemic shock had turned him hopeless and depressed. While he remained thankful for the support and opportunities he had in his life, he found the psychological pressure of his current situation with no signs of resolution in the near future insurmountable.

7.4.3

Prabhat

Like Pradeep, Prabhat too earned his livelihood as a driver. He used to work both as an on-call driver, and as a monthly hire. He owned a small piece of ancestral land. He lived with his wife and son in a rented accommodation in the city. Prabhat’s land made him ineligible for any welfare and benefits from the government. His grown son was on the lookout for regular employment and in the meantime, worked at a store as a store assistant. With the income they had between himself and his son, they were able to maintain a decent standard of living. He had purchased a motorcycle on a loan. With the coming of the pandemic, on-call jobs dried up for Prabhat, including the monthly hire, and his income came to a standstill. He had to borrow month after month to cover the family’s living expenses. Meanwhile, the finance company that covered the motorcycle purchase pressurised him for loan repayment. He ended up

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having to borrow even for the loan repayment. He recounted. “When I borrowed 3000 from my earlier employer for buying groceries, she made a bank transfer. Before I could withdraw this money from the ATM, the money was automatically deducted for loan repayment through an electronic clearing service. I did not know this till I went to the bank. I did not know how I was going to buy groceries that day. I had to go back to my employer again and listen to all the things they had to say and their questions to borrow Rs. 1500 more”. During the pandemic, his son proposed a love marriage with a girl he had met. Both the boy and girl’s families had to accommodate this sudden demand and incur attendant expenses. Prabhat now became responsible for providing for the daughterin-law as well. The son’s earnings did not cover even the groceries expense. In the absence of any income for several months, Prabhat let his motorcycle insurance, satellite TV subscription and phone connection all lapse. Borrowing money month after month, disturbed him mentally and interfered with his ability to think and act clearly. He got hit by a vehicle while crossing the road, the treatment bills adding to his financial distress. Following constant pressure at home, he had to borrow again to renew the motorcycle insurance and pay for the fuel for his son to commute to work. He cycled to work when he found it intermittently. Towards July, he was again able to secure work as a driver on a full-time basis with a monthly payment. However, he was unable to attend to this properly, being mentally disturbed and worried about all the debt he had accumulated and his means to pay the debt back. Even as he struggled with these worries, and had not yet repaid the motorcycle loan, his family expected him to borrow afresh to purchase a vehicle for the son to get into goods transport as a livelihood. This expectation was reiterated as his responsibility as the son was now married and he had to help him stand on his own feet. Prabhat finally succumbed to all these pressures and found himself constantly depressed, unable to concentrate on his work or driving. He absented himself from work frequently. He said, “Accha nahin lagta, kaam karne ka mann nahin lagta” (I don’t feel good. I don’t feel like working). After being hauled up by his employer for tardiness, he left the job, the one source of regular income he had in a fit of frustration. Even though his employer had already waived a significant portion of his debt on humanitarian grounds, he was left with a lot more to repay. He reverted to the precarious income of the pandemic times still searching for work while he yearned for the standard of living and mental peace, he had attained previously.

7.4.4

Sanjay

Sanjay dropped out of studies in his 12th class to take care of the family after his father passed away in 2003 with cancer. The small parcel of land his family owned had been sold to provide for his father’s treatment. With no means of putting food on the table, Sanjay looked for a job and found one at a Yoga Research Institute for Rs. 1000 per month and started working as a trainee in physiotherapy. As they had their own house, the amount was just enough for their food. Having this house also

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meant they could not access any government welfare benefits. After a few months, he started taking house calls for physiotherapy charging Rs. 50 per session for such calls, in addition to his work at the Yoga Institute. He worked from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. His early experience of struggling to secure treatment for his father taught him the value of being prepared for emergencies and he began saving a small amount every month from whatever he earned. After a few years, he joined another institute to get more training in physiotherapy and Ayurvedic massage by paying Rs. 60,000 his entire savings till then. After successful completion of the training, he was offered a job in the same institute with a salary of Rs. 18,000 per month. He continued the job for a few years and in the meantime also obtained another certificate in Ayurvedic therapy. With the newly acquired certificate, he approached his office for a hike in salary. However, they neither gave him a promotion nor hiked his salary. Meanwhile he got married and was blessed with two daughters. Determined to provide the education he did not have to his children, he left the employment and joined an e-commerce platform as a freelance massage therapist a year before the pandemic. He continued his savings habit and also bought some health insurance for the family, lest the experience with his father repeat. Things seemed quite comfortable for Sanjay, his struggles seemed to be in the past. . . until the pandemic. With the pandemic, he did not earn anything for 5 months. He used up all his savings to survive the pandemic. Initially, the e-commerce platform had provided an interest-free loan of Rs. 15,000. He was asked to repay it after the pandemic had ceased. Even after lockdown restrictions eased, work only trickled. Most people were afraid of getting therapy done owing to the physical contact intensive nature of the job. To protect himself and his clients, he had to invest in buying protective equipment, which was denting his already meagre income. The stress he experienced from the pandemic was not just economic. As his work involved close physical contact, he was constantly worried for his health and of his family. As the sole breadwinner of the family, he did not have a choice but to risk himself. Nevertheless, the desire to protect his family made him live in a make-shift tin shed just outside his house, to avoid contact with his family and small children. This led to heart-wrenching cries from the kids wanting to play with the father. As he was the only earning member in the family, he had to take the hard decision to protect his family from destitution. But, the emotional stress felt while keeping himself distant from the family was sometimes uncontrollable. He was slowly coming to terms with the situation, with the unlock conditions improving day by day until the second wave hit. “Now, with the second wave of COVID-19 and the emerging conditions god know how things will. . .”.

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The Stories These Narratives Tell

The narratives of the four individuals and their families provide a window into how they have experienced the disruptions caused by the pandemic. From the narratives, I am able to identify, two main dimensions of “falling back”, namely the dynamic of decline and trauma of decline. I discuss both below.

7.5.1

Dynamic of Decline

The dynamic of decline, we notice, is not a simple case of falling back. Instead, the dynamics of the decline reflects the difficulty of the individual and family to scale down their consumption and financial commitments in the face of less or no income. This difficulty, sometimes, comes from the increasing family needs (such as marriages, childbirth, ill-health, etc.). Interestingly, the financial implications of marriage and child birth are not things that seem to have bothered the young family members much, unlike the patterns found in upwardly mobile middle-class families, where marriage and child birth are delayed in the pursuit of financial security. For comparison, the mean age of women at first birth for OECD nations is above 30, whereas the same in India is 21 years in 2017 (OECD Report 2017; Statista n.d.). Without depending upon government welfare provisions, these individuals had worked their way into the circulations of the formal economy and built for themselves a standard of living many others aspire towards. Their engagement with the formal economy often gets reflected in the consumption of white goods such as TV, refrigerator, phones and purchase of vehicles on loans, medical and life insurance, entry to private schools, etc. Through all these actions, they had committed themselves to certain future payment obligations that could not be immediately scaled back. In addition, some of these commitments exposed them to the harsh and ruthless side of the formal economy such as harassment for loan repayment. As individuals with limited understanding of the formal economy, they also could not effectively utilise the redressal or adjustment mechanisms offered in the formal economy, such as incorporating a business formally to avoid personal guarantees or seeking police protection from harassment. Secondly, these individuals had acquired the ability to withstand short-term shocks to their incomes, such as a month or two. They were able to withstand short-term shocks because of small quantum of accumulated savings or the ability to raise a short-term hand loan from employers, acquaintances and friends. But, their highly leveraged situation in pursuit of a better life made them more vulnerable to pandemic shock. They had spent all their savings either for consumption and family needs or livelihood enhancement. And investments in business expansion and skill enhancement could not yield returns during the pandemic period. The prolonged nature of the shock made their savings insufficient.

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Thirdly, their inability to scale down their consumption quickly was also because of family and social expectations around maintaining their standard of living. Evidently, in all the instances family expected the primary breadwinner to continue to deliver on previous consumption goods. The social pressure on helping the son settles down, providing for new additions to the family, etc. Having clawed their way out of poverty over several years and having attained a certain standard of living, reputation and social status, the family and community expectations that accompany this rise out of poverty push them into maintaining an illusion of a standard of living. This desire to be seen as successful at beating poverty pushes them into a debt trap. These pressures and constraints on quickly scaling down consumption force them to resort to taking loans. In the continued absence or decline in income, seeking debt soon forms a trap. The accumulating debt becomes an overwhelming, insurmountable obstacle in their lives, impeding their chances of launching a comeback, having significant psychological consequences. Within the context of indebtedness their resilience, i.e. “their capacity to resist contingency ex ante, cope with and/or recover from its effects ex post” (BusumtwiSam 2008: 20) gets severely comprised by the prolonged nature of the pandemic’s income shock. The material deprivations produced by the income shock gradually worsened, pushing them into a debilitated state (financially, physically or both), making their fight back so much more impossible and insurmountable. With the pandemic literally wiping out their life’s work, no end in sight and nothing to fall back on, their life stories have now become about a sense of failure, helplessness and inability to provide for the basic needs of the family and falling back into poverty.

7.5.2

Trauma of Decline

The individuals we have spoken about experience the trauma of decline largely by virtue of their being the sole or primary breadwinner but being unable to provide for the family. They feel lonely and helpless and in spite of having the willingness to work hard do not see a path to the future. This trauma often gets experienced both physically and mentally. Physically, even if they have not been infected by COVID-19, because of high stress levels, their health starts failing them leading to disease and accidents. Their mental health and psychological well-being get adversely impacted as well. While we are not in a position to diagnose the impact in a clinical sense, the narratives demonstrate them being overwhelmed by helplessness and hopelessness. The depressed feelings they experience get intense enough to interfere with their ability to act rationally such as in the case of Prabhat. While Busumtwi-Sam (2008) invokes the idea of resilience in more sociological terms, resilience can be read as both a sociological and a psychological resource while preserving the model’s explanatory value. The psychological resilience that had served them well in their upward climb out of poverty previously fails them now. Reasons being unlike before they are not starting from a zero-debt stage, but

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from diminished capacities—both health and financial. Their indebtedness and income uncertainty combined with poor health and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness compromise their social and psychological resilience differentiating “falling back” dynamic from being “left behind”. Their resilience also takes a beating because, they are unable to access family, community and kinship networks of support. At this time, the family becomes an exhausting demand rather than a, supportive mechanism helping the primary breadwinner cope with the income shock wrought by the pandemic. The sense of failure they experience in asking their families to adjust and compromise to the new realities of low or no income, at times paralyses these individuals. Also, the inability of the family to understand the need for reducing consumption makes their task much more difficult. Furthermore, these individuals had found some form of upward mobility and improvement in the standard of living through hard work and resilience utilising the opportunities that came along their way. In getting ahead, in a way, they had broken ranks with their communities. Whether it was Pradeep’s status as a business owner or Meena’s status as working woman, the rank had alienated them from having close relationships within the extended kinship network. In the pandemic, when things became worse, these strained relations prevented them from leveraging the social security offered by kinship networks.

7.6

Insights and Implications

We discuss below some of the implications of the stories presented above. Our first insight highlights that in times of a pandemic with sudden and sustained threats to human well-being in the form of food, health and economic insecurities, relying on static, historical categories of poverty and welfare recipients are of limited use. The impacts of the pandemic while broadly foreseeable are also quite dynamic and emergent. Following the prevention-oriented and context-specific principles of the human-security approach outlined by the United Nations, therefore, requires policy to identify and develop categories of the population for providing protection and relief interventions on a dynamic basis. The fact that none of the four individuals and families could access any government benefit, or had even received the attention of civil society points to the invisibilities produced by static categories in volatile situations such as the pandemic. Given that a pandemic is an exceptional event, using routine and static categories and classifications of population groups to assess human security needs has limited value. Static categories exclude groups who are newly vulnerable due to the pandemic. Static categories appear to be more suited for responding to, planning and implementing programs for addressing enduring and relatively stable human security and development challenges. COVID-19 pandemic, in contrast, has been a sudden and unprecedented human security emergency. Under such sudden emergencies, food, health and income insecurity are intricately interconnected and interact to deepen each of these. Categories need to be dynamically constituted following the “people-centred” principle of human security. This

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principle “enables highly localised, and disaggregated analyses, thereby helping to reveal the “real” situation of individuals and communities, and allowing for a deeper understanding of how communities and social groups experience different types of threats and vulnerabilities” (HSU 2016: 8). A second insight pertains to the way we understand deprivation and human vulnerability in the human security perspective. For instance, the model proposed by Busumtwi-Sam (2008) identifies three ways of assessing threats to human security, namely imminence, suddenness and severity. The narratives here suggest, durability of the threat also forms an important mechanism of how a threat presents itself. All these four people were able to withstand the sudden, severe threat caused by the sudden lockdown. However, the prolonged duration of the lockdown and economic decline has threatened them. A third insight emerges from posing a hypothetical counterfactual. Why were they unable to cope by relying on community exchanges as usually done amongst the poor? Literature highlights the poor often coping with their poverty and developing resilience by relying on community support, which not only enables them to develop some self-esteem but also saves them from material deprivation. I believe, in the narratives their getting ahead in the pre-pandemic phase weakened their community support system and thus made access much more difficult in times of need. Going back to the community in a sense carried a tinge of failure with it. Last but not least, existing research underlines the importance of resilience in coping with insecurity and striving for development. Psychological resilience has been found very important (Ebersöhn 2017) in coping with and getting out of poverty. Given that the pandemic seems to have dented the resilience, we also need to understand how a diminished resilience can be built back up, because mere monetary support may not address their trauma. Understanding the processes contributing to positive development under stress can assist in the development of resilience (Chandler 2012) and the interventions for these processes must go beyond the technical means of intervention (Ungar et al. 2013).

7.7

Epilogue

Interviewing subjects for the chapter has been an emotionally exhausting exercise. Many subjects of this category of not the extreme poor were reluctant to speak about their troubles because of a sense of preserving their pride and reputation. Some of the others were willing to speak, but their narrations were tear-filled and frequently carried mute appeals for immediate help. My inability to provide immediate assistance, beyond what I had already done made me feel like a profiteer seeking to benefit out of someone’s pain. The emotional experience was in some ways similar to the photographer who shot the enduring photo of Sudan’s famine where a vulture was waiting for the child to die. Given this emotional experience and the brutal second wave of the pandemic under way, I have refrained from reaching out to any more subjects. The people I report here have been known to me for some time and I

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have been able to assist in some ways, reducing my moral discomfort a little even as I use their narratives.

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Chapter 8

Urban–Rural Linkages and Their Implication to Human Security in Pandemic Time Vibhas Sukhwani and Rajib Shaw

Abstract Evident through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation, the wider impacts of pandemics stretch far beyond the immediate and devastating loss of human lives. Beyond the health crisis, the pandemics often turn out to be a crisis for human security, as the unprecedented movement restrictions disrupt the lives of all people and their freedom to live with dignity. The core issues pertaining to limited healthcare capacities, job losses, economic slowdown, etc., also bring forth a range of inequity issues for urban and rural populations within a regional space, which are closely interlinked through spatial and sectoral linkages. While the geographically dispersed rural populations often depend on their urban counterparts for access to emergency services, they are often disproportionately impacted by a crisis situation due to the persisting connectivity gaps and socioeconomic barriers. Several such experiences have also been made during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which call for revisiting the contemporary developmental planning from human security perspective, so as to safeguard the survival, livelihood, and dignity of the diverse urban and rural populations. This chapter highlights the key lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation and offers a forward-looking perspective on strengthening urban–rural linkages for consideration by the policymakers. Keywords COVID-19 · Pandemic · Urban–rural linkages · Human security

8.1

Introduction

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a respiratory illness caused by the novel form of coronavirus called as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was first detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Characterized by symptoms like fever, cough, and shortness of breath, the disease

V. Sukhwani (*) · R. Shaw Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_8

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mainly gets transmitted by contact with infectious material or infected individuals (like through respiratory droplets). After the communicable disease swiftly spread to several countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on 11th March 2020 (gFSC 2020; Dwinantoaji and Sumarni 2020). Until third March 2021, the pandemic had already affected 192 out of 195 countries, wherein more than 114 million cases were confirmed worldwide, and more than 2.54 million deaths were reported (JHU 2021). While the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic continue to unfold, its scale and severity are reported to be unprecedented. To contain the spread of the virus, countries around the world have taken significant measures, like strict lockdowns, tightened border controls, enforced social distancing and quarantine, closing of schools, etc. (Djalante et al. 2020; Izumi et al. 2020; Shaw et al. 2020). The resultant slowdown in global trade has caused substantial economic contraction, probably worse than the 2008 financial crisis. In reference to the World Bank datasets, Krisnadi (2020) highlighted the impacts of COVID-19 as multidimensional, like on education and healthcare. CCSA (2020) emphasized how the pandemic has also taken an enormous toll on human lives and livelihoods, transforming the way of working, communicating, travelling, etc. Remarkably, the “Global human development measured through education, health, and living standards” may decline for the first time after its introduction in 1990 (UNDP 2020). For long, a disease spread has been viewed solely as a public health concern (Walker and Novogrodsky 2006). However, time and again, the outbreaks of diseases, epidemics, and pandemics have raised consequences for human lives, property, and well-being. Liu (2009) and Udeh and Amadi (2020) discussed about these issues in reference to several earlier outbreaks like the outbreak of the Black death from 1346 to 1353, the Spanish Flu of 1918–1920, new influenza A (H1N1) in Mexico 2009, etc. Fukushima (2020) underlined that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is also becoming more of a human security crisis, as the ability of people to live peacefully and with dignity, and free of fear, has been severely affected. Although the definition of human security continues to be subjected to policy and academic debates, its importance has now increasingly been recognized in regard to the transnational nature of nontraditional security threats like pandemics. While the notion of national security is more focused on the safety of a country, the virus clearly does not respect national borders, military powers, or economic capacities in its transmission, especially in the current era of globalization. Resultantly, the focus of security needs to shift toward the human dimension, as it recognizes the multifaceted dimensions of human safety, human rights, and well-being (Udeh and Amadi 2020). While revealing the gaps and vulnerabilities in existing healthcare infrastructure, the COVID-19 pandemic has also displayed high levels of vulnerabilities of individuals, households, and human communities. Several studies from different parts of the world have highlighted the COVID-19 implications on human security, covering diverse aspects of food insecurity, poverty, and conflicts (Cordaid 2020; Chukwufumnaya and Oghuvbu 2020; Islam 2020; Majee 2020; Oriola and Knight 2020). The virus does not differentiate between the class, status, nationality, race, or

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gender, however, Milani (2020) stressed on some individuals, communities, and nations being more vulnerable as compared to others. The varying levels of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, and the pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities lead to disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on various groups like rich and poor, urban and rural, developed and developing nations, etc. Like for instance, the regional and local impact of the COVID-19 crisis has been highly heterogeneous around the world. Still, Woodhill (2020) highlighted the rural poor in middle- and low-income countries being particularly at risk due to high poverty levels, high share of population, decline in remittances, and limited response capacities. As such, the strict containment measures, supply chain disruptions, resource shortage, etc., disproportionately impact their well-being and livelihoods. Thus, this chapter provides greater awareness about the varying implications of pandemics on urban and rural populations at local level. As the urban and rural economies within a regional space are interdependent, intertwined, and complementary (Akkoyunlu 2015), the varying spatial and sectoral urban–rural linkages also have complex ramifications on human security during pandemics. Urban–rural linkages basically refer to the complementary and synergetic functions and flows of people, goods, services, natural resources, capital, information, technology, etc., between the urban and rural areas (Tacoli 1998; Douglass 1998). Like for example, the urban areas mostly serve as the center of specialized services (healthcare, education, etc.) for the surrounding rural areas. However, during any emergency situations, rural populations regularly encounter accessibility barriers due to greater geographical distances and lower population density. The delays in receiving emergency care in sparsely populated areas or the poor provision of services across space put many rural and remote rural residents at a disadvantage. Several such experiences have also been made during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (Floss et al. 2020; Kumar et al. 2020; Larkins et al. 2020; Phillipson et al. 2020), which call for revisiting the concepts of human security in developmental planning. The importance of strengthening urban–rural linkages and prioritizing human security has also been recently recognized through the global policy frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. However, limited understanding of how the urban–rural linkages overlap with the human security issues during pandemic situations remains. Although few studies have earlier addressed the human security risks through pandemics and natural disasters (Jimba et al. 2011; Glasser 2016; Hilhorst et al. 2013), few have researched about the intricate implications arising from the urban–rural interconnections. Thus, the chapter typically underlines some key learnings from the ongoing COVID-19 situation, which would provide a basis to fight against the future pandemics. This chapter comprises five sections, including the Introduction (see Sect. 8.1). Section 8.2 lucidly delineates the core concept of “human security” and its varying components. Section 8.3 provides an overview of the urban–rural linkages and the implications of COVID-19 pandemic, the human security aspect of which is discussed in Sect. 8.4. Section 8.5 summarizes the key lessons from the chapter and underlines the way forward.

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Overview of Human Security Concept

The ideas of human well-being, security, and dignity can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ philosophers (Bambals 2015). However, the concept of “human security” gained popularity and development only after being introduced in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 1994 Human Development Report (Altman 2020). Since then, the concept has continued to evolve in academic and policy debates. Figure 8.1 highlights the year-wise number (until the year 2020) of research documents (articles, conference papers, etc.) on Scopus database (the largest abstract and citation database of multidisciplinary literature) for the open search query on “human security.” Apparently, the scientific literature on human security has exponentially increased after the 1994 Human Development Report. Furthermore, Fig. 8.2 illustrates the subject area-wise categorization of these research documents, wherein the major focus disciplines are seen to be “Medicine” and “Computer science,” and the disciplines of Social and Environmental Sciences are seen to have received comparatively less attention. UNDP (1994) underscored that human security has two main aspects, first, safety from chronic threats like hunger, disease, and repression, and second, protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in daily life patterns—be it in home, in job, or in community. The individual being the referent object of human security is widely accepted (UNESCO 2008), contrary to the long prevailing state-centric approach. UNDP (1994) defined seven key individual centric components of human security (the impacts on all of which are apparent during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis) as follows:

Fig. 8.1 Growing significance of human security research. (Image source: Authors)

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Fig. 8.2 Subject-area-wise categorization of research documents related to human security. (Image source: Authors)

1. Economic security: The security mainly relates to an assured basic income for all people through a productive and remunerative work or through some publicly financed safety net. 2. Food security: Beyond the overall availability of food in the world, food security relates to the continued physical and economic access to basic food for all people at all times. 3. Health security: Instrumental to human survival, livelihood, and dignity, health security intends to safeguard a minimum protection for all people from diseases and unhealthy lifestyles. 4. Environmental security: To maintain healthy physical environment for human survival, the security aims to mitigate the environmental threats, and avoid the deterioration of natural ecosystem. 5. Personal security: It relates to protecting people from physical violence, including from violent individuals or substate actors, from domestic abuse, or from predatory adults.

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6. Community security: The security relates to protecting people (like minority ethnic groups) from the loss of long-established relationships and values and from sectarian and ethnic violence. 7. Political security: The security aims to ensure basic human rights of all people in the society are honored, and the human right violations are avoided during any circumstances. The General Assembly resolution 66/290 further emphasized that “human security is an approach to assist Member States in identifying and addressing widespread and cross-cutting challenges to the survival, livelihood, and dignity of their people. Specifically, the resolution calls for a people-centered, comprehensive, contextspecific, and prevention-oriented responses that strengthen the protection and empowerment of all people (UN.org 2021).” However, despite the significant recognition in international development and security studies, the concept of human security still continues to be seen as a complex and contested term without a universally agreed definition or framework. Behind the slow progress of its institutionalization at policy and governance levels, critics have pointed several shortfalls like ambiguous meaning of the concept, the lack of affiliation to specific scientific discipline (also apparent from Fig. 8.2), lack of analytical frameworks and methodologies, etc. (Bambals 2015).

8.3

Urban–Rural Linkages and Disproportionate Impacts of Pandemic

Urban and rural communities are geographically dispersed, yet they have always been dynamically interdependent and interconnected through diverse social, economic, political, and environmental linkages (as highlighted in Fig. 8.3). Like, the rural populations depend on urban areas for university education, healthcare, credit, farm equipment, etc., the urban populations are also reliant upon the rural areas for food, water, manpower, etc. Urban–rural linkages basically refer to these spatial (like flow of people, goods, money, technology, knowledge, information, and waste) and sectoral (like flow of agricultural products to urban areas, and manufacturing goods to rural areas) flows across space, which link urban and rural communities (Tacoli 1998). In the recent decades, new forms of such interdependencies have emerged along the urban–rural interface as a consequence of rapid urbanization, labor market flows, improved road networks, technological advancements, and production flows. While more than half of world’s population (around 55%) today lives in urban areas (UN DESA 2019), the expanding city boundaries and changing population dynamics are also transforming the resource use and migration patterns. The traditional distinctions between urban and rural settlements (like population density and economic activities) are now increasingly blurred, and many intermediate forms of human settlements ranging from small towns to peri-urban areas have come into

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Fig. 8.3 Schematic overview of urban–rural linkages within a regional space. (Image source: Authors)

picture, as illustrated in Fig. 8.3 (von Braun 2007). Cities and their wider region are now viewed as a complex system where hierarchy of cities and their peri-urban and rural areas form a network for maintaining the reciprocal flow of resources. In that context, the functional regions refer to any territorial area characterized by high frequency of intraregional economic interaction, such as intraregional trade in goods and services, labor commuting, and household shopping. The immediate impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic worldwide have been primarily realized in urban areas; however, its wider impacts quickly spread to the rural areas through the urban–rural interconnected economies (FAO 2020a). While the rural communities continued to provide essential resources (including a place for temporary shelters) to urban households, hospitals, and health centers during the initial confinement periods, the medical responses in rural areas have reportedly been asymmetric, largely because of the unequal service provision, accessibility barriers, and lack of advanced healthcare facilities (intensive care units, ambulance services, specialist doctors, etc.). Beyond the geographic features, rural populations have also been disproportionately impacted due to their socioeconomic characteristics, few of which are explained below in reference to OECD (2020) and TRACIE (2020): • Demographic Characteristics: Rural communities often have higher proportion of at-risk populations (elderly/poor), who tend to have higher comorbidities than others and are at higher vulnerability to health impacts of pandemics.

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• Financial Constraints: Rural communities have a less diversified economy with a high share of workers in essential jobs (like agriculture). The comparatively lower incomes and savings further constrain people to stay in confinement or receive timely medical assistance. • Resource Constraints: Rural hospitals have limited capacities (space, equipment, supplies, etc.) and they often face workforce shortages. At times of emergency situations like pandemics, even a small number of cases quickly overwhelm the facility. • Poor Digital Connectivity: Rural communities are often at a disadvantage of digital divide, due to their vast geographic coverage and poor access to broadband internet or wireless bandwidth supporting video capabilities.

8.4

COVID-19 Impacts on Human Security from Urban– Rural Linkage Perspective

Although the greater geographical distances and the lower population density in rural areas are favorable to minimize the direct impacts of pandemics like COVID19, the experiences from the current situation have shown both urban and rural populations increasingly hard hit by the pandemic-induced human security threats (refer to Fig. 8.4). The following subsections provide a generic description of how the ongoing COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted the human security components (described in Sect. 8.2) in rural areas.

8.4.1

COVID-19 Impacts on Economic Security in Urban– Rural Context

In parallel to rapid urbanization trends worldwide and economic development, a considerable increase in income diversification has also been witnessed in the countryside, as the rural populations adapt to seasonal migration and other nonfarm livelihood strategies (e.g., Thapa et al. 2020). However, the sudden transport restrictions and social distancing measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused strong economic impacts for the vulnerable rural households, like in the case of wider Sahel region (Riquet and Anderson 2020). Herein, the disrupted cereal banks and warrantage systems have raised undue concerns for loan repayments and livelihood sustenance, driving the rural households toward untenable debts and selling of their assets.

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Fig. 8.4 Pandemic implications to human security components from urban–rural perspective. (Image source: Authors)

8.4.2

COVID-19 Impacts on Food Security in Urban–Rural Context

Urban and rural areas are closely interlinked through the food systems. While the food production is centered in rural areas, bulk consumption takes place in urban areas (Sukhwani et al. 2019). While the changing consumption patterns in urban areas and the globalization of diets were already impacting the smallholder rural farmers, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised additional concerns for the local food systems. Like for a specific case of Nagpur in India, Sukhwani et al. (2020a) highlighted that the COVID-19 lockdowns had shared consequences for both urban and rural populations. As the sudden closure of wholesale markets and transport restrictions disrupted the food supply chains, a sense of insecurity prevailed among the various supply chain actors including the rural farmers, traders, and the home-confined urban residents.

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COVID-19 Impacts on Health Security in Urban–Rural Context

Health security forms one of the key drivers of all other insecurities in pandemic situations, and the rural communities are often at a disadvantage due to their widespread geographical locations and connectivity gaps with urban areas (both pre-existing and pandemic-induced). For the hinterlands of Brazil, Floss et al. (2020) highlighted nurses, community, and indigenous health agents, sometimes, being the only healthcare providers in these communities. Similar concerns have also been highlighted from other parts of the world like in United States (King 2020; InsuranceNewsNet 2020), where the rural hospitals are faced with the issues of limited capacities and workforce shortages. Kumar et al. (2020) also highlighted the inadequacy of rural healthcare system in India, for the critical challenges brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic.

8.4.4

COVID-19 Impacts on Environmental Security in Urban–Rural Context

Beyond the food systems, urban and rural populations also rely on the shared stock of natural resources like water and energy. Concentrated in nearly 3% of the total land surface, cities worldwide already account for around 75% of natural resource consumption, which they predominantly meet from rural regions outside their physical boundaries (Sukhwani et al. 2020b, c). Thus, any pandemic-induced change in urban resources consumption patterns consequently generates insecurities for the co-dependent rural populations. Like for instance, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the residential water demands in several cities around the world increased temporarily (Cooley et al. 2020).

8.4.5

COVID-19 Impacts on Personal Security in Urban– Rural Context

Domestic violence and sexual exploitation were already an epidemic across the world (both in urban and rural areas), which spike when the households experience increased security strains like due to financial issues, congested living conditions, etc. Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an increase in domestic abuse and intimate partner violence cases has been reported worldwide. While women endured the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 pandemic (like caring for children) (Cordaid 2020), many of them were also trapped at home with their abusers. Compared to urban settings, the rural women often find difficulty to relocate, and

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they also have limited access to formal and informal support (explained in Moffitt et al. 2020).

8.4.6

COVID-19 Impacts on Community Security in Urban– Rural Context

Migrants form an important link between urban and rural areas, as they cater for bulk of seasonal labor work in cities, while contributing to the rural economies in form of remittances to their families. However, the migrant communities were among the most impacted by the social and economic consequences of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. While their livelihoods collapsed, the stringent lockdowns and transport restrictions left the migrant workers stranded without food, shelter, access to essential services or the ability to return home. More so, the pandemic has also led to an increase in stigma and discrimination, and the migrants have also been blamed for the spread of disease (United Nations 2020).

8.4.7

COVID-19 Impacts on Political Security in Urban– Rural Context

Major socioeconomic inequalities persist between urban and rural areas owing to the urban bias in government spending for physical infrastructure development, healthcare, education, etc. FAO (2020a) underlined that in almost all lower income countries, the rural populations (particularly the rural poor) have comparatively less access to adequate sanitation, broadband Internet, social protection, etc., which enhances their vulnerabilities during any crisis situation like pandemics. By producing specific evidence on educational infrastructure and learning experiences, Agwu and Atta (2020) highlighted that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may further heighten the urban–rural inequalities.

8.5

Key Lessons and Way Forward

The development planning at local level has conventionally been based on a simplified notion of rural areas relating to “remote farming areas” and the urban areas have been referred more as the “crowded cities.” However, the dichotomist approach to urban and rural development has underplayed the crucial role of urban– rural interlinkages. In due regard to the urban–rural transboundary implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a strong consensus on the resilient urban– rural linkages as key to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. UN-Habitat (2020)

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also underlined the diverse urban–rural flows to be carefully considered for responding to COVID-19 pandemic in short, medium, and long terms. Although the detailed impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be fully understood, the following subsections highlight three key takeaway lessons through the chapter.

8.5.1

Adopting a Community-Centric Approach to Regional Development

Trenkov-Wermuth (2020) stressed that the international, state, or regional security requirements (especially during a health emergency) can be suitably matched, only by effectively meeting the health and safety needs of local population. To achieve that, it is important to realize that at the local level, the urban and rural populations have varying levels of requirements, and the diverse population groups also have varying social care demands, like for the elderly, children, homeless, migrants, disabled, poor, indigenous people, etc. (refer to FAO 2020b). While it is difficult to generalize about the nature of urban–rural linkages, the local community context (like the proportion of urban and rural populations) within a region needs to be duly considered for regional development. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread globally, all efforts should be put to strive for the protection of human rights (including socioeconomic and cultural rights, equitable access to healthcare and education, good governance, etc.) and well-being of all people within a regional space, and to build back better toward a more inclusive and resilient future. Following the spirit of the 2030 Agenda and “Leaving No One Behind,” a communitycentered approach should be mainstreamed to overcome the regional disparities, and emphasis should be put to maintain equity and inclusivity. Due attention should be put to meet the needs and specificities of most vulnerable populations (like the poorest of the poor, migrants, or those not covered in social protection), who may need specific support interventions.

8.5.2

Enhancing Service Delivery in Remote Areas by Upscaling the Use of Digital Tools

The at-risk population groups in remote rural areas, like the elderly, disabled, or individuals who may have additional healthcare, communication, and transportation needs, are often disproportionately impacted by any crisis situation. The ongoing COVID-19 situation has also exposed the underlying weaknesses in the delivery of social services. To overcome these issues and to enhance the first-mile/last-mile delivery of emergency services, covering of wider geographies through infrastructure development becomes important. Although urban–rural connectivity has for

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long been a challenge to balanced regional development, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the use and diffusion of digital tools in cities, towns, and rural areas and opened up several pathways for continued schooling, higher education, business meetings, health consultations, shopping, etc. Taking benefit of the ongoing technological transformations, efforts should be made toward digitally opening up the remote and underserved areas through increased mobile broadband network coverage. The expanded outreach would not only enable the deployment of public services such as e-health, e-education, e-agriculture, and financial services, but also optimize the delivery of emergency services. The increased connectivity will also unlock further opportunities for rural development and regional integration.

8.5.3

Stimulating Urban–Rural Partnerships for Coordinated Development

The persisting disparities in spatial development form the basis for why strong urban–rural linkages are important for distributing the benefits of the urbanization process. Given the global trend of economic growth in cities and towns, urban areas often tend to draw the bulk of resources, raising concerns for biased spending at regional level. In recognition to the rapid urbanization trends and changing population dynamics, collaboration and partnerships between urban and rural areas should be enhanced to strategically prepare and connect the decentralized urban and rural communities for such hazards in future. While the unchecked and unplanned urbanization can lead to negative externalities in terms of land degradation, environmental pollution, higher levels of crime, and unequal service provision, urban and rural communities should duly recognize the shared areas of concern and foster cross-boundary cooperation to minimize the competition for resources and reach common goals. Herein, urban–rural partnerships have shown to be an effective means of governing these interactions and fostering economic development. Moreover, in consideration to the drastic changes brought forth by COVID-19 pandemic, clearly, the world is now set toward a “new normal.” Herein, the disruptive experience of COVID-19 has accelerated the need to reexamine the current practices of development planning, taking due account of the widespread urban–rural populations and their interlinkages. Thus, human security offers an alternative perspective to plan how we prepare for the future pandemics, and what strategies are feasible to protect and empower all people. For long, the development policies and programs have been influenced by pro-urban and pro-rural arguments. However, the policymakers need to start thinking of the cross-boundary impacts of their development interventions by addressing the urban and rural economies as a united whole. The need for coexisting with the future epidemics has also highlighted the need to make disaster response practices more community-centric, digitally inclusive, and agile.

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Toward the end, the realization becomes important that human security (in urban or rural context) during any disaster situation is reliant upon the timely access to necessary resources. While the disadvantaged communities in urban–rural context often face a myriad of disparities due to the asymmetrical resource provision within a regional space, their ability to effectively respond to the crisis gets constrained. During times of crisis—such as pandemics and disasters—these barriers can hinder timely response and severely restrict the community’s ability to recover from such shocks. While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is magnifying the already-existing inequities between rural and urban communities worldwide, it is important to enhance the urban–rural partnerships and foster collective action against the future pandemics. Acknowledgements V. Sukhwani is thankful to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan for the provided scholarship.

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Moffitt P, Aujla W, Giesbrecht CJ, Grant I, Straatman AL (2020) Intimate partner violence and COVID-19 in rural, remote, and northern Canada: relationship, vulnerability and risk. J Fam Viol:1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-020-00212-x OECD (2020) Policy implications of coronavirus crisis for rural development. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris. http://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/ policy-responses/policy-implications-of-coronavirus-crisis-for-rural-development-6b9d189a/. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 Oriola TB, Knight WA (2020) COVID-19, George Floyd and human security. Afr Secur 13(2): 111–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2020.1783760 Phillipson J, Gorton M, Turner R, Shucksmith M, Aitken-McDermott K, Areal F, Cowie P, Hubbard C, Maioli S, McAreavey R, Souza-Monteiro D, Newbery R, Panzone L, Rowe F, Shortall S (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for rural economies. Sustainability 12(10):3973. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12103973 Riquet C, Anderson J (2020) COVID-19 and disruptions to vulnerable rural livelihoods in the Sahel, COVID-19 briefing: insights for inclusive finance. Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). https://www.cgap.org/research/covid-19-briefing/covid-19-and-disruptions-vulnera ble-rural-livelihoods-sahel. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 Shaw R, Kim YK, Hua J (2020) Governance, technology and citizen behavior in pandemic: lessons from COVID-19 in East Asia. Prog Disaster Sci 6:100090. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas. 2020.100090 Sukhwani V, Nurzaman A, Kusumawardhani NP, AlHinai AM, Hanyu L, Shaw R (2019) Enhancing food security by institutionalizing collaborative food alliances in urban areas. Sustainability 11(15):4103. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11154103 Sukhwani V, Deshkar S, Shaw R (2020a) COVID-19 lockdown, food systems and urban–rural partnership: case of Nagpur, India. Int J Environ Res Public Health 17(16):5710. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/ijerph17165710 Sukhwani V, Shaw R, Deshkar S, Mitra BK, Yan W (2020b) Role of smart cities in optimizing water-energy-food Nexus: opportunities in Nagpur, India. Smart Cities 3(4):1266–1292. https:// doi.org/10.3390/smartcities3040062 Sukhwani V, Thapa K, Shaw R, Deshkar S, Mitra BK, Yan W (2020c) Addressing urban–rural water conflicts in Nagpur through benefit sharing. Water 12(11):2979. https://doi.org/10.3390/ w12112979 Tacoli C (1998) Rural-urban interactions: a guide to the literature. Environ Urban 10(1):147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789801000105 Thapa K, Sukhwani V, Deshkar S, Shaw R, Mitra BK (2020) Strengthening urban-rural resource flow through regional circular and ecological sphere (R-CES) approach in Nagpur, India. Sustainability 12(20):8663. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208663 TRACIE (2020) Rural health and COVID-19. Assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR) technical resources, assistance center, and information exchange (TRACIE). https://files.asprtracie.hhs.gov/documents/aspr-tracie-rural-health-and-covid-19.pdf. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 Trenkov-Wermuth C (2020) How to put human security at the center of the response to coronavirus. United States Institute of Peace. https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/04/how-put-humansecurity-center-response-coronavirus. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 Udeh CS, Amadi EN (2020) The impact of coronavirus on human security in Nigeria. GRIN Verlag, Munich. https://www.grin.com/document/923276. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 UN DESA (2019) World urbanization prospects: the 2018 revision. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), New York. https://population.un.org/wup/ Publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2021 UN.org (2021) What is human security. https://www.un.org/humansecurity/what-is-humansecurity/. Accessed 3 March 2021

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UNDP (1994) Human development report 1994. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Oxford University Press, New York. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/ 255/hdr_1994_en_complete_nostats.pdf. Accessed 3 Mar 2021 UNDP (2020) Assessment of the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on the Kingdom of Lesotho. United Nations development Programme (UNDP). https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/ research/assessment-socio-economic-impact-covid-19-kingdom-lesotho. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 UNESCO (2008) Human security: approaches and challenges. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/ pf0000159307. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 UN-Habitat (2020) COVID-19 through the lens of urban rural linkages—guiding principles and framework for action (URL-GP). The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Nairobi United Nations (2020) Impact of COVID-19 on migrants and refugees in the Arab Region, Technical paper. https://www.unescwa.org/publications/impact-covid-19-migrants-refugeesarab-region. Accessed 3 Mar 2021 von Braun J (2007) Rural–urban linkages for growth, employment and poverty reduction. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. https://www.ifpri.org/publication/ruralurban-linkages-growth-employment-and-poverty-reduction-0. Accessed 3 Mar 2021 Walker EM, Novogrodsky NB (2006) The HIV/AIDS pandemic and human security. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), vol 100. JSTOR, pp 345–350. www.jstor.org/stable/25660124. Accessed 12 Feb 2021 Woodhill J (2020) Responding to the impact of COVID-19 on rural people and food systems. Working Document. https://www.foresight4food.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Impact-ofCOVID-19-on-Rural-Poverty-and-Food-Systems-V2.pdf. Accessed 12 Feb 2021

Chapter 9

International Migration and Human Security Under the COVID-19 Pandemic Oscar A. Gómez

Abstract This chapter reviews the effects of the pandemic on population movements, following three human security frames of migration: (1) migration as a threat, (2) migrants as a population of concern, and (3) migration as a means for security. Despite great global efforts to debunk the myth of migration as a threat, the pandemic’s nature has once again made the stereotype prominent. Distrust and xenophobia episodes have taken place worldwide, adding a new layer of complexity to the emergency. Moreover, an almost complete halt to migration closed the possibility of moving away from the direct disease threat and ensuing deprivation, not only because governments impeded new movements but also because people on the move found themselves in new precarious situations. The fall in remittances and relapses into poverty across the world are evidence of this trend, so any recovery strategy will have to include migration considerations. Finally, different migrants have fared differently against the pandemic’s challenges: while specific vulnerabilities are notorious, contributions covering dangerous jobs during the emergency have also been exalted. Efforts to contain stigma and provide protection without discrimination will be necessary to potentiate the migration contribution to the pandemic recovery. Preventing further disease relapses remains a difficult problem to address. Keywords Travel restrictions · International Health Regulations · Survival migration · Crisis management · Global governance

O. A. Gómez (*) College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_9

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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic completely disrupted the flow of people around the world. In a few weeks, the quotidian movement of millions of persons went from being a symbol of globalization benefits to a dreaded vehicle for the spread of the disease. As of 15 March 2021, the International Organization for Migration (IOM 2021) reported a total of 227 countries, territories, or areas having issued 108,244 travelrelated measures, mostly quarantines or medical requirements, and restrictions to specific countries, airport closures, and flight suspensions. Figure 9.1 shows the geographic evolution of the entry restrictions and conditions for authorized entry, covering practically the whole world by the end of 2020. Figure 9.2 shows how initial lockdowns gave way to conditioned reopening, allowing some recovery although still very far from pre-pandemic levels. However, more contagious strands of the virus were identified in several parts of the world late in 2020, triggering once again border closures and an overall reluctance to give population movements a higher priority in the recovery agenda. These restrictions were due to lead to 2020 becoming “the first year in recent decades to mark an actual fall in the stock of international migrants” (Ratha et al. 2020b: 4). Restrictions did not only stop people from leaving home but also from returning. Numbers are difficult to come by, but IOM estimates nearly three million migrants stranded by the travel-related measures out of the 272 million international migrants and refugees worldwide (IOM and WFP 2020). Extensive operations were necessary for repatriations, including over 600,000 Indians and 230,000 Filipinos (Ratha et al. 2020b). Moreover, these numbers do not include restrictions’ impacts to domestic migration, which have affected an even larger share of the world population—the magnitude of internal migration is about two-and-a-half times that of international migration (Ratha et al. 2020a). People moving away from violence or deprivation were also heavily affected by the emergency: refuge options decreasing, lockdowns forcing survival migrants to go back to their countries of origin, and resettlements almost stopping. While the pandemic impacts to the general population are larger in magnitude, migrants in places like Saudi Arabia and Singapore have been disproportionally affected, reflecting structural vulnerabilities. Because of its human and economic implications, migration forms a key dimension of the COVID-19 crisis. This chapter offers a review of the impacts of COVID-19 on migration from a human security perspective. I provide first a description of what such a perspective entails, introducing different approaches to the study of migration in the human security literature. The literature suggests at least three different framings to understand migration: (1) migration as a threat, (2) migrants as a vulnerable population, and (3) migration as a means for security—including not only for the migrants and their families but also for host populations. The central sections consider these three frames in turn; they help us to understand the multiple ways in which the pandemic and migration are interrelated. The final section makes some suggestions about

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Fig. 9.1 Evolution of entry restrictions and conditions for authorized entry. Note: This map is for illustration purposes only. The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on the map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the International Organization for Migration or the author. (Source: IOM (2021))

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10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

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Entry Restrictions for Passengers from Restricted C/T/A

8,124 8,332 9,352

44,054 38,881 37,517 33,32534,805 32,907 28,113

Fig. 9.2 Restrictions and conditions for authorized entry, by type. (Source: IOM (2021))

Number of Restrictions 90,000

8,702

27,874

76,755

8,204

28,031

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Other Restrictions

08 March 2020 16 March 2020 23 March 2020 30 March 2020 06 April 2020 15 April 2020 20 April 2020 27 April 2020 04 May 2020 11 May 2020 18 May 2020 21 May 2020 28 May 2020 01 June 2020 08 June 2020 15 June 2020 22 June 2020 29 June 2020 09 July 2020 13 July 2020 20 July 2020 27 July 2020 30 July 2020 03 August 2020 10 August 2020 17 August 2020 24 August 2020 01 September 2020 07 September 2020 14 September 2020 21 September 2020 28 September 2020 05 October 2020 12 October 2020 19 October 2020 26 October 2020 02 November 2020 09 November 2020 16 November 2020 23 November 2020 30 November 2020 07 December 2020 14 December 2020 21 December 2020 29 December 2020 04 January 2021 11 January 2021 18 January 2021 25 January 2021 01 February 2021 08 February 2021 15 February 2021 22 February 2021 01 March 2021 08 March 2021 15 March 2021

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implications for the protection and empowerment of humans in the post-pandemic world.

9.2

Human Security, Migration, and Crisis

Population movements have received particular attention throughout the human security literature. Migrants are a paradigmatic example of individuals falling outside the citizenship protection umbrella and, thus, illustrate the narrowness of state security’s traditional conception. The first focus of attention was refugees and internally displaced populations, particularly in the 1990s when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) promoted a holistic view of security conducive to durable solutions to forced displacement (UNHCR 1997; Hammerstad 2014). Then, in the early 2000s, the Commission on Human Security (2003) opened the attention to all types of “people on the move,” highlighting not only migrants’ vulnerability but also their contributions to the development of both their countries of origin and host communities. However, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States (US) drastically affected the perception of migrants in relation to national security, generating doubts about how much human security propositions could help contain the “migrants as threats” frame (Hammerstad 2014). A new generation of research emerged as the shadow of the War on Terror dwindled, retaking the broad agenda envisaged by the Commission. Notable contributions include the volumes edited by Edwards and Ferstman (2010), Truong and Gasper (2011); Truong et al. (2014), as well as the work of Estrada-Tanck (2016). Moreover, human security thinking has also served as a platform for multi-disciplinary, worldwide efforts to understand the connection between migration and climate change (Gómez 2013, 2021). The work was recognized through a chapter on human security in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (Adger et al. 2014), which included migration among other issues of concern. Even a Journal on Migration and Human Security was created in 2013 (Vietti and Scribner 2013), attesting to the close relationship between the concept and population movements. One of the fundamental contributions of a human security approach to migration is identifying the roots of exclusion and vulnerabilities of migrants (Estrada-Tanck 2013). These are the more evident for refugees and internally displaced populations, who actively look for protection, and also underlie the experience of undocumented migrants, stateless persons, or survival migrants (Lester 2010), whose vulnerabilities can be easily underestimated. The human security approach puts humans back at the center, countering dehumanizing language in stigmatizing views on migrants and technical perspectives on migration. The approach “combines the person-focus with a systematic way of investigating the opportunities and vulnerabilities of complex persons, and a worldwide frame in explanation as well as evaluation.” (Gasper and Sinatti 2016: 5). Gasper and Sinatti put forward a repertoire of issues covered by such a complex understanding of migrants, including “bodily and psychological

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needs, drives and feelings: imperatives of bodily, psychological and social reproduction and death; fears, feelings of dignity and respect, recognition, affiliation and caring, felt needs to belong. . . emotional security and insecurity, mental frames and intuitions, and felt national and/or community loyalties.” (2016: 34). Thus, our understanding of insecurities goes beyond a generic migrant, capturing the nuances of different persons’ conditions. The human security and migration literature pays particular attention to human rights. A fair share of the vulnerabilities of migrants is related to their legal status in the host country. Ideally, migrants should receive the same protection as natives, given their equal social contributions. Some portable social protection schemes have also been suggested (Gasper and Sinatti 2016), in an agreement underlying the globally accepted aim for safe, orderly, and regular migration (UN General Assembly 2018). Yet, while the legal status remains a thorny issue, the literature emphasizes that fulfilling human rights obligations must be the minimum expectation. A human security approach is useful fleshing out these obligations because it helps identifying the risks to human rights and, therefore, establishing thresholds and criteria to trigger state’s obligations, as Estrada-Tanck (2016) and Bilgic et al. (2020) meticulously show. Significantly, human security also recognizes migrants and host communities’ mutual vulnerability, as, through their contact and interactions, they share a common fate (Lester 2010). The complementarity of the human security approach to human rights becomes even more significant in the context of crises. During crises, some fundamental rights can be overridden by security concerns, as has been the case with COVID-19 (Quintana and Uriburu 2020). Under these circumstances, non-citizens can quickly become the target of discriminatory or unnecessary restrictions in the name of national security. Edwards and Ferstman (2010) recognize emergencies are an accepted reason for exceptional measures but stress that multiple checks need to be in place to ensure excesses or needless harm are avoided. These checks include the careful assessment of threats and the “necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality” of the countermeasures (38). Just as in the case of migrants’ vulnerabilities, a human security approach enlarges our pool of information and evaluation tools to make sure threats and measures are understood as comprehensively as possible (Gómez 2014). Compared to other alternatives to understand migration, such as a livelihoods approach, “human security analysis is perhaps more dynamic and more open to the complexity and divergences introduced by contingencies and crises” (Gasper and Sinatti 2016: 28). Nevertheless, it must be stressed how the COVID-19 pandemic does not resemble any of the crises analyzed by the literature or fit the scope of the most recent agreements on migration (Newland 2020).1 Most of the literature strives to draw attention to migrants’ insecurities, as they go unperceived and unattended during

1

The problem of population movement has been at the heart of the International Health Regulations from at least the nineteenth century, as I show in the next section. Understanding this disconnection, and how we can mend it, is part of the contribution of this chapter.

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peaceful times. Following recent waves of populations reaching European and North American borders and some backtracking on governments’ commitments to refugee support, some of the current literature addresses migration as a crisis itself—e.g., Morrissey (2020). These efforts offer insights into the definition of crisis and different concerns across the continuum of its management cycle, including response, recovery, prevention, and preparedness (Gómez and Kawaguchi 2018). Estrada-Tanck (2020), for instance, emphasizes how obligations of prevention, protection, and reparation underlie human security–human rights synergy in addressing the Mediterranean crisis, casting light on the capacities and areas of government action required. While this crisis approach is useful, the complete halt of population movements triggered by the pandemic poses unique challenges in need of their own understanding. A human security analysis can offer a comprehensive mapping of views on migration and their interactions around basic security questions (Gómez et al. 2013, 2016). Such a map is crucial for emerging phenomena about which we do not know much but expect implications at multiple levels. Similar to the case of migration in connection to climate change and disasters (Gómez 2013, 2021), I suggest at least three different types of narratives or framings that can be distinguished when connecting the pandemic and population movements. The three framings are (1) migration as a threat, (2) migrants as a vulnerable population, and (3) migration as a means for security. Each of the frames represents different concerns about dealing with the crisis, which overlap but ultimately push the pandemic governance in opposite directions. They also represent multiple types of epistemological approaches that demand conciliation when appraising the best ways to overcome the contingency. In the following sections, I put forward a version of each of these three framings, drawn from multiple reports and fast-tracked research triggered by the pandemic up to January 2021.

9.3

Migration as a Threat

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and then the virus spread all around the world in a few months. Infected persons moving across borders were the primary means of transmission and, so, population movements were an unmistakable source of the threat. At least in principle, the emergency justified restrictions to people’s free movement as a countermeasure to the spread of the disease. In other words, protecting human security in the context of a pandemic may justify violations of migrants’ rights. However, the travel restrictions’ practicality and the actual impacts of such an approach to the pandemic are far from simple and present complex choices. The spread of disease through migration is not a new phenomenon. As the first cases of COVID-19 arrived in the Americas from Europe, there was a feeling of déjà vu. Diseases were the leading cause of the death of an estimated 90% of the

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continent’s original population following the conquest and colonization processes (Koch et al. 2019). Later, the spread of Cholera, Plague, and Yellow Fever was the most important trigger of the international agreement on health regulations, under discussion since the mid-nineteenth century (Howard-Jones 1975). The debate from those days until today has been how “to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade” (WHO 2005). The International Health Regulations recognize travel restrictions and other border measures as alternatives to deal with public health emergencies, but they are seldom recommended. Historically, such restrictions have been shown to have little or no impact (Mateus et al. 2014; Ryu et al. 2020) while their costs are monumental. Recent research suggests that this is still the case, although empirical data has been traditionally scarce, so the scientific grounds against travel restrictions are not yet highly robust. Mateus et al.’s (2014) review of the literature for the case of influenza suggests international travel restrictions could delay the spread of the disease from 1 week to 4 months. The four-month figure results from a simulation that assumes a 99.9% restriction of travel; once the restrictions are relaxed to 90%, the delay would be of only 3 or 4 weeks. Depending on the transmissibility of the disease, the impact of the restrictions would be even more limited. Highly networked, densely populated urban centers can hardly benefit from such restrictions. Full border closures have been practiced in the past with positive results. Ryu et al. (2020) describe research about four South Pacific Island jurisdictions that delayed the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic for 3 to 30 months and reduced mortality compared to other islands. Similarly, during the 1957 influenza pandemic, the political situation in the Middle East resulted in Israel having an almost complete absence of international travel, but that only resulted in a two-month delay in the onset of the epidemic (WHO 1959). Boyd et al. (2017) propose some calculations for the case of New Zealand and find some scenarios in which full closure would be justified, and even call for considering islands as possible refuges against extreme pandemics (Boyd and Wilson 2020). However, whether such a drastic approach is an option for the overwhelming majority of today’s heavily interconnected societies remains unclear, especially when considering returning citizens being an important share of the migrants—see below. For the case of COVID-19, Russell et al. (2021) suggest some countries may have benefitted from travel restrictions but under certain specific conditions. First, observe that complete prevention was probably impossible since the virus had spread to many countries by the time they imposed travel restrictions (Gonzalez-Reiche et al. 2020). The US was quick to close its border with China but got the disease from Europe. Even with fast and transparent information about outbreaks, the gap

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between disease spread and detection means travel restrictions would not be as effective if starting in a highly connected region.2 Once local outbreaks gain momentum, they become the driving force, and travel restrictions become far less effective. Thus, only countries with a very low incidence of the disease and large numbers of arrivals would benefit from stringent travel restrictions (Russell et al. 2021). Russell et al. (2021) suggest restrictions were justified in May when most countries—i.e., 102 of the 136 countries had reported at least 10 COVID-19 deaths—did not have much local transmission, but less relevant in September as the disease mainly spread locally by then. Restrictions may also be recommendable for countries close to the tipping point of the outbreak—i.e., R between 0.95 and 1.05, as any contribution of extra cases at this point can result in a surge into the exponential growth of cases. However, micromanagement of restrictions does not seem a viable option. Additionally, there are two interrelated features of travel restrictions that make them a complicated measure to manage: first, data issues. It is difficult to get useful data about restrictions’ impact and efficacy. All the existing research uses simulations, and the assumptions of the underlying mathematical models are difficult to verify (Ryu et al. 2020). Observational or experimental studies are limited, and the paucity of data about land and sea travel remains (Mateus et al. 2014). Assumptions underlying analyses of other aspects of the emergency, such as the idea of achieving herd immunity, have often resulted in much harm, showing the limitations of the models. Second, the numerous human factors underlying the implementation of travel restrictions deserve careful consideration. For instance, travel restrictions remain a popular option because they are an easy way for governments to show they are doing something, and to blame outsiders. The public’s pressure is intense, and while waiting for definitive solutions, a security theater becomes felt as politically necessary.3 In this sense, disarray after pandemics seems to have changed little from the nineteenth century. An academic journal in 1885, reflecting on the impact of the International Sanitary Conferences, published the following: Unfortunately, the decisions of the Conference, if we may judge by the utter want [i.e. lack] of result from the resolutions of the Vienna conference, will really settle nothing. At the first panic about Cholera, the votes of delegates, the resolutions of conferences, and the convictions of sanitary administrators will again be instantly set aside and repudiated, in response to unreasoning popular clamor. (Howard-Jones 1975: 55)

The same situation is described about the 1957 influenza pandemic (WHO 1959), and this time after COVID-19, when governments moved quickly to impose travel

2

In the case of Ebola Fever in West Africa, while the outbreak did not take place in a densely populated area, porous country borders allowed the disease to spread across the three most affected countries, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. 3 Security theater refers to the “largely palliative measures introduced in the name of security but taken primarily to allay public fears or at least persuade them that something is being done” (Zedner 2009).

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restrictions not recommended by the WHO, instead of enforcing basic public health measures such as testing and social distancing (Maxmen 2021). Closing borders is extremely popular and allows governments to dodge accusations of leniency.4 Nevertheless, restrictions, with or without foundation, impose an onerous burden especially on migrants but also on the rest of society.

9.4

Migrants and the Pandemic

The pandemic affects migrants in multiple ways, starting with the stigma associated with being the disease’s suspected vector. Stigma and discrimination related to infectious diseases have a long history and seem to be ingrained in humans’ nature. For instance, in the nineteenth century, much of the emphasis during the sanitary conventions was on the threat from maritime trade from India to Great Britain, as well as the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, for which there were specific international sanitary agreements. Still, while there were outbreaks of Cholera related to these two settings, Cholera was arriving in Europe by land, for which no measures were in place (Howard-Jones 1975). Dutta and Rao (2015: 45) list multiple cases of discrimination following infectious diseases and contamination rumors, including Jews during the Bubonic Plague in medieval Europe, immigrants, prostitutes, and alcoholics during Cholera epidemics in New York, Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1906, and East-Asian restaurants during the first SARS epidemic. The authors demonstrate through a pilot experiment that “exposure to disease thoughts triggers exclusionary acts toward immigrants even when this had no relevance to disease protection” (44). Thus, travel restrictions are expected to be very satisfying for the public and particularly appealing for political leaders. The Economist reports the Indian Prime Minister blaming Muslims as superspreaders, Bulgaria imposing lockdowns on Romany neighborhoods, blaming of gays in Turkey, migrant workers accused in Malaysia, and minorities in Myanmar.5 The then US president also emphasized the presumed Chinese origin of the virus, resulting in cases of assault and discrimination against persons of East-Asian descent. Stigma affects not only minorities but also persons returning to their home countries (Newland 2020) or anyone looking like outsiders. In Japan, there were cases of people throwing stones at cars from different prefectures, while in India, more than 100 million internal migrants were stigmatized as virus carriers (IOM and WFP 2020). Besides the violence resulting from fears and xenophobia, stigma has long-term consequences for migrants’ vulnerability (ICRC 2020). InterAction (2020) reports

See for instance, “Britain’s belated quarantine scheme” https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/ 02/10/britains-belated-quarantine-scheme 5 See “No vaccine for cruelty” at: https://www.economist.com/international/2020/10/17/thepandemic-has-eroded-democracy-and-respect-for-human-rights 4

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how ostracized people are less likely to seek help or health treatments through social services. Notably, illegal migrants may avoid official support out of fear of the consequences given their legal situation. This behavior is detrimental not only for illegal migrants but also for the hosting community, as the outbreak can stay alive, reproducing harm and reinforcing xenophobic fears. While migrants are not, in principle, the most vulnerable population to the disease, as they tend to be younger than host communities, they are more likely to have bad health conditions and suffer from co-morbidities increasing their vulnerability (OECD 2020b). The experience of the US has shown how ethnic minorities have been disproportionally affected by the disease (Tai et al. 2020), and migrants are usually overrepresented among these disadvantaged socio-economic groups. The economic effects of the pandemic also hit migrants particularly hard. Migrant workers often work for sectors in which jobs are temporal, informal, and unprotected (IOM and WFP 2020). Sectors such as hospitality, health, retail trade, and security and cleaning services hire large shares of migrants, significantly affected by the movement restrictions and the need for avoiding personal contact (OECD 2020b). These are jobs without telework as an option, in which migrants become the first to be laid off (IOM and WFP 2020), or jobs that increase their exposure to the disease. Both phenomena have been widely documented during the pandemic. Major clusters of infection have developed among migrant workers in Singapore and Saudi Arabia, where living conditions make it difficult to abide by public health measures (Chamie 2020). Similar outbreaks among migrant workers in low-paid jobs could be found in meat factories in Germany (Newland 2020), suggesting the trend is not geographically limited. On the other hand, millions of migrant workers were at some point stranded in their host countries, scrambling for means to keep their livelihoods or go back, as we noted in the introduction (Ratha et al. 2020b). The case of returnees adds several layers of complexity to the emergency response, making it even more challenging to manage. First, even if migrant workers themselves want to go back to their countries of origin, the return may conflict with each government’s travel restrictions, as the evidence shows only strict travel restrictions can have effective results. Indeed, countries like Venezuela would accuse the returnees of spreading the disease to avoid its own responsibility for mishandling the crisis (Standley et al. 2020). Yet, the challenge of returnees is not limited to typical migrant workers sending countries like the Philippines or to humanitarian disasters like Venezuela. In countries like Germany, most international arrivals are returning citizens, so border closures become difficult to enforce (Clemens and Ginn 2020). Depending on their conditions, waiting for their turn to fly back to their countries of origin can further expose migrants to the effects of the pandemic. The exposure becomes critical for those who are forced to leave and have to go through detention centers, as was the case of illegal migrants in the US (Perzyna 2020). In this case, the expelling country causes additional harm to migrants, exposing them to the disease in those centers, and increases the risk at the migrant origin country, if the deported person gets infected. The expulsing government may also be violating the principle of non-refoulment included in refugee and asylum agreements. In other words, by

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pushing migrants back to countries with inferior health care systems, expulsing governments violate migrants’ human rights by putting them in harms’ way (Estrada-Tanck 2016; ICRC 2020). Finally, the economic effects go beyond migrants themselves, affecting their families and the networks depending on them back home (IOM and WFP 2020). The World Bank estimates that between 88 and 114 million persons moved back to severe poverty because of the crisis (Ratha et al. 2020b), intensified through the effects on remittances. Definitive numbers are difficult to come by, as was the case for evaluating restrictions in the previous section, due to the unavailability of reliable data about current migration (OECD 2020b).

9.5

Migration as a Means for Security

Despite the instrumentalization of migration for crisis management purposes, the fate of migrants and their host communities are closely linked. As the WHO and the rest of the UN have repeatedly stressed, no one is safe until everyone is safe. This is true not only because of the need to stop the spread of the disease but also because of the essential contributions migrants make to the societies they interlink. In other words, migration is not only a means for security because migrants can access to resources for guaranteeing protection at their host communities but also because they can become providers of security as well. I briefly review these two dynamics of security provision in this section. Migration is, at least partly, a way to escape from violence, hunger, and deprivation. The pandemic became a prominent source of all of these maladies; but all other sources predating the emergency coexist with the disease. As I mentioned in the previous section, migrants may have better odds of being protected from the pandemic threat by staying in wealthier countries. Governments around the world are usually committed to provide access to “essential and emergency health care to all non-nationals, regardless of their migratory status” (Milan and Reshma 2020), and many governments have indeed kept this commitment—e.g., UN ESCAP (2020). Improvements to the living conditions of migrant workers are expected in the countries that depend on their labor because the recovery will most certainly need their precious support (Papademetriou 2020). On the humanitarian side, much-feared disease clusters in refugee camps failed to materialize, suggesting that the public health measures existing were good enough for temporary protection.6 As vaccination campaigns speed up worldwide, equitable access to vaccines for refugees has become the primary concern (Bartovic et al.

See the Webinar “Why is COVID-19 NOT Transmitting in Humanitarian Settings as Expected. . .or is it?”, organized by READY: https://www.ready-initiative.org/why-is-covid-19not-transmitting-in-humanitarian-settings-as-expected-or-is-it/

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2021). However, the pandemic did result in a drastic reduction in refugees’ access to asylum and resettlement, the latter being the lowest in two decades.7 Betts et al. (2021) suggest refugee-led organizations can be an option in responding to the emergency and show successful cases in Kenya and Uganda. Yet, expectations of new job opportunities are already pushing some to embark on risky migration.8 Remittances are a crucial way through which migrants help providing security back home. Support after crises has been documented about disasters (Gómez 2021), and the effect seems to hold for the pandemic. Ratha et al. (2020a: 6) show how remittances to the Philippines increased in 2003 during the Bird Flu but decreased during the 2008 financial crisis, thus highlighting uncertainty about what will happen this time. More recent data suggests there will be a mixed picture (Ratha et al. 2020b),9 as some sectors and countries have recovered faster than others, so different types of migrants are faring differently. Migrants have played essential roles in helping societies to endure the pandemic. The role of supporting the health sector has received the most attention (Ratha et al. 2020a: 44). van Selm (2020: 44) describes how 16.5% of the healthcare workers and 28.7% of the physicians in the US are immigrants; figures for the whole health sector in Canada are 27% and in Europe 11% (OECD 2020b). Additionally, some illegal migrants have medical qualifications but are not allowed to work because of their legal situation (van Selm 2020), showing some of the contradictions of a narrow approach to human security in the pandemic. Healthcare-related work also has a female bias, sometimes leading to violence and additional exposure to COVID-19 (UN ESCAP 2020). Ratha et al. (2020b: 19) also emphasize how migrants are “on the front line in stores and restaurants, farms and factories, keeping these businesses running.” These are not minor contributions as societies still need to satisfy their basic needs during lockdowns. Finally, perhaps too far away to be of any policy use, migrants were also behind several of the technologies that made vaccines possible. The world dramatically benefits in the long run from the exchanges inherent to migration. Recovery plans will have to include a migration component balancing risks and pressing needs. Tourists, international students, and business people are highly expected, as the sectors depending on them risk collapse. The situation for other migrants will depend on how rich countries rethink their dependence on foreign workers, and how far they use the opportunity to advance automatization or

See Ratha et al. (2020b), Papademetriou (2020) and UNHCR press release: “With refugee resettlement at a record low in 2020, UNHCR calls on States to offer places and save lives” https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2021/1/600e79ea4/refugee-resettlement-record-low-2020unhcr-calls-states-offer-places-save.html 8 See “Africa’s do-or-die boat people”: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/ 11/26/west-africans-are-dying-trying-to-reach-the-canary-islands 9 See also the following for Latin America (https://www.latinamerica.undp.org/content/rblac/en/ home/presscenter/director-s-graph-for-thought/stand-by-me%2D%2Dcovid-19-and-the-resilienceof-remittance-flows-to-.html) and the Philippines (https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Philippineremittances-come-in-at-29.9bn-defying-COVID) 7

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inclusion of local groups less represented in the labor market (Papademetriou 2020). Newland (2020) stresses that migration schemes will be difficult to politically justify under high unemployment, yet this is nothing new for migration policy discussions.

9.6

Closing Remarks

A human security approach to the implications of the pandemic on migrants and migration helps us obtain a comprehensive view of the situation and encompass trends pushing in opposite directions. While the health threat posed by migrants is real, the threat gets exaggerated given that intra-country transmission is quickly predominant. The practice of travel restrictions is full of complexities and contradictions. For example, a strict protection strategy at the country level would require preventing fellow citizens from returning during the emergency. Any exception could compromise the effectiveness of the measures, but it is difficult to restrict the entry for those persons who governments are supposed to protect. On the other hand, local safety nets must cover all persons coexisting in the territory, including illegal migrants and other vulnerable populations, otherwise, the pandemic will fester in disadvantaged communities, causing much harm and continuing the risk for everyone. While potentially of little practical use under present conditions, travel restrictions help palliate social unrest against the government and its management of the emergency. Despite being discouraged for over a century, the fact they keep being popular suggests the importance of finding ways to reduce their negative impacts. Xenophobia and all forms of discrimination should be the targets of government efforts, including providing accurate information and reacting appropriately to any incidents (OECD 2020a). The temptation to scapegoat migrant populations is morally wrong, scientifically unjustified, and could have destabilizing repercussions, further worsening the situation. Not only does the disease thrive in conditions of deprivation, but also host communities greatly benefit from migrants’ contributions, from the daily support to factories, businesses, and care services, to the ingenuity necessary to create vaccines and other technological advances. The negative effects also travel across borders, as migrants’ support to their families back home is vital for their subsistence and flourishing. Travel restrictions can only be temporary, and the reestablishment of population flows would depend on successful prevention measures everywhere, including access to vaccines. Societies hit economically by the pandemic may struggle to keep pace with the enforcement of these measures, so mutual support efforts become necessary. The COVID-19 pandemic will be an opportunity to revise our crisis management policies, including response, recovery, and prevention of future emergencies. The scientific community has emphasized travel restrictions being mostly ineffective for over a century, but this did not stop governments from imposing them every time. Consequently, the pandemic can allow enriching the International Health Regulations with a more nuanced and detailed section on travel restrictions. The present

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version of the Regulations stresses the protection of the human rights of persons and travelers, but our human security analysis shows that policy recommendations need to go beyond. Clear explanation of the conditions in which restrictions work should be specified, delineating their consequences and impacts, as well as the necessary countermeasures. Capacities required to make restrictions work also deserve attention, so they are integrated into future response planning. Besides, it is fundamental to agree not only on when and how to use travel restrictions but also on when and how to ease them. Migration and migrants must be integral part of any recovery plan. Thinking about preventing future pandemics, some may plea for less connected societies to reduce our exposure to similar or more virulent outbreaks. Reviewing the experience of major influenza pandemics since 1889, Clemens and Ginn (2020) suggest that the evidence does not justify such a position. Recent attention to existential risks (Bostrom 2013) warns us about the possibility of a threat being used to justify extreme measures such as definitive border closures and complete isolations of communities in islands. All options should remain on the table but in the meantime, humanity benefits far more from migrants and our multiple exchanges across borders, including but not limited to their contributions to the race against pandemics and many other threats. Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (Grant Number JP18KT0057). Thanks to the editors for the invitation and support. I am heavily indebted to Des Gasper for his insightful comments. Mauricio Duque Arrubla helped clarifying some points of the literature, and Tomoya Kamino provided valuable comments. Thanks to IOM for the permission to use the figures. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Chapter 10

Fragility and Resilience in Food Systems: What Can We Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis? Rami Zurayk

, Abed Al Kareem Yehya

, and Rachel A. Bahn

Abstract The global food security situation has been under threat in recent years due to factors including conflict and economic contraction, even before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The deteriorating situation has raised questions about the functioning and resilience of our food systems, and their ability to deliver key outputs such as food security for all. The chapter seeks to explore the fragility and resilience of our food systems in the face of shocks. By applying a food systems approach, the chapter offers a more comprehensive lens through which to understand and achieve food security. The chapter reviews the academic and gray literature on food systems, with a focus on concepts of fragility and resilience, and then applies secondary data (quantitative and qualitative) to assess the status of our food systems prior to and within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. A food systems approach allows for the clear identification of its components (food supply chains, food environments, individual level filters, and consumer behavior), a range of external drivers, and contemporary outcomes (food security, environmental, economic, and social outcomes). By applying this approach, we find some aspects of our food systems were already fragile prior to the pandemic, and the fragility has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of the pandemic and associated lockdowns have been widespread in terms of geography and scope, with serious impacts on the performance of our food systems. Within the span of a few months, food systems were pushed to the brink of crisis. However, while many impacts were negative, some parts of the food system were resilient and even flourished via significant financial gains. Resilience of a system cannot be solely measured by its individual components. Building food systems more resilient to shocks forms an urgent priority for humanity to avoid suboptimal outcomes, particularly food insecurity. Lessons derived from the COVID-19 pandemic help explain incongruous instances of fragility and resilience, and point to measures that can limit the adverse effects of future shocks to food security. The need for a holistic rather than mechanistic approach to R. Zurayk (*) · A. A. K. Yehya · R. A. Bahn Food Security Program, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_10

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food systems performance, improvement, and transformation will be central to the effort. Keywords COVID-19 · Food security · Food systems · Resilience · Fragility · System transformation

10.1

Introduction: COVID-19 and Food Security1

In 2019, COVID-19 appeared in a world in crisis. The global economy was shaky, oil prices had abruptly declined, and the climate emergency appeared to be more pressing than ever. Conflicts, poverty, and inequalities were spreading, especially in countries of the Global South. Although the divide between them appeared deeper than ever, North and South shared a number of negative social development trends such as decreasing state investments in social protection, increasing diet-related diseases, a production-driven agriculture aimed at maximizing marginal profits in a world where a vast amount of what we produce gets lost or wasted, and a deepening metabolic rift2 associated with an open consumption of nature. Literature has argued for COVID-19 being an outcome of our food system (Bett et al. 2020; Lee et al. 2020), as our modes of food consumption and production encourage the transfer of zoonotic diseases from animals to humans. COVID-19 emerged from the folds of this food system, and exposed its weaknesses. The pandemic undermined an already fragile global food security, setting the world back in its goal to reach zero hunger by 2030 (UN SDG2). Box 10.1: What Is Food Security? Food security is an outcome of multiple dynamics that operate from household to planetary level. It depends not only on food production, but on a suite of entitlements that enable and protect economic and equitable access to safe and sufficient food at all times. According to the FAO (2009), “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Food security is usually considered to have four dimensions: food availability (a function of quantity and dietary (continued)

In this chapter, we will consider the terms “food security,” “food and nutrition security,” and “food security and nutrition” as synonymous, as nutrition is an integral part of food security. 2 “Metabolic rift refers to an ecological rupture in the metabolism of a system. The natural processes and cycles (such as the soil nutrient cycle) are interrupted. The division between town and country is a particular geographical manifestation of the metabolic rift, in regards to the soil nutrient cycle” (Clack and York 2005: 400). 1

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Box 10.1 (continued) energy supplies), access to food (physical, social, and economic), utilization (nutritional status, food quality and safety, health, hygiene), and stability (applies to all other dimensions and is a function of vulnerability due to shocks: conflict, climate, import disruptions, global food price volatility). On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was already hungry. Progress in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 2 was faltering (Barbier and Burgess 2020). As of end-2019, FAO et al. (2020) estimated nearly 690 million people were hungry, or 8.9% of the world population—an increase of ten million people in 1 year and of nearly 60 million people in 5 years. The number of people affected by severe food insecurity, another measure approximating hunger, highlighted a similar upward trend, reaching close to 750 million people or nearly one in ten people as of 2019. An estimated three billion people could not afford a healthy diet, most of them in the Global South (FAO et al. 2020). The pandemic swelled the numbers of hungry people as the United Nations warned of a major famine (IPS 2020). However, COVID-19 was not harmful for everyone in the food system. As the number of food insecure people escalated, the world’s largest food corporations made billions of dollars in profit. Thirty-two of the world’s most profitable companies were jointly projected to earn US$109 billion more in profits during the pandemic than the average profits of the four previous years (Oxfam 2020). Top retail companies in the United States earned US$16 billion in 2020 compared to 2019, where retail profits soared by 40% (Brookings 2020). Corporate entities around the world made around US$5 trillion in profits (Haddad 2020) and unhealthy commodity industries leveraged promotion and marketing to boost sales (NCD-Alliance 2020). These reports possibly underlie the OECD statement regarding the “remarkable resilience” of food supply chains (OECD 2020), and praise from The Economist newspaper of the food system for its ability to “hold up” to COVID19’s impacts on both supply and demand sides (The Economist 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restriction measures exacerbated food insecurity for hundreds of millions of humans, while large food corporations gained strength during the same period. At some level, therefore, food security has evidently decoupled from the global business of food. The same food system that generates exceptional profits for some actors concurrently results in significant declines in the food security of a vast section of humanity. The chapter aims to contribute to understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human food security by exploring the response of food systems operating at local, national, and global scales to the shock caused by the pandemic. The purpose of the endeavor is threefold. We seek firstly to illustrate the manner in which food systems and food security are connected, and thereby demonstrate why a food systems approach is essential to understanding and achieving food security. Secondly, we aim to illustrate some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic

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has impacted food systems, and to uncover how the same system can flourish in some aspects while collapsing in others. Finally, we will address the issue of resilience in food systems, and propose means to reduce their fragility.

10.2

Why a Food Systems Approach?

In a world increasingly affected by interconnected and multisectoral risks, systems thinking is needed to tackle food security (Ericksen et al. 2010; Ingram 2011; Haddad et al. 2016). Understanding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic requires, therefore, developing a clear understanding of the processes leading to food security. These interconnected processes are called “the food system.” In the current section, we present the conceptual basis of a food system approach and its connection to food security. We show how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the food system at various locations, resulting in significant declines in food security. The pathway of food from farm to fork is best described using a socio-ecological systems approach (Ericksen 2008), whereby a food system is “formed of biophysical and social factors linked through feedback mechanisms” (Tendall et al. 2015: 18). The High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) defined the food system as a system that “gathers all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, infrastructures, institutions, etc.) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution, preparation and consumption of food, and the outputs of these activities, including socio-economic and environmental outcomes” (HLPE 2017: 11). The science underlying a food system approach is in constant evolution. According to the latest rendering, the food system is represented as a framework composed of four interlinked components which interact to produce the diets we consume: food supply chains, the food environment, individual level filters, and consumer behavior (The Food Systems Dashboard 2021). These are impacted upon by a number of drivers. The resulting interactions are complex and involve positive and negative feedback loops. The food system produces four outcomes: food security outcomes (including nutrition and health), as well as economic, social, and environmental outcomes (Fig. 10.1).

Globalization and Trade

Food messaging - food promotion, advertising & information

Vendor properties - location & type of retail outlets

Products properties - safety, quality, appeal, & convenience

Food affordability - food prices, alone & in comparison to income and expenditures

Food availability - type & diversity of foods on offer

Population Growth and Migration

Cognitive - home and work environment, mobility, location, time resources

Aspirational - desires, values, and preferences

Cognitive - information and knowledge

Economic - income and purchasing power

Individual-level filters

Urbanization

Food environments

Income Growth and Distribution Social-cultural Context

Diets

Food acquisition, preparation, meal practices, and storage

Consumer Behavior

Politics and Leadership

Economic, Environmental and Social Outcomes

Food Security Outcomes

Food System Outcomes

Fragility and Resilience in Food Systems: What Can We Learn from the. . .

Fig. 10.1 Conceptual Framework of a Food System (Arrows in the figure refer to feedback loops between components, drivers, and outcomes). (Adapted from HLPE 2017)

Retail and marketing

Processing and packaging

Storage and distribution

Food production systems and input supply

Food supply chains

Climate Change

External Drivers

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Understanding the Food System in the Era of COVID-19

10.3.1 The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Components of the Food System In the current section, we describe the main components of the food system and briefly review, through selected examples, how they were impacted by global pandemic. (a) Food Supply Chains (FSC) include all processes involved in the production of food for human consumption, including farming and associated activities, transport, storage, processing and packaging, and retail and marketing. Issues of food losses and food trade are important subcomponents affecting the various outputs of the food system. The FSC were the first components of the food system to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of lockdown and quarantine measures to contain COVID-19, most of their processes were disrupted in one way or another. Food trade, nationally and internationally, declined or slowed. Several countries restricted food exports for fear of food shortages, such as the wheat export ban by Kazakhstan which reduced neighboring Kyrgyzstan’s calorie supply by 50% (IFPRI 2020). At the local level, restaurants closed their doors during lockdowns, contributing to increased food losses as FSC struggled to re-route their products to remaining customers. Perishable foods such as dairy products, potatoes, and fruits were dumped or donated as farmers could not find proper storage and cooling facilities (Newman 2020; Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery 2020). (b) The food environment is the space of interaction between consumers and food, and is defined as “the collective physical, economic, policy and sociocultural surroundings, opportunities and conditions that influence people’s food and beverage choices and nutritional status” (Swinburn et al. 2013: 2). The definition includes the type of retail outlets (open markets vs. supermarkets) as well as marketing and regulation shaping the promotion information, branding, advertisement, and labeling policies (Turner et al. 2018). The food environment was a space of significant interaction between food, people, and COVID-19, which transmitted to humans through a wet market in China. Informal and wet markets were quickly shuttered in China and elsewhere, and were negatively impacted by the lockdown measures. Supermarkets witnessed skyrocketing food demand, and demand increased exponentially on food delivery services. Food companies were often (if temporarily) unable to meet the demand. Bracale and Vaccaro (2020) reported consumption of processed food surged during lockdowns, affecting diets. These kinds of dietary changes could have more effects, as individuals who experience malnutrition are

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more exposed to contracting the disease and developing weaknesses (Micha et al. 2020). (c) Individual-level filters are consumer characteristics that affect which foods they purchase and consume. Filters include economic attributes such as income, location, or purchasing power; social attributes, such as education or the desire for distinction; or cultural attributes, such as the attachment to specific culinary choices. These can encourage or curtail access to healthy diets. COVID-19 induced a global economic recession diminishing consumers’ purchasing power and limiting food choices due to movement restrictions. FAO reported poor households with already low food intake, had to decrease dietary diversity in favor of cheaper staples as incomes fell and food prices rose (FAO 2020a). (d) Consumer behavior is the sum of the vectors originating from the three preceding components. Based on a sequence of pressures, the consumer decides what to purchase, how to prepare it, and how much to eat. The resulting diets can exert positive or negative feedback on different system components. COVID-19 has changed the way people think about, buy, prepare, and consume food (EIT Food 2020), for good or ill. Panic buying and hoarding behaviors caused by the pandemic exacerbated the negative economic effects of the lockdowns and curfews (Lewis 2020). Conversely, a survey of 5000 European consumers found one-third consumers increasingly shopping online and carefully planning shopping trips. Long-term attitudes may also shift, as survey respondents also anticipated an increased in the importance of time to prepare home-made meals (27%) and to continue consuming more varied foods (30%) post-pandemic (EIT Food 2020). As for diet quality, another study of 1047 Asian and African respondents reported 76% of respondents increased their unhealthy food consumption during the lockdown (Ammar et al. 2020).

10.3.2 External Drivers of the Food System and Their Linkages to the COVID-19 Pandemic A number of external drivers influence the food system which can facilitate or hinder its operation, and which affect the quality and adequacy of its outputs. The drivers can be environmental, economic, political, socio-cultural, and demographic. The most influential among them are presented below.

10.3.2.1

Climate Change

Climate change forms a major environmental driver of a food system. The impacts of global climate change on food systems are widespread, complex, and geographically and temporally variable (Vermeulen et al. 2012). The food system itself has an impact on climate change especially environmental outcomes such as greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) from food production, as agriculture accounts for quarter of

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GHGE globally (Searchinger et al. 2019). Global pandemics and other biological hazards are associated with climate change in various ways. For instance, metaanalysis and mathematical modeling demonstrate the rising burden of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and meningococcal meningitis in the tropics and beyond in coming years due to global warming (Chowdhury et al. 2017).

10.3.2.2

Globalization and Trade

Globalization and trade connect countries and people, shape economies, and affect health and nutrition in positive and negative ways (The Food Systems Dashboard 2021). Around 20%–25% of global food production is traded (D’Odorico et al. 2014). Most countries are net food importers, and trade-based food security is the norm in countries with scarce agricultural resources, such as the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, favorable trade policies (and continuous advertisement) have facilitated the accessibility of low-cost, unhealthy food commodities such as processed industrial food and hydrogenated fats, which have detrimental effects on human health (Gustafson et al. 2016; Blecher et al. 2017). Diversity of food supply remains key for food availability and continuous supplies, but comes at the cost of food trade dependency (Kummu et al. 2020). A shock to the food system, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, shows that trade dependency can be risky. As global food trade patterns were disrupted, an early export ban on Vietnamese rice induced concerns in Malaysia, which was left with only 2.5 months of rice supply (IPES-Food 2020). Trade restrictions can also impede farmers’ ability to access input and output markets, limiting productive capacities and preventing food from reaching the point of sale (Torero 2020).

10.3.2.3

Income Growth and Distribution

Access to healthy food is linked to income growth and its equitable distribution. According to HLPE (2020a), income variability forms a challenge to the stability of food security. Additionally, income growth might lead to a decline in food security caused by changing diets. As incomes increase in low- and middle-income countries, so does the demand for highly processed and packaged foods (Mayén et al. 2014; HLPE 2017). Declines in incomes encourage people, especially those who are already vulnerable, to select the cheapest options, which are often energy sufficient but unhealthy. For instance, a person living in a low-income country would be unable to afford a healthy diet, which costs around six times more than an energy sufficient diet (FAO et al. 2020). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 400 million full-time jobs were lost in the second quarter of 2020, as several countries enforced lockdown measures (ILO 2020a), which resulted in an increase in global poverty. The World Bank (2020a) estimated that up to 100 million people would swell the ranks of those already suffering from extreme poverty (World Bank 2020a). Food system workers

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are among those who suffered most, including 40% of the billion primary food producers of the world and 60% of those working in the other components of the food system (650 million people) (UN 2020).

10.3.2.4

Urbanization

Around 6.5 billion people now live in urban areas, and the urbanization phenomenon has massively changed their relation to food (Seto and Ramankutty 2016). Urbanization can shape the food system, creating longer food chains and limiting agricultural land (The Food Systems Dashboard 2021). Urbanization contributes to changing food demand and modifies the food environment (Seto and Ramanakutty 2016). Urbanization can also facilitate access to food during shocks to the food system, especially in areas where subsistence farming has been eclipsed by exportoriented agriculture. Nevertheless, food insecurity is more prevalent among urban societies of least developed countries than among rural dwellers (Tefft et al. 2017). While urbanization increased the exposure to disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, the structural inequalities between rural and urban regions result in decreased access to health care and sanitation for those who live in rural areas, especially in the Global South3.

10.3.2.5

Population and Migration

Food production, trade, and consumption change with population growth and migration. Population increase will raise stress on the food system to deliver more food from our limited natural resources. Migration from one country or area can affect the food system in transit or receiving countries, especially so for countries that share borders with nations in conflict and receive a sudden influx of refugees threatening the stability of their food system. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased pressure on governments hosting migrants and refugees, notably in the MENA region. Concurrent economic and political crises in Lebanon hindered the country’s ability to support its citizens while Syrian refugees faced additional restrictions and increased food insecurity (UNHCR 2020a).

3

Proper sanitation in rural areas compared to urban areas (23% compared to 44%), health services (22% compared to 56%), education, broadband internet, social protection or public infrastructure, such as electricity (27% to 67%) or access to roads. Data set from the World Bank reflect this reference http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/3.13 (World Bank 3.13 2020; ILO 2019). These differences can magnify the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 (FAO 2020a).

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Policies and Leadership

The food system is affected by policies that impinge on all its components (e.g., agricultural production, food trade and distribution, food safety, advertisement, etc.). Food subsidies and trade policies can influence the availability and affordability of certain foods which, in turn, can affect diets (IFPRI 2019). Policies can also impact nutrition, such as when governments implement dietary guidelines to promote healthy diets. Tax policies can discourage consumption of unhealthy foods such as sugary drinks and highly processed foods (HLPE 2017). Agencies, states, and civil society are today fully invested in preventing a further collapse of the food system as the pandemic and accompanying crises appear to be persistent. For instance, Jordan and Iraq enhanced local food production and distribution through laws, decrees, and the establishment of collection centers (MENAFN 2020; WFP et al. 2020). However, power and leadership does not reside solely with governments, and policies can also serve the interests of food corporations, regardless of their potentially nefarious impacts on health. The power of corporations is infused in the food system, especially at the levels of the food supply chains and the food environments. Official stakeholders, who are often shareholders of multimillion dollars firms invested in the food systems, can translate their economic supremacy into political guidance and hence earn huge profits. The influence of private entities on governments can constitute a challenge to food security through the unchecked promotion of highcalorie, low-nutrient foods.

10.3.2.7

Socio-Cultural Context

Food forms an essential part of cultures around the world and is deeply rooted to human history, traditions, lifestyles, and customs. Although the diversity and cultural drivers of food choice are still insufficiently understood (Samaddar et al. 2020), the relation of an individual to food is essentially cultural and the relation feeds into the sociocultural driver of the food system. The local, specific nature of a food system is conceptually important since the “cultural acceptability” dimension forms a core element in the food system (Béné et al. 2019). Social and cultural traditions also influence diets. Traditional foods strengthen bonds to culture, which could help prevent the shift to highly processed foods and fast food. However, traditional diets are under relentless assault from globalized eating habits. In Lebanon, for instance, the erosion of the traditional diet, a variant of the Mediterranean diet, has been documented and associated with increases in obesity and diet-related diseases (Naja et al. 2019).

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10.3.3 Food System Outcomes and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Food system outcomes are the product of the sequential interaction of food system components with drivers and with decisions taken by actors (including farmers, intermediaries, consumers and policy-makers). These outcomes include (1) food security outcomes, (2) environmental outcomes, (3) economic outcomes, and (4) social outcomes. Analysts often focus on food security outcomes, as they constitute the normative link to diets. However, the remaining three outcomes are no less important. The environmental outcomes of the food system have recently become the subject of mounting interest (Willett et al. 2019). The economic viability of the food system is crucial to its continuity. Socially, the food system needs also to provide decent employment, equitable distribution of profits, and fair representation of all actors. The pandemic revealed deep inequities in the food system and exposed failures in its outcomes as food insecurity increased disproportionately in poor and marginalized communities. Financial losses for small-scale producers and food workers were witnessed as well, while transnational corporations continued to make large profits. The current section highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic affected food systems outcomes.4

10.3.3.1

The Impact of COVID-19 on Food Security

Food security, an inherently multidimensional concept, is the outcome of the operation of the food system. Understanding food security requires taking a holistic view of the food system and seeking to interpret interactions as well as responses to shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Important indicators for food security are the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU, an SDG2 indicator), obesity, overweight, wasting, stunting, and anemia, all of which are associated with dietrelated noncommunicable diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated global food insecurity. The restriction measures accompanying the spread of COVID-19 caused a ripple effect throughout the food system and affected the food security of the most vulnerable. According to WFP (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic could double the number of people suffering from acute hunger, pushing to more than a quarter of a billion, with food insecurity affecting predominantly women headed households and communities of color whose abilities to cope with the crisis are limited. Some 85 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were at high risk of not receiving schools meals, making them more food insecure (FAO 2020b). WFP (2020a) estimates the number of food insecure individuals to have increased by 17.5 million in East Africa, 4

To date there are no global data regarding the impact of the pandemic on the food system; however, it is possible to paint a picture of those impacts by reviewing studies at communities and national levels that have been published.

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reflecting a 73% increase in the estimated population of food insecure individuals. In Kenya and Uganda, food insecurity has increased by 38% and 44%, respectively (Kansiime et al. 2021). COVID-19 affected the availability, access, utilization, and stability dimensions of food security (see Box 10.1) in numerous ways: Impacts on the Availability Dimension The disruptions to FSC described above and the economic slowdown negatively impacted agricultural production. These impacts were tempered in high-income grain producing countries where the mechanized infrastructure requires limited labor. In contrast, impacts were significant on smallholder producers in lower income countries where farming tends to be more labor intensive and female dominated (HLPE 2020b). Food availability may continue to be unstable depending on how long the pandemic lasts. While food commodities were in ample supply during 2020 due to an exceptionally good growing season, the pandemic and associated measures could potentially impact output levels going forward. The world faces high degree of uncertainty surrounding the virus and its evolution, even though several vaccines have been developed (DW 2020). Impacts on the Access Dimension Arguably, the access dimension of food security was most affected by the pandemic (HLPE 2020b). As food prices surged globally, incomes dropped concurrently, and food became out of reach for many. Remittances from migrant workers, on which 800 million people depend worldwide, declined significantly due to the pandemic, and 33 million faced hunger in 2020 due to loss of remittances (WFP and IOM 2020). Households with reduced ability to access food became more likely to adopt negative coping strategies, such as reducing frequency, quantity, and quality of food consumed during lockdowns, which affected their nutritional status. The impact was not limited to poorer countries: In the United States, almost 30 million people did not have enough to eat in the last few months of 2020 (Andone 2020). Impacts on the Utilization Dimension The utilization dimension of food security includes determinants that affect how foods are prepared and consumed and interacts with human health. Among those are: access to clean water, to sanitation, food safety concerns, and nutritional status. Overnutrition, overweight, and obesity are associated with the consumption of unhealthy diets (see Sect. 10.3.1d). Before COVID-19, obesity and overweight were widespread and linked to an estimated five million deaths per year worldwide (IHME 2020). Rich and poor countries are impacted by this scourge, although the prevalence of overweight increases quickly with per capita income. Obesity and overweight interacted with COVID-19 and worsened its impact. Popkin et al. (2020) found people with obesity and COVID-19 were 113% more likely to be hospitalized and 48% more likely to die. The effect of malnourishment on health outcomes has been demonstrated by evaluating adults infected with COVID-19. Individuals who were malnourished with various comorbidities were at elevated risk of admission to the intensive care unit and mortality from COVID-19 infections (Jin et al. 2020; Handu et al. 2021).

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Impacts on the Stability Dimension The stability dimension of food security is cross-cutting, applying to the three other dimensions (availability, access, and utilization). Even before COVID-19, each was already subject to instability due to a range of factors—conflict, environment, economic recession, etc. COVID-19 has shocked the food system, and served to amplify the instability. The disruptions of the FSC due to COVID-19 have affected the stability of global food supply (Béné 2020), especially in countries where instability pre-existed due to environmental or political causes. Hunger, conflict, and displacement are intertwined with food insecurity and stability of the food supply. Low-income countries facing conflict, emergencies, and humanitarian crises are particularly fragile. Nine out of ten of the world’s worst food crises are in countries with the largest number of internally displaced persons (UN 2020). Conflict, violence and persecution are powerful drivers for people to migrate. More than 79.5 million people had moved away from their homes by the end of 2019 (UNHCR 2020b), a coping strategy to reduce hunger and increase incomes (FAO et al. 2018). A recent dossier by The New Humanitarian (2020) shows food crises in hotspots all over the world being driven by conflict, poverty, and economic shocks. According to the IPC (2020), more than half of Yemenis were threatened by high levels of food insecurity in 2021. In the Sahel, at least 3.2 million people were currently in need of food aid as of 2020 (Mednick 2020). COVID-19 has exacerbated the instability. In Chile, marginalized urban populations have been trapped in food insecurity due to the combination of pandemic lockdown measures, political instability, and economic downturn (Cuffe 2020). The same applies to Lebanon, where 49% of citizens worried about maintaining food access (WFP 2020b). COVID-19 compounded the destabilizing effects of natural disasters on food security in Southeast Asia, which suffered typhoons (Loy 2020), and in the Horn of Africa, which experienced floods and desert locust swarms (The New Humanitarian 2020). As food price inflation increases, consumers’ ability to access food weakens, which reduces the affordability of healthy diets (FAO et al. 2020). Due to the pandemic, many people have had to scale back their food intake and increasing numbers are facing food insecurity (Clapp and Moseley 2020). In sum, the colossal magnitude of the crisis has affected the ability of people to secure food. Table 10.1 summarizes the major impacts of COVID-19 on food security.

10.3.3.2

The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Economic Outcomes of the Food System

The food system forms the main employer in the global economy. Perturbations in the food system impact the livelihoods of farmers, retailers, and consumers (HLPE 2017). The gross value of primary agriculture production is estimated by FAO at more than US$5 trillion (FAOSTAT 2020), while the global food system, across its four components (Fig. 10.1), increases by 2 to 5 times the value of agricultural farm production (World Bank 2019). The value of agri-food trade has doubled since 1995 (FAOSTAT 2020). However, internalizing the costs on environment and human health shows that the global food system was already failing before the COVID-19

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Table 10.1 Impacts of COVID-19 on food security Dimension Availability

Access

Utilization

Stability

Impacts • Adverse impacts on agricultural production, particularly within labor-intensive smallholder systems in lower income countries (HLPE 2020b) • Increased instability of food availability, including on long-term supply levels (DW 2020) • Increases in food prices and concurrent reductions in incomes reduced access to food (WFP and IOM 2020) • Significant reductions in remittances limited food access for 33 million people (WFP and IOM 2020) • Reduced food access triggered negative coping strategies (reduced frequency, quantity, quality of food) with knock-on effects on nutritional status (Andone 2020) • Amplification of health risks associated with obesity and other forms of malnutrition (Popkin et al. 2020; Jin et al. 2020; Handu et al. 2021) • Rapid increases in price push healthy food further out of reach (FAO et al. 2020) • Disruption of food supply chains and heightened instability of global food supply (Béné 2020) • Exaggeration of existing risks to food security including conflict, political disruption, and/or environmental threats (UN 2020; FAO et al. 2018; The New Humanitarian 2020; Loy 2020)

pandemic. Numerous problems such as malnourishment, undernourishment, obesity, food loss and waste, insufficient food safety, land-use change, and many others were estimated to result in economic losses of US$6 trillion in 2019 alone (World Bank 2019). At household level, the pandemic has resulted in a decline in incomes, especially of food workers. Around 451 million jobs and around one billion livelihoods were considered to be at risk because of COVID-19 restrictions (Torero 2020). A joint statement by ILO, FAO, IFAD, and WHO5 indicated millions of agricultural workers were at risk (ILO et al. 2020). In Malawi, for example, 23% of household income comes from agriculture and due to the pandemic this income has decreased by 60% (World Bank 2020c). In China’s rural areas, rural households lost about US $100 billion in salaries from migrant workers and thus spent less on nutrition and health (Rozelle et al. 2020). Due to quarantines and transport restrictions, local agricultural activities of farmers in China stopped and agricultural products went unsold, leading to a severe year-round drop in agricultural income (Pan et al. 2020). Even in food exporting countries, such as Cambodia, the livelihoods of farmers were under threat due to COVID-19 measures and existing food policies (Marzo 2020). Women have been disproportionately affected as they face greater vulnerabilities such as lack of land tenure security and loss of land, both of which worsened during the pandemic (FAO 2020c).

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International Labor Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund of Agricultural Development, and World Health Organization

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Table 10.2 Impacts of COVID-19 on economic outcomes of the food system Negative impacts • Risk of loss or reduction of 451 million jobs and one billion livelihoods dependent on food systems (Torero 2020) • Declining incomes among food system workers, particularly agricultural workers (World Bank 2020c; Pan et al. 2020) • Loss of remittances leading to lower spending on nutrition and health (Rozelle et al. 2020) • Worsening relative position of female farmers and food system workers due to further reductions in land tenure security and loss of land (FAO 2020c) Positive impacts • Support of larger companies for recovery of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and local manufacturers via e-ecommerce and online delivery platforms (Reardon and Swinnen 2020) • Growth of and investment in online agri-food enterprises, including food delivery services (Nestlé 2020)

Not all economic impacts were negative, however. Some small- and mediumenterprises (SMEs) and local manufacturers, which constitute and coordinate the larger parts of the FSC in developing countries (Kot 2018), were able to recover. The recovery was in part due to technological and financial support provided by larger companies such as e-commerce and online delivery platforms (Reardon and Swinnen 2020). The recovery may underlie some of the profits earned by transnational corporations. SMEs increasingly sold food directly to consumers via Facebook, and local delivery apps extended using mobile networks (LessaNguansuk 2020). In India, 40,000 restaurants also gained access to subsidized financing “jumpstart” through the Swiggy Capital Assist program (IANS 2020). In the United States, Nestlé acquired Freshly, a pioneer in healthy fresh meal delivery services, in a groundbreaking deal worth 1.5 billion dollars (Nestlé 2020). This followed Freshly’s exponential growth in earnings during the pandemic, making the delivery service a desirable investment by the multinational corporation. Table 10.2 summarizes the impacts of COVID-19 on economic outcomes of the food system.

10.3.3.3

The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Social Outcomes of the Food System

Food systems play an important if imperfect role in societal well-being, notably through their role as employer throughout FSC but especially in agricultural production. Before the pandemic, employment in agriculture had been decreasing worldwide. Gender equity within the labor force, measured as female employment in agriculture, had also been decreasing internationally, further limiting women’s social inclusion (ILO 2020a). Millions of waged and self-employed agricultural workers around the world face high levels of poverty, malnutrition, and poor health on a regular basis (ILO et al. 2020). Employment in the agricultural sector is highly vulnerable due to the high proportion of informal workers. For instance, 82% of the informal workforce in

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Latin America is employed in agriculture. Workers in the informal economy are vulnerable because the majority lacks access to quality health care and social protections, and have lost access to productive assets. Of particular note are the international migrant workers who constitute a large share of the informal economy, providing vital skills and labor for agriculture in exchange for the income-earning opportunities offered by labor-intensive farming (Martin 2016). Migrant farm workers are especially vulnerable because they face additional threats in terms of travel, working and living conditions, and because they fail to access governmentimplemented support measures (ILO et al. 2020). Informality is more spread among women, young people, and migrants in both industrialized and developing countries. COVID-19 has resulted in lost or more precarious employment within the food system, notably informal and migrant labor in the agricultural sector. The underlying informal employment and poor working conditions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan have further deteriorated due to the COVID-19 pandemic (ILO 2020b). Moreover, young workers are strongly influenced by the economic consequences of COVID-19, according to the ILO, because they lack networks or expertise. Measures to contain the pandemic have also disrupted governments’ capabilities and plans to provide social protection for the most vulnerable (FAO and WFP 2020). Work environments of meat, poultry, and grocery store workers—such as processing lines and other areas in busy where they have close contact with coworkers and supervisors—contributed to infection with COVID-19 (CDC 2020). In spite of dangerous working conditions, food workers are on the front lines and many could not afford not to work. These workers face precariousness, low benefits, and limited bargaining power (Klassen and Murphy 2020).

10.3.3.4

The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Environmental Outcomes of the Food System

Environmental outcomes include the impacts of the food system on natural resources. Global food production uses approximately 50% of habitable land (Tilman and Clark 2014) and agri-food systems account for roughly 25% of all GHGE, thus contributing to climate change (IPCC 2019). Food products such as ruminant meat have the largest environmental impact within the food system. Their GHGE, land use, and nutrient pollution impacts are 100 times greater than those of whole grain cereals (Clark and Tilman 2017; Poore and Nemecek 2018). In the United States, food waste mountains piled up as the pandemic shuttered restaurants and restricted transportation (WEF 2020). As organic food waste was left to decay, levels of methane gas6 and carbon dioxide emissions were expected to rise sharply (WEF 2020). A particularly heavy toll on forest ecosystems and

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According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 28 to 36 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period.

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forest-dependent communities was also anticipated to result from the COVID-19 pandemic, as the loss of livelihoods was expected to lead to increased overexploitation of already scarce natural resources (FAO 2020c). Zoonotic diseases (like COVID-19) are made more probable by the loss of biodiversity and by encroachment of intensive animal production systems. However, the reduction in transport associated with the pandemic may have had some positive environmental effects. According to EEA (2020), lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic may have some direct, short term, positive impacts on the environment, particularly in terms of reduced emissions and improved air quality. Halting fishing activities for around one million hours has led to an increase in fish biomass and to the increase in the stocks of some fish species (Korten 2020).

10.4

How to Make the Food System Resilient?

The previous section highlighted how the same food system, when affected by shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can deliver benefits to some and massive hardship to many. Moreover, while international humanitarian organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) have warned of famines at a massive scale, a handful of corporations have made exceptional profits and elicited praise for their resilience. However, judging by its outcomes, the current food system has failed millions of humans when exposed to the COVID-19 shock. Building food system resilience to shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, remains an urgent priority for humanity.

10.4.1 What Is Resilience in the Food System? System resilience, a concept borrowed from ecology (Holling 1973), reflects the capacity of the system to withstand and/or adapt to disturbances caused by shocks and stresses over time (Hoddinott 2014). Resilience can be described at different spatial and temporal scales: at household level, at sector level, at country level, or at a global level; in the long or short term. And while the concept is relatively simple to capture, complication arises during the quantification, assessment, or prediction of resilience within food systems. Part of the complexity is due to the food system being “extremely fragile in some of its parts, and yet extraordinarily resilient in others” (Savary et al. 2020: 696). Another level of complication comes from whether the resilience of the food system can be measured or predicted mechanistically, using the sum of the resilience of its components (Seekell et al. 2017); or whether it behaves as a stochastic system7 due to the randomness associated with many of the

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Hollings’ (1973) definition closely associates resilience with randomness, i.e., stochasticity.

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processes, shocks, and drivers involved in its functioning, and which therefore can only be assessed probabilistically. While the concept of resilience gets increasingly used to address challenges and fragilities of food systems at various scales (global, regional, local) (Pingali 2005; Tendall et al. 2015; Ahmed et al. 2020; Béné 2020; Savary et al. 2020), the body of work related to food system resilience originates from research carried out on the resilience of local food systems (Brück et al. 2019; Ansah et al. 2019; Béné 2020). These studies focused on resilience of households after an exogenous shock. The main findings of the studies are similar to what we presented earlier in the chapter and highlight the food system commonly failing the most vulnerable households, as measured by the decline in food security. Béné et al. (2020), for instance, shows that the food system was poorly equipped to handle the health shock caused by COVID19 and consequently created a negative tradeoff between health and economy where the poor suffered the most. Béné (2020) concludes that food system resilience is best expressed using the notion of resilience capacities that can be built into the system before a disturbance in order to increase its resilience.

10.4.2 Resilience Capacities For individual households or local communities, building resilience in food systems means building resilience capacities. According to Béné et al. (2020), these are “the different elements, tangible or less tangible, that actors of the food system have at their disposal, which they have accumulated, built, developed (income, knowledge, social capital, others) and that may or may not use in response to shock” (Béné 2020: 811). In other words, they are akin to Amartya Sen’s “entitlements” which he used to show why, in their absence, famines can take place while grain stores can be full (Sen 1981). The ultimate ability to bounce back and recover from a shock does not depend solely on the intensity or severity of the initial shock, but also on the impact of that shock combined with the resilience capacities of the actors to mitigate or counteract the initial effect of that shock—sometimes with unintended consequences. Thus, households with greater resilience have the ability to cope successfully with food system disturbances and have a more stable food security than household with lower resilience capacity. General empirical evidence measured by various indicators shows resilience capacities improve food security (Ansah et al. 2019). Thus, improving food security outcomes requires improving resilience capacities at the individual or household level. Weak capacities are comprised of low income and assets, poor health (and include exposure to COVID-19), limited education, and insufficient access to services.

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10.4.3 Resilience in Globalized Food Supply Chains and Fragility in Local Food Systems At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, food exporting countries feared food shortages as well as the spread of contagion via trade channels. They imposed trade restrictions to keep their stocks high and avoid the epidemic (e.g., Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan). Shortly after the virus began to spread, international pressure to keep food trade routes open was exerted. As a result, disruptions to global food trade were relatively limited (World Bank 2020b). Moreover, resilience capacities that were built into the food system after the global food crisis of 2007–2008 were invoked. They included facilitation of customs measures, diversification of trade partners, and creation of national reserves. Aided by exceptional harvests, the highly capitalized global food supply chains showed remarkable resilience, and supermarket shelves remained full (though with temporary stock-outs) of attractive, if not always healthy, food products. Resilience capacities of food corporations kept the global food supply chain flowing, without taking into account a key final outcome of the food system, household and individual food security. For instance, while trade in nonperishable or staple foods such as cereals flowed relatively unimpeded during the pandemic, the ability of households to acquire fresh, nutritious, and healthy food. The affordability of healthy diets was neglected. The shortage of resilience capacities among the most vulnerable households explains the worsening of the food security situation. This gap in resilience capacities explains how corporations involved in international commodity trade were able to make extraordinary profits while vulnerable households sank deeper into food insecurity. Parts of the food system proved resilient to the benefit of major corporations, while the entire system showed catastrophic fragility for vulnerable individuals and households, especially, but not exclusively, in the countries of the Global South.

10.4.4 How to Impart Resilience to the Entire Food System? Our analysis shows COVID-19 pandemic affecting all the components of the food system. Building resilience in the food system requires policy interventions addressing all its components (Savary et al. 2020). The challenge lies in identifying those policies most likely to enhance food system resilience at individual and household levels. To support such efforts, we present a framework for understanding and planning food system resilience at the household level, which we illustrate with selected examples from the COVID-19 pandemic. A framework was developed by Béné et al. (2012) to understand the resilience capacities of food security of households. The importance of the framework comes from preserving the agency (equality) between households and the power of

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Fig. 10.2 Resilience capacity/attributes. (Adapted from Béné et al. (2012))

households as decision making units (Béné et al. 2012).The framework is based on three resilience capacities illustrated in Fig. 10.2: 1. Absorptive capacity defines the ability of the system to minimize its exposure to shocks, but also its capability to recover quickly when affected by a shock. This capacity ensures the persistence of system functions, and is mostly constituted of coping strategies such as harvesting crops early to avoid floods, taking children out of school, or even delaying debt repayments (OECD 2014). Absorptive capacities were triggered during the COVID-19 pandemic when social protection measures (monetary support, wage loss substitution) were offered to those affected in higher and middle income countries. In response to COVID-19 and other similar shocks, FAO recommended that, in low income and fragile countries, particular attention be paid to enhancing food system resilience of poor rural households by actions including the expansion of social protection systems to preserve lives, livelihoods, and access to food (FAO 2020a). Moreover, accessibility to health services becomes essential in a pandemic, due to the prevalence of illness especially among food system workers (Clapp and Moseley 2020). Women’s empowerment at all levels and for all laborers and small-scale producers must be prioritized. 2. Adaptive capacity measures are defined as “the ability to make informed choices about alternative livelihood strategies based on changing conditions” (Béné et al. 2012: 27). Diversification of livelihood activities and the use of drought resistant crop varieties, among others, are key adaptive strategies that help households to deal with shocks (Heltberg and Lund 2009). Farmers’ and workers’ education becomes essential and requires proper awareness of the threats and opportunities. D’Errico et al. (2018) found the level of education and the proportion of income earners to the total members of the household contribute to household resilience, positively affecting the food security outcomes after the shock (d’Errico et al. 2018). Empowering rural capacities8 helps secure food supply chains. These capacities include: more diversified food production and agroecological farming practices that enhance the environmental outcomes; provision of networks and 8

Most rural poor households, even when having access to land, livestock and/or forestry or aquaculture and natural resources, rely on diversification of sources of income to survive. Diversification includes wage labor and non-agricultural activities as well as seasonal migration that helps in netting national and international remittances (FAO 2020b).

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connections to support market access (rather than relying on middlemen); public infrastructure (roads, electricity, internet connection); education; and extension services especially advocating for climate smart agriculture. Empowering food workers at the retail and distribution levels (Clapp and Moseley 2020) helps secure the food supply, food safety and food visibility, especially of healthy food. Empowering migrant workers by securing their remittances reduces disturbances to FSC. 3. Transformative capacity refers to the system-level conditions necessary for changing the basic configuration of the system to create long-term resilience. Researchers argue for the adaptive and transformative capacities as being necessary for dealing with the primary sources of vulnerability (Folke et al. 2010; Béné et al. 2012). In other words, adaptive and transformative capacities involve medium- to long-term mechanisms to help fragile systems in developing resilience against specific kinds of shocks. Advertisement and promotion of healthy food at lower costs can enhance the individual level filters component of food systems (desirability and affordability of food), which consequently enhance food security and nutrition as well as economic and environmental outcomes. For instance, a Malaysia-based online platform provided fresh, protein-rich seafood subscriptions and delivery services for local fishermen during the COVID-19 pandemic (Harper 2020). Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has opened up its platform to farmers for free along with its Foodie livestream channel to connect farmers across China with its 41 million followers, which helps farmers increase their incomes by selling directly to consumers (Harper 2020). Community kitchens, awareness campaigns to reduce consumer food waste, and enhancing the role of the circular economy all positively affect food security and nutrition and economic outcomes. For example, as COVID-19 spread through India, the Kerala Forest Department initiated a “Break the Chain” drive in India to raise awareness of the virus, provide forest communities with food supplies, and arrange daily supplies of drinking water for families in areas where power supplies had been exhausted. Communal kitchens have been established and forest goods have been procured to provide the tribesmen with economic support.

10.5

Conclusions

The food system is only as strong as its weakest components. An analysis of its operation during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates resilience in parts and fragility in others. Two of components, Food Supply Chains and Food Environments (Fig. 10.1) proved resilient to COVID-19 perturbations, especially when involving well capitalized operators, as reflected in the profits made by large food corporations. The two subsequent components—Individual Level Filters and Consumer Behavior—were severely and negatively impacted by the crisis. This translated into poorer

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diets and a deterioration in food security as well as in the other food system outcomes: environment, economic and social. Thus, the food system failed to produce some of its desired outcomes, and cannot be described as fully resilient. To mitigate the weaknesses of the food system, resilience has to be built into the entire system, and not just in selected components. The four lessons below are critical for improving our understanding of food security and food systems in shocks and crises, and to develop policies aiming at building systemic resilience. 1. A food system approach provides a lens through which we can view food security as one outcome of a complex system. The approach helps us plan, design, and improve the food systems that provide humanity with food security and nutrition. But first, the aim of the food system should be corrected. Its main goal should be to bolster food security, sustain the environment, enhance livelihoods and cultivate equity. Strengthening a food system has no benefit if the systems fail the economy, society, and nature. 2. It is essential to approach the food system in a holistic manner. Building resilience has to involve all food system components. Resilience of a system cannot be solely measured by the resilience of its individual components. The current food system has shown resilience in some parts (e.g., wealth accumulation for selected corporations), and deepened fragilities in others (e.g., increased exploitation of food workers). A holistic approach rather than a mechanistic approach is essential to analyze the performance of food systems. 3. The challenge of political economy needs to be addressed (Béné et al. 2020). Private finance and investment are often directed toward profitability or efficiency, with insufficient incentives for sustainable practices to produce nutritious food (Swinburn et al. 2019). For instance, the involvement of the food industry in nutrition research has recently been brought to light by Sacks et al. (2020) who reported that, out of 1461 nutrition articles, 196 (13.4%) reported food industry involvement. Governments should exert efforts to control the dominant actors of the agri-food system, and make all actors fully accountable to any causes of marginalization of food system workers (Schutter 2019). 4. Collective responses are needed to address today’s global challenges such as the recovery from COVID-19, climate change, declining levels of biodiversity, inequality, the myriad implications of digitalization, and the future of work. The food system forms an essential entry point to these endeavors. COVID-19 is an opportunity to initiate the transition toward the great food system transformation (GloPan 2020).

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The New Humanitarian (2020) 2020 in review: food security. https://www.thenewhumanitarian. org/feature/2020/12/24/Famine-food-insecurity-climate-change Tilman D, Clark M (2014) Global diets link environmental sustainability and human health. Nature 515:518–522. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13959 Torero M (2020) Prepare food systems for a Longhaul fight against COVID-19. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC Turner C, Aggarwal A, Walls H et al (2018) Concepts and critical perspectives for food environment research: a global framework with implications for action in low- and middle-income countries. Glob Food Sec 18:93–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2018.08.003 UN (2020) Policy brief: the impact of COVID-19 on food security and nutrition. https://reliefweb. int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/sg_policy_brief_on_covid_impact_on_food_security.pdf. Accessed June 2020 UNHCR (2020a) Nine out of ten Syrian refugee families in Lebanon are now living in extreme poverty, UN study says. UNHCR, Lebanon. https://www.unhcr.org/lb/14025-nine-out-of-tensyrian-refugee-families-in-lebanon-are-now-living-in-extreme-poverty-un-study-says.html. Accessed 8 Jan 2021 UNHCR (2020b) United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Figures at a glance. UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html. Accessed 22 Dec 2020 Vermeulen SJ, Campbell BM, Ingram JSI (2012) Climate change and food systems. Annu Rev Env Resour 37:195–222. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-020411-130608 WEF (2020) Here’s how COVID-19 creates food waste mountains that threaten the environment. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/covid-19-food-wastemountains-environment/. Accessed 8 Jan 2021 WFP (2020a) East Africa—impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods, food security & nutrition: urban focus, August 2020 | World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/publications/east-africaimpact-covid-19-livelihoods-food-security-nutrition-urban-august-2020. Accessed 24 Jan 2021 WFP (2020b) Lebanon | World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/countries/lebanon. Accessed 2 Oct 2020 WFP, FAO, World Bank (2020) Joint weekly COVID-19 food security monitor report Weekly Update—Issue 1 WFP, IOM (2020) Populations at risk: implications of COVID-19 for hunger, migration and displacement, November 2020 | World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/publications/ populations-risk-implications-covid-19-hunger-migration-displacement-2020. Accessed 24 Jan 2021 Willett W, Rockström J, Loken B et al (2019) Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–lancet commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393:447–492. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4 World Bank (2019) Do the costs of the global food system outweigh its monetary value? https:// blogs.worldbank.org/voices/do-costs-global-food-system-outweigh-its-monetary-value. Accessed 13 Jan 2021 World Bank (2020a). COVID-19 will double number of people facing food crises unless swift action is taken. World Food Programme. https://www.wfp.org/news/covid-19-will-doublenumber-people-facingfood-crises-unless-swift-action-taken World Bank (2020b) Food security and COVID-19. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/ agriculture/brief/food-security-and-covid-19. Accessed 17 Jan 2021 World Bank (2020c) Malawi high-frequency phone survey COVID-19. COVID-19 impact monitoring. Round 4. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/784171607320182211/pdf/ Findings-from-the-Fourth-Round-of-the-High-Frequency-Phone-Survey.pdf. Accessed Nov 2020 World Bank 3.13 (2020) World development indicators Yaffe-Bellany D, Corkery M (2020) Dumped milk, smashed eggs, plowed vegetables: food waste of the pandemic. The New York Times

Chapter 11

Challenges and Solution Pathways in Water Use Through the Lens of COVID-19 Rajarshi Das Bhowmik and Tirthankar Roy

Abstract Water withdrawal for public/private suppliers and public services (defined as public water use) and for irrigation (defined as irrigation water use) are essential components of agricultural water management as well as of the planning and management of domestic, commercial, and municipal water supplies. A significant fraction of the public and irrigation water use is consumptive (defined as the part of water withdrawn that is consumed) in nature, and it is primarily freshwater. Global climate change and variability have substantially impacted the large-scale drivers of freshwater resources across the globe, which include, for example, precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and hydrologic extremes. Global environmental change has also influenced several local-scale freshwater availability drivers, such as water quality, municipal policies, and water taxation. Overall, the changes in freshwater resources have potentially stressed irrigation and public water use. Population growth has altered the supply–demand fronts of water balance, resulting in increased water supply stresses. Researchers have considered several soft- and hard-path solutions to augment the deficit in the supply–demand fronts; however, each solution has its own pros and cons. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already existing critical issues related to sustainable future water use. New challenges have emerged, requiring both short- and long-term solutions. Hence, it is essential to understand the current public and irrigation water use changes resulting from the pandemic. An appropriate estimate of the future changes in water use would help develop/upgrade new/current water resource systems that can mitigate risks and show increased resiliency against global climate and environmental changes and unprecedented events like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this opinion chapter, we discuss some examples of the regional/local changes in water use during the ongoing pandemic and our increased R. D. Bhowmik (*) Interdisciplinary Centre for Water Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected] T. Roy Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_11

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preparedness or the lack of it. Additionally, the chapter focuses on the future risks and resilience of water resource systems to meet the future demands of water use as well as to face unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Keywords Water use · COVID-19 · Climate change · Resiliency · Freshwater

11.1

Introduction

The availability of water to meet the demands of drinking, cleaning, irrigation, industrial purposes, and recreation has been stressed globally by the imbalance in the supply and demand fronts (Sankarasubramanian et al. 2017). While efficient applications have been invented to optimize water use (a term representing the sector where the withdrawn water has been utilized) at the demand end, water withdrawal has typically witnessed an increase. Local agencies have issued short-term operational decisions to manage real-time threats, such as extreme weather conditions. On a regional and national scale, long-term planning has been considered in order to build resilient water resources systems. Overall, it is a combination of these two types of strategies that can be crucial to meet the increasing demand, given the constraints on available water resources. Depleting freshwater resources is primarily stressing municipal and irrigation water uses since both these sectors rely entirely on freshwater (Dieter et al. 2018). Increasing population and changing land use and land cover are creating a further imbalance between the supply and demand. Several studies (e.g., Brown et al. 2013) have projected that freshwater resources are expected to deplete further in the near future under human-induced climate change while the population is projected to increase. National and international agencies have started revising the current shortand long-term policies to mitigate the known perils by augmenting the water supply (Gleick 2002; Golembesky et al. 2009). Considering these, COVID-19 is a disruption that was never accounted for in the water distribution system. Hence, water-use sectors were mostly caught off-guard to mitigate the additional challenges triggered by the global pandemic. Additional constraints on the already struggling water resource system have had a multisectoral impact. Some of the effects can be mitigated with appropriate operational decisions, while a few others need longterm decisions to combat the current and future global pandemics. In this opinion chapter, we provide a synthesis of water use issues during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Fig. 11.1). We provide relevant examples from some regions across the globe to present the global issues faced by the water sector. Further, we discuss how a resilient water distribution system that can sustain a future pandemic can be built. At the same time, such a system should also help close the gap between the supply and demand fronts. Additionally, this chapter investigates the possible seasonality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Disease seasonality is typically associated with temperature and other meteorological factors (Paaijmans et al. 2010). An association between temperature and COVID-19 cases (if any) should also ensure

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Fig. 11.1 The schematic shows the different issues related to COVID-19, water use, and meteorology

the ramping up of health infrastructure. The water and utility sectors would also potentially benefit if seasonality is identified. The current chapter systematically reports some of the past incidents and analyses potential measures to absorb a future global pandemic shock.

11.2

Challenges in Water Use Due to COVID-19

Since the early days of the pandemic, international and domestic organizations have been continuously promoting the habit of handwashing, along with social distancing and wearing masks to prevent and control the spread of the pandemic (Web Source 1 n.d.). While local authorities could enforce laws to wear a mask or maintain a 6-foot distance, frequent handwashing has primarily been an individual decision that local authorities have little or no control over, except for promoting the advisory as vigorously as possible. However, the personal choice of handwashing is primarily an ideal scenario, considering sufficient water has been regularly supplied (alternatively, access to abundant water) to households by local water agencies. Thus, the role of local authorities in providing water security cannot be ignored. It is worth noting that global water security is still a distant achievement, with challenging conditions in underdeveloped and developing nations. In India, 160 million of the total population lacks access to clean water, with 2.2 billion people lacking access to drinking water globally (Rohila 2020). The number increases further when access to sanitization services is considered. The lack of appropriate water security is not only evident in underdeveloped and developing countries; several developed nations also fail to ensure water security for their citizens. For example, in 2014, the American Community Survey reported that 1.6 million people in the United States lack access

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to either running water or proper sanitation (Web Source 2 n.d.). Considering these, a significant question related to the COVID-19 pandemic and water use is this: If water security is not guaranteed, how would the countries and communities prevent COVID-19 spread? We think that the question will remain relevant in the near future, even after the vaccination goals are partially achieved, but the handwashing recommendation is in place. The lack of appropriate water security does not always arise from the lack of freshwater resources. Water taxation, pollution in surface water, and inefficient municipal water distribution systems also create additional challenges to securing access to clean water. Human-induced climate change, as well as changes in land use and land cover, further strain the available freshwater resources. For example, drought conditions in California, USA, have led to groundwater exploitation over the past decades (Mann and Gleick 2015). There are some hard- and soft-path strategies to augment the deficit in the water supply. In the long term, hard-path strategies, such as building new reservoirs, might become extremely useful in combating another future pandemic, whereas soft-path strategies related to water policy, conservation, and taxation could help fight the current pandemic by restricting water leakage and water wastage. It may not be feasible to adopt a hard path quickly; thus, water agencies continue with their current water management with occasional adaptation to soft paths. Hence, the concern remains whether existing municipal distribution systems are sufficient to meet existing water demands and elevated water demands resulting from COVID-19. It is worth mentioning that UNESCO’s sustainable development goals include a global engagement of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to promote WASH: water, sanitation, and hygiene (World Health Organization 2020; Web Source 3 n.d.). According to the WASH initiative, its core activity “emphasizes the teaching of basic sanitation and hygiene to communities and school children with a particular focus on girls’ education and gender equality, as a necessary complement to the success of water and infrastructure projects.” WASH has been running since 2014, and it can be considered a combination of soft- and hard-path strategies to meet water security goals. The role of WASH is exceptionally crucial in controlling COVID-19 spread and build resilient communities across Africa and many Asian countries. However, the impact of WASH on COVID-19 is not one directional, as COVID-19 has made a substantial secondary impact on WASH activities. For example, people quarantined with mild COVID-19 symptoms or with a travel history have often complained about no access to the piped water supply. Additionally, lack of maintenance of the water supply chain, disconnection of supply, and an increased price of WASH commodities have primarily affected the WASH projects. Nevertheless, ensuring water security at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic still remains a global challenge in countries supported by the WASH project and in countries where municipal water supply is typically able to meet the pre-COVID per capita demands. The prevention of COVID-19 warrants proper handwashing by lathering soap and scrubbing hands on both sides for 20 s. A total of 30–40 s of handwashing with a tap on (tap off) requires 4 L (2 L) of water flow, which suggests an additional

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100–200 L/day of water requirement for a family of 5 to only wash hands (Rohila 2020). Hence, under an ideal situation where everyone strictly follows the handwashing guidelines, municipal water use is expected to increase. Along with several major cities worldwide, Portsmouth, England, experiences a 15% increase in residential water demand during the first lockdown period (Coley 2020). For the same reason, Portsmouth experienced a 17% decrease in its nonresidential water demand (Coley 2020). American Water Works Association (2020) reported that the leisure, hospitality, and transportation sectors exhibited a lesser water demand as compared to the other sectors. Although an increase in residential water use and a simultaneous decrease in nonresidential water use are short lived and often restored as lockdown restrictions are waived, water and wastewater system operations might get strained by the sudden change in water use. Existing water and wastewater resource systems are designed based on historical water use data and future projections of demand that do not necessarily account for a pandemic situation. Therefore, a sudden change in water use not only strains the system with over- and under demands it also disrupts regular maintenance activities. Due to the lack of maintenance, residual disinfectants in the water may dissolve, affecting building operations and the water quality. It has been observed that there is an overall decrease in total water use (since industrial water use has substantially decreased during the lockdowns), utility revenue has been reduced (Pacific Institute n.d.; Coley 2020). Financial burdens during the pandemic have caused payment failure of the utility bills of individual customers (Pacific Institute n.d.). These financial constraints could be fatal for small water distribution companies. Apart from handwashing and sanitation, residential water supply is also crucial for drinking, cleaning, laundry services, and cleaning food products. The pandemic has disrupted the overall water demand and the smooth supply of municipal water. During the lockdowns, utility workers failed to appear at their workplaces. Workers infected with COVID-19 were prescribed self-isolation or appropriate treatment, thereby diminishing the total workforce. In multiple sites, infected workers could resume their services only after they could produce a medical fitness certificate issued by a medical practitioner. Co-workers who were in contact with infected colleagues were also suggested to self-quarantine, thereby further constraining the available human resources. Inappropriate knowledge regarding the virus also caused the absence of utility workers at the workplace. This was especially true for wastewater treatment plant staff, sanitation workers, and sewage cleaners. To the best of our knowledge, conclusive evidence of fecal-oral transmission of COVID-19 has not been established yet (Environmental Protection Agency 2020). Although the presence of the COVID-19 virus has been found in sewage lines, the virus’s spread has been primarily “respiratory” and “from contact” (Mohan and Deswal 2020; World Health Organization 2020). Incomplete knowledge, insufficient preparedness, and the lack of testing have regularly caused panic among utility workers, leading to workers’ absence and general strikes, resulting in overall water supply disruption. Other issues, such as infrastructure failure, supply-chain problems (insufficient materials to treat water), and public perception regarding their trust in the

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quality of the supplied water, also affected municipal water supply during and after lockdowns. Apart from the feedback mechanism between COVID-19 and water use, the relation between COVID-19 and meteorological variables is also significant. Researchers are interested in identifying the climate conditions that can either strengthen or weaken the spread of the disease (for additional information, readers are encouraged to check the “References” section). One traditional statistical attribute related to COVID-19, i.e., seasonality, would become crucial to ramp up the fight against COVID-19. In simple terms, the seasonality of an event is defined as the interannual frequency. Several well-known pathogens exhibit prominent seasonality (e.g., Cherrie et al. 2018). For example, in South Asian countries, most cases of malaria infection are reported during the pre-monsoon season (Laneri et al. 2010). Hence, countries traditionally ramp up their infrastructure, obtain medical supplies, train health-care professionals before the monsoon season to fight malaria. Seasonality related to COVID-19 will ensure appropriate preparedness in the near future. Although it is too early to determine a seasonality (if any) for COVID-19, since the sample data in the temporal domain is limited, scientific studies attempted to find an association between COVID-19 and climate conditions. Among several meteorological variables, the association between air temperature and hospitalization related to a disease is a strong indicator of the disease’s potential seasonality. So far, no overwhelming evidence has been found that indicates a universal association between temperature and the spread of COVID-19. Several regional level studies have reported a strong correlation between the number of cases and temperature. For example, Şahin (2020) examined the spread of COVID-19 over nine cities in Turkey and reported that the highest inverse correlation is present between the number of total cases and the temperature on the day of total cases. For Jakarta, COVID-19 cases only correlated with the average temperature but not with the maximum and minimum temperatures. Fu et al. (2021) found that cold and dry weather conditions contribute to the decline in the doubling time of COVID-19 cases. Bashir (2020) reported that the new and the total number of COVID-19 cases were positively correlated with the minimum and average temperature for New York but found no evidence of the warm weather’s impact in suppressing the spread of the virus. Shahzad (2020) examined the interlinkage between temperature and COVID-19 in the top 10 affected Chinese provinces and found while some cities exhibit a negative correlation, most provinces demonstrated a positive role between COVID-19 and temperature. A global study by Sobral et al. (2020) confirmed a negative association typically exists between average temperature and COVID-19 infections. While interpreting these studies, readers should note that: (a) Most of the studies do not consider a long record of data and primarily rely on spatial data that varies from city to city or nation to nation and (b) The relationship between temperature and COVID19 may be more complex than a linear/nonlinear monotonic relationship. Hence, we conclude that although the seasonality of COVID-19 transmission is not clear as of now, the transmission is expected to increase between the summer to winter seasons. Other meteorological variables, such as precipitation and relative humidity, might

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also play a role in changing the course of the transmission as they impact ambient air temperature.

11.3

Solution Pathways

Issues related to COVID-19 and water use are multisectoral and multifold. No easy and single solution can ease the pandemic’s stress on the already-stressed water utility sector. However, the overall goal of water management is simple—a resilient water infrastructure needs to be built that optimizes the supply and demand imbalance while also mitigating expected (e.g., extreme events triggered by climate change) and unexpected shocks (e.g., COVID-19) to the infrastructure. Although water resource system resiliency has been studied rigorously in the past within the context of natural or human-made disasters (e.g., Vogel and Bolognese 1995), the impact of COVID-like events is not yet well understood. Therefore, at the onset of the pandemic, we had limited knowledge about how the event will find its course in the future. However, over a year into the pandemic, we now understand many issues, and this new understanding can potentially help us prepare for similar unprecedented events in the future. Several solution-oriented approaches have recently been discussed in different media. For example, a recent article by Coley (2020) listed down some essential points that can help build resilient water utility systems. Such measures include developing a more robust and sophisticated resilience plan, increased use of digital technology in monitoring and operational tasks, regularly updating pricing and financial policies, purchasing commercial insurance products, and increased financial assistance prioritized for small systems and disadvantaged communities. In this subsection, the authors include their opinion on what can be done, acknowledging that each of these areas can often have complications and tradeoffs. Therefore, coordinated investigations considering a wide range of factors and scenarios need to be carried out to better understand the problem and its potential solutions. To safeguard our water resource systems in the event of such a pandemic, it is crucial to follow a holistic approach toward water infrastructure design and management. Centralized water distribution systems are very efficient in what they do; however, when there is an unprecedented level of stress in the system, it may experience a steep decline in its performance. Distributed water infrastructure is one way to tackle such disturbances, and they can be implemented together with the centralized systems (Kammeyer and Koehler 2020). Water infrastructure planning also needs to have room for flexibility and adaptability. There should be multiple fallback options in place. Even in developed countries, natural disasters such as cyclones and catastrophic flooding disrupt water distribution systems. Past experiences call for additional investment in infrastructure development and adapting to new and efficient water technologies. The design for such a system should consider safety, reliability, and resilience as the utmost priorities. Thus, science, engineering,

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management, economics, society—all these fields need to be combined while designing a resilient water infrastructure. In hydrology, the importance of incorporating societal interactions has been widely acknowledged (Sivapalan et al., 2012). Both natural and anthropogenic factors can impact the water availability component of the distribution system. Understanding the coupled dynamics of the human–water systems within the context of climate change should be a key area of research. New scientific and technological advances should be integrated into practice seamlessly. Advances in water infrastructure also include enhancement in monitoring capabilities. Wide-scale water surveillance and data collection should be standard practice. Wastewater monitoring, for example, gained significant popularity in identifying the community spread of COVID-19 (Web Source 4 n.d.). We need to expand the data collection efforts significantly. Information about the changes in water use, stress in the water distribution systems, mitigation efforts—all of these could be valuable in understanding the impact of a pandemic on water resource systems. Water demand changes in the event of a pandemic and the effects of the pandemic itself will vary across sectors, regions, demography, and time. Thus, understanding the pandemic’s spatiotemporal dynamics and its impact on water resource systems is crucial. Coupled system models could be valuable tools in this regard. A resilient water system should also include a pandemic preparedness plan. A survey conducted by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) revealed that almost two-thirds of the water utilities in the United States and Canada lack a pandemic preparedness plan (AWWA 2020). The impact of climate change on different hydrologic components has been a critical area of research. However, there are still many unanswered questions regarding how climate works and what will happen in the future, especially when the changes are nonstationary (Milly et al. 2008). Adding COVID to the fray further complicates the problem. Climate change has a significant role in changing water supply patterns, and we are quite likely to see more drastic impacts as climate change intensifies (Roy et al. 2012; Brown et al. 2013). This calls for interdisciplinary collaborative research on compound events. Understanding the impact of a pandemic on water resources, coupled with changing climate, should be a high-priority research area. These two events act on very different timescales; however, the consequence could be catastrophic when they concur; for example, Cyclone Amphan that hit West Bengal (India) in May 2020 when quarantining was at its peak. Events such as these are likely to be more catastrophic and difficult to manage with the intensification of climate change. It is imperative to maintain social equity when such a crisis hits. Our social system has many layers driven by economic status, caste, religion, etc. Not everyone, for example, has the luxury to even have access to fresh drinking water, let alone water for other sanitary needs. It is not a new problem, but it is getting worse with the growing population. “Clean Water and Sanitation” is one of the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations and is a significant step toward building resilient water infrastructure. The next-generation water workforce training should not just focus on technical skills but also on ethics. Diversity should be the backbone of this workforce.

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The importance of investment in the water sector is reasonably apparent, but the investment will be better utilized when there is capacity. Capacity building should not just focus on the engineering systems and the workforce but also on incorporating stakeholder inputs. It is crucial to strengthen industry-public sector-academia partnerships. Such partnerships can ensure a seamless transition of new scientific knowledge into application and practice. Investments should also focus on improving the quality of the work environment for workers. The quality of the work environment is particularly important when the workers could be exposed to highly infectious diseases. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, primary protective equipment for workers remains a distant dream. Therefore, we need to readjust our priorities. Mainstream media, as well as social media, plays a significant role in our daily lives. Hence, misinformation spread through these mediums can be detrimental. We need to build a transparent information dissemination system that is driven by science and is heavily vetted to remove hidden biases. Increasing public awareness is crucial, especially in pandemic-like situations. Outreach activities organized by legitimate agencies can go a long way in this regard. A multisectoral approach to build or upgrade water infrastructure starts with efficient leadership that combines political willingness and financial capabilities. Countries require visionary leaders who would emphasize on crossing the barriers between different sectors to build a resilient water system. Additionally, a leader’s role is crucial to assure a “safe water” supply to the consumers and support the utility staff during a pandemic. Leaders’ influence should extend beyond regional and national domains, and they must encourage international organizations to increase spending in WASH-type activities. COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of escalating the funds related to WASH-type projects at a national level. From our previous section, it is clear that access to safe and adequate water is crucial to maintain hygiene during a pandemic. Hence, the importance of large-scale water treatment facilities and an overall supply augmentation is vital. Toward this end, in addition to improving water quality and quantity, clean water laws would help to secure additional funding to enforce water security.

11.4

Concluding Remarks

The relative impact of COVID-19, with respect to the impact of climate change on water resource systems, is yet to be fully understood. Irrespective of whether the current pandemic further intensifies or subsides, a complete assessment of its influence on water use might take years or even a generation. So far, several studies have performed case-by-case impact assessments to relate the pandemic with water and environmental variables. Such analysis often restricts the larger picture and emphasizes the short-term impacts of COVID-19. One typical example is the reports regarding the impact of COVID-19 in reducing carbon dioxide emissions during lockdowns, thus contributing toward achieving a net-zero carbon goal. We note that

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the improvement of air quality during lockdowns was limited to a short time window, and the air quality rebounded to the “normal” states as soon as the restrictions were lifted (World Meteorological Organization 2020). Nevertheless, we acknowledge that several disruptions in the water supply were of temporary nature (i.e., operational). Hence, typically, the restoration of the water supply was not challenging. For example, the management could assure agitated maintenance staff by providing protective gears. However, long-term planning to avert the impact of unexpected events remains underestimated. Reports suggest that water distribution agencies are not planning for new water and wastewater treatment facilities to augment the increasing demand resulting from the pandemic. Similarly, operational issues have been given additional importance by the local media. These situations show the need for appropriate assessment of the disruptions in water supply resulting from COVID-19. Whether under- or over-estimated, it is certain that COVID-19 has taught the water sector that an unexpected but global crisis is a real threat, and it should look beyond regional and localized threats (e.g., broken pipes, leakages, power failure, extreme weather). An unexpected but global crisis is likely to affect water agencies proportionally in developed and developing countries. A global water crisis can substantially influence political turmoil, migration, food crisis and violent conflict. Therefore, together with climate change and population growth, a global water crisis triggered by a global pandemic should be considered a potential driver for human security. Further, a future pandemic may be completely different in characteristics compared to the current one. It could be a water-borne virus that would multiply the threats to water resources. Hence, comprehensive impact assessments are the keys to absorb the shock of another pandemic. To conclude, COVID19 has given the water sector one of its toughest challenges. However, it has also served as a warning sign. It has given us a unique opportunity to build on the existing infrastructure, transfer the lessons learned to future generations, revise our policies and recalibrate our priorities, and if we succeed, the water sector can sustain an even bigger shock.

References American Water Works Association (2020) The financial impact of the COVID-19 crisis on US drinking water utilities Bashir MF, Ma B, Komal B, Bashir MA, Tan D, Bashir M (2020) Correlation between climate indicators and COVID-19 pandemic in New York, USA. Sci Total Environ 728:138835 Brown TC, Foti R, Ramirez JA (2013) Projected freshwater withdrawals in the United States under a changing climate. Water Resour Res 49(3):1259–1276 Cherrie MP, Nichols G, Iacono GL, Sarran C, Hajat S, Fleming LE (2018) Pathogen seasonality and links with weather in England and Wales: a big data time series analysis. BMC Public Health 18(1):1–13 Coley H (2020) How the coronavirus pandemic is affecting water demand. Pacific Institute, Oakland. https://pacinst.org/how-the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-affecting-water-demand/

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Web Source 1 (n.d.). https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advicefor-public Web Source 2 (n.d.). https://www.census.gov/acs/www/data/data-tables-and-tools/data-profiles/ 2014/ Web Source 3 (n.d.) Sustainable development goals. Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) for all initiative. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/partnership/?p¼1665#:~:text¼The%20core% 20activity%20of%20WASH,water%20and%20sanitation%20infrastructure%20projects Web Source 4 (n.d.). https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/wastewatersurveillance.html World Health Organization (2020) Water, sanitation, hygiene, and waste management for SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19: interim guidance, 29 July 2020 (No. WHO/COVID19/IPC_WASH/2020.4) World Meteorological Organization (2020) Economic slowdown as a result of COVID is no substitute for climate action. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/economic-slowdownresult-of-covid-no-substitute-climate-action

Chapter 12

Education in the Time of a Pandemic Kurukundi Vaijayanti

Abstract Since 2000, there has been enormous progress in achieving the target of universal primary education. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reports that while the total enrolment rate in developing countries has reached 91%, the quality of education is lagging. The report says that six out of ten children are not achieving a minimum level of proficiency in reading and math. Goal 4 of UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to ensure that all children complete primary and secondary schooling by 2030. However, COVID-19 has added a sense of crisis to the existing inadequacies and inequities in our education system. Learning opportunities often remain closed for children from disadvantaged communities when schools are shut. A misalignment exists between resources and needs. Further, many innovations have emerged in tackling the issues around primary education in almost all countries, rich or poor, around the world. The chapter presents data collected during a pilot implemented by Akshara Foundation, an educational NGO, in the southern state of Karnataka in India. The data gathered presents the direct and indirect impact of COVID-19 on the education of children. Children studying in government schools are the worst hit during the pandemic. The uncertainties of school reopening, lack of clarity in guidelines on what needs to be done for engaging children in the educational process, and of course the great digital inequality have created a deeper crisis in education in general and more so for the most vulnerable sections of society. On the one hand, livelihoods are slowly rolling back, while on the other hand, children have been left in a nowhere situation, as most

Akshara Foundation is a Bangalore-based Public Charitable Trust with the mission to ensure that ‘every child is in school and learning well’. In the interest of reaching out to the vast numbers of students in government schools, Akshara has consciously adopted the approach of comprehensive, scalable, replicable, and cost-effective education solutions. The Foundation demonstrates the efficacy of the interventions through pilots that are based on ground level insights. Thanks to Akshara Foundation for sharing the data. K. Vaijayanti (*) Akshara Foundation, Bangalore, Karnataka, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_12

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of the parents went get back to their respective occupations. Many children were left behind without sufficient adult supervision while their parents were out doing their jobs. Schools, in general, were also perceived as a safe place for children to be during a substantial period of the day with children provided with midday meals and engaged in learning activities. While the pandemic has thrown many challenges, current times also demand gathering of evidence from the grass roots to understand the damage caused by the pandemic. The chapter ends by presenting the innovative pilot Akshara Foundation implemented in Southern India as a possible solution when schools are closed and also after the reopening of schools. Keywords Pandemic · Digital learning · Primary education · Blended learning · Learning outcomes

12.1

Context

COVID-19 has created multiple challenges for every country in the world. The pandemic can only be slowed by physical or social distancing and for a substantial length of time. In other words, we will have a prolonged period of practicing preventive measures like social distancing, high levels of hygiene, masking, and other safety precautions. The prolonged period of absence will impact multiple facets of school education and thus makes prudent sense to think on addressing these issues. Basic schooling is central to human security because illiteracy and innumeracy are forms of insecurity in themselves. Direct reduction of one form of deep-rooted insecurity forms the immediate contribution of a successful primary education. Basic education leads to economic and social mobility and helps get gainful employment. Education is often considered an equaliser. As argued by Sen, whenever educational opportunities have been good in India (like in high-level technical education and specialised skill formation), Indians—with the appropriate educational background—have been able utilise global facilities. Further, education has positive implications. People with education understand their legal rights and have a political voice. Education enables effective participation in the political process and helps push forward women’s empowerment, improve health and nutrition, and reduce infant mortality rates. Thus, any disruption in the education process will have serious negative consequences, direct and indirect, on human security issues.

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School Closures in the Time of COVID

United Nations (UNDP Report 2020) reports the world having experienced the largest disruption of education in history owing to the pandemic, and affecting 94% of the world’s student population. COVID-19 restrictions closed schools in more than 190 countries to prevent the spread of the virus. World Bank reports even before the COVID-19 pandemic that a learning crisis had been experienced the world over. India was no exception. In the Indian context, the Annual Status of Education Report surveys year-onyear have been pointing out that learning levels in language and numeracy are not at the grade-appropriate level in primary schools. In Learning Poverty: Global Alliance to Monitor Learning, the World Bank (2019) reports that over half of all 10-year-old children cannot read and understand an age-appropriate story in low- and middleincome countries. The World Bank (Education 2019) states that being in school is not the same thing as learning. Further, literature highlights disadvantaged children have the worst access to schooling, the highest dropout rates, and the largest learning deficits. Another World Bank report (2019) says COVID-19 pandemic may make education outcomes even worse. The pandemic has shocked all education systems and the prediction is that the damage will become even more severe as the health emergency translates into a deep global recession. UNICEF (March 2021) assessed the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the educational attainment of school-aged children in South Asian countries and reports that around 420 million children in South Asia are out of school (March 2021). The report indicated grim results for all the countries, with a significant COVID-19 impact on maternal and child mortality, education, and the economy. Many studies have indicated that school closures will have a significant negative impact on the learning levels of children, and children with socioeconomic disadvantages will be affected more severely. A study (Kuhfeld et al. 2020) projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19, forecasts that students will likely return to schools with greater variability in academic skills. Loss in educational attainment can occur in multiple ways, such as loss of learning time or loss of already acquired learning due to school closures, loss of schooling-induced socialisation, and the academic learning that children would have acquired had schools remained open.

12.3

COVID-19 Impact on Primary Education

India has one of the largest public schooling systems in the world and shutting schools for maintaining social distancing amidst the COVID-19 was the most logical solution to limit community transmission. However, the prolonged closure has had a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable students in public

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schooling. Before the pandemic, 32 million children, most of whom belong to the socially disadvantaged strata in the country, were already out of school as highlighted by NSSO-2014 (Social and Rural Research Institute 2014). Many studies indicate further deepening of the crisis due to COVID-19. The pandemic has increased the already existing digital inequalities in the country. Like many other governments, the Government of India took several measures for preventing COVID transmission. As a first step, the Union Government declared the closure of all educational institutions in March 2020. Starting with a day long nationwide curfew in March 2020, the country observed several lockdowns (lockdown 6.0 so far) intermittently to fight the pandemic but educational institutions remained closed continuously. In Karnataka, primary schools were hit the hardest as many online teaching–learning measures were implemented for grades 6 and above, and since the beginning of 2021, the government has reopened schools for grades 6 and above. The students studying in grades 1–5 were distributed textbooks and workbooks to replicate the academic activities of school at home and not get hampered during the lockdown period. The outbreak of COVID-19 created many negative impacts on education like hampering educational activities, suspension of classroom transactions, and delay in evaluation and admission processes. The most critical negative impact has been not just loss of learn during the academic year but loss of refreshing the learning of the previous year. As many researchers predict students would face many difficulties in resuming schooling after a huge gap. School closures forced teachers and students to suddenly transition from face-to-face learning to online learning. In the government school context, many students have limited or no internet access and cannot afford the support of computers, laptops, or mobile phones in their homes. As cited by many studies, online teaching–learning has created a digital divide among students. The lockdown has hit poor students hardest as most of them are unable to join online learning. Thus, online teaching–learning during the pandemic enhances the gap between rich and poor and urban and rural demographies (Jena 2020). Research on digital inequality shows only 22% of the Indian population with access to a digital device. Moreover, Vaijayanti (2019) highlights only 20% of students with access to smartphones were found using the digital space for educational purposes. Globally, in the last decade and a half, education technology (EdTech) has demonstrated significant potential for increasing the learning outcomes for students, and India is no exception. The expanding role of mobile phones in social connectedness and economic development has been tremendous and has been narrowing various gaps. There are examples like the ‘Grameenphone’ model, one of the earliest innovative interventions. The programme was created to help rural Bangladeshis in improving their livelihood by lending money to rural women with a credit history of buying a phone. These women leased phone time to villagers and with the money earned the women repaid the loans borrowed for animal husbandry. The programme

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was later expanded within the country and replicated in many other countries like Rwanda, Nigeria, and Uganda (Goggin and Clark 2009). In the early 2000s, Roshan, the largest telecommunications provider in Afghanistan, eased people’s lives by starting a mobile phone banking service when over 97% of the population in Afghanistan had poor access to a traditional bank account or financial services. The services began through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) mechanism as the majority of the population were illiterate and texting was not a viable option (Satchu 2009). Later in 2008, Roshan partnered with Vodafone to implement M-Pesa1 in Afghanistan to make money transactions cost-effective. In Nigeria in 2001, where people had limited access to landline connections (about two landline connections per 1000 people), a mobile phone network was a boon for the rural economy. The farming season was crucial as the entire business was dependent on knowing the market price. They travelled long distances at a time when road infrastructure was poor; the arrival of mobile phones has not only reduced the cost of travel but also the time lost on travelling. The larger impact of mobile coverage was on the grain price dispersion for markets by improving market information which was otherwise inaccessible due to the poor quality of roads and long-distance road connectivity (Jenny 2009). Found similar impacts in a study on fish markets in India. Along with a reduction in price dispersion across markets, there was a significant decline in wastage and resulted in an increase in fishermen’s profits by 8% and a decline in consumer prices by 4%. A report on the impact of mobile telephony (Deloitte et al. 2012) finds that doubling of Internet data services through smartphones and tablets leads has increased the GDP per capita growth rate by 0.5 percentage points. The new economy brought about through mobile apps has made transactions smoother for the customer as well as for the service provider and has reduced higher manufacturing investments like labour and time. A report on innovations (Kudva et al. 2017) predicts that over 500 million first-time internet users to come online via their mobile phones in the next five years in India. In the social sphere, examples of improving education and health care service delivery through the use of mobile phones are widely seen. Learning through mobile devices is more popular because of easy access while a person is on the move. For children and youth, gaming apps or subject-specific apps are exciting and help a student with content creation. In the clinical field, the devices provide long-distance counselling services, manage client records, picture archiving and communication systems, laboratory information systems, and significantly provides online time for searching for medical information and making clinical decisions (Mosa et al. 2012).

1

In 2007, Vodafone launched M-Pesa, the largest mobile money transfer network in Kenya and Tanzania providing microfinancing services that allow users to deposit money and do other transactions by paying a small fee (Wikipedia).

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Many applications like IVRS, SMS, video counselling, email chat, social networking websites, text messaging, and apps are used for such service delivery. In rural India, telemedicine is gaining popularity and many startups are entering rural areas to provide support and knowledge in the medical sector (Chitra and Ayyar 2016). Telemedicine service reduces barriers for rural women in discussing reproductive and other health issues, with the service being available round the clock. The app-based healthcare service has linked urban doctors with rural patients as well and supports women patients to pay for care through mobile top-ups. Gramvaani (n. d.), a social tech company, provides healthcare knowledge for rural residents through the use of mobile phones. They mobilise communities using voice technologies to demand health delivery infrastructure. Education and discussion programmes are part of the awareness strategy to create demand for quality care.2 While all these research studies have created positive vibes around the online/ digital platforms, the gaps of learning loss due to school closures in countries like India where 70% of the children are studying in public schools in rural areas, the challenges are manifold. With the evolution of screen technology, an opportunity for learning, navigation, and recreation has taken advantage of the real world. Research has proved screen-time technology leading to learner motivation, better educational outcomes, and self-efficacy (Liu et al. 2006) and its appropriate use enhances cognitive and social skills (Kirkorian et al. 2008; Adams 2011). Digital learning supports a child’s critical thinking skills, listening skills, and creative skills. Besides, some studies show significant or less impact of technology on literacy outcomes (Piper et al. 2016). Finds the limited impact of technology on educational outcomes has been because of the low level of technology implementation in classroom instruction. Roschelle et al. (2000) opine that the benefits of technology can be harnessed if rooted in a broader education reform movement that includes improvements in teacher training, curriculum, student assessment, and a school’s capacity for change. The educational advantages are well researched; however, another school of thought argues high digital screens exposure may result in adverse effects on the child and expresses concern over developmental appropriateness. Excessive screen time affects cognitive skills, reduces physical activities, builds behavioural disorders, and creates health disorders like obesity (Thomas et al. 2014; Plowman et al. 2011; Tandon et al. 2011). A study carried out in India (Muralidharan et al. 2019) found that students who used an EdTech product in an afterschool centre increased their mathematics scores by twice the amount as compared to a randomly assigned control group. In Punjab, Pakistan, a low-cost EdTech product implemented in government schools doubled the learning gains in mathematics and science (Beg et al. 2019). Therefore, governments around the world looked at digital solutions as an immediate response to COVID-19-induced school closures. While this may be a reality of the future, the challenge is one of device availability. The survey conducted

2

http://www.gramvaani.org/

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by Akshara Foundation across 15 villages in 2020 shows smartphones access at home being an issue. Further, even if the family owns a smartphone, will a student get access to sufficient screen time remains a question. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed large inequalities in technological access, such as between rich and poor, rural and urban, girls and boys, across and within countries. Online platforms were first to be rolled out for enabling children to continue learning from home. Indeed, they are generally the most effective learning modality in getting some form of learning up and running. However, they have the lowest reach. In some countries, online platforms reach less than 10% of the population. Reasons for low reach include lack of electricity, reliable Internet connectivity, as well as sufficient devices for children in the household: particularly, devices with good functionality and capabilities, and large enough screen sizes.

12.4

The Challenges When Schools Are Closed

What has the child missed because of closure of schools? They range from missing out on midday meals to the socio-psychological and physical routines that school offered. In most of the households where both the parents are at work as daily wagers or in the unorganised sector, the child will be left behind without adult support. UNICEF reports that even before the pandemic, children’s exposure to violence was widespread. The pandemic has worsened child security. Limited contact with informal support networks such as friends, teachers, childcare workers, extended family, and community members has left children and families more vulnerable. Informal discussions with parents during Akshara Foundation’s pilot reveals school form a secure space and school closure is one of the major negative impacts on children in these COVID times. In the initial days, school lockdown was widely accepted as a necessary measure. However, many researchers, teachers, parents, and policymakers acknowledge the learning losses for students and the resulting educational inequality (Azevedo et al. 2020; UNDP Report 2020). In India, the lockdown began with a complete closure of activities for a month and then escalated. Almost an entire academic year has been lost. The opening-up only addressed the economy and livelihood issues. Schools remained closed. While the country moved towards the somewhat old normal, education still grapples with alternative solutions. Initially, digital learning seemed a distinct possibility, but access to digital learning remains a challenge.

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Blended Solutions

The loss of learning—refreshing learnings of the previous grade as well as the lost opportunity for learn in the present grade—will create a cumulative loss over the years, impacting not only the academic performance of students in their school years but also their adult lives. Many studies (Azim Premji University 2021; The Center for Research on Education Outcomes 2020) have speculated that the cumulative loss over the years will impact both the academic performance of students in their school years as well as their adult lives. A rapid survey conducted by Oxfam India (2020) highlights that the impact of prolonged school closure will deprive children of learning as a reliance on digital modes alone may not be an effective solution. Akshara Foundation’s household survey on access to smartphones, their use, and perceptions about them in households in rural Karnataka addresses some of the gaps in data. The preparatory research was conducted before launching Akshara’s digital mathematics learning app called Building Blocks that takes learning to the home. Until teaching children in classrooms in government primary schools resumes, the strategy of engaging students at home should continue. ‘Home as a learning space’ with distancing norms and an adult playing the role of a teacher with an individual student or a small group of students is the only option. Thus, Akshara Foundation designed a pilot programme which included blended learning strategies. The programme design looked at solutions by leveraging the available material in the public education system such as textbooks and workbooks provided by the state government and the digital content approved by the government and uploaded on its DIKSHA3 platform by the Ministry of Education.4 Akshara Foundation has developed digital content which has been approved and uploaded on DIKSHA for practising grade-appropriate math in the form of games. Blending these two content streams—digital and non-digital—Akshara Foundation designed a programme called Paryaya Ganitha Kalika Yojane, or Alternative Math Learning Programme, currently being piloted during the COVID months.

3

Launched by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, DIKSHA serves as the National Digital Infrastructure for Teachers. It helps enable, accelerate, and amplify solutions in the realm of teacher education. It aids teachers to learn and train themselves, for which assessment resources are made available. It also helps teachers create training content, in-class resources, assessment aids, and connect with the teacher community. Paraphrased from: https://www.india.gov.in/spotlight/diksha-national-digital-infrastructureteachers 4 Ministry of Human Resource Development/Ministry of Education, Government of India.

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The Pilot

The pilot covered 15 villages in Nanjangud Block in Mysore district in Karnataka. The programme targeted 240 students enrolled in government schools spread across these selected villages. The Paryaya Ganitha Kalika Yojane had the objective of supporting the students with math learning during the pandemic at home. Importance was assigned to the process of how the home could turn into a learning space and how could be exploited as an opportunity until schools reopen. The programme provided the device—a smartphone—preloaded with math content to children and tracked their learning through workbooks. The digital content was provided as math practice games from Akshara Foundation’s math app that enabled children to reinforce math learning. As a part of the pilot the 240 students from grades 4 to 5—16 students from each of the selected villages—were enrolled in the programme. However, by the end of the programme, only 234 students were found participating in it. Around five students had migrated from their respective villages. During the pilot, a household survey was conducted and data was collected from 200 households. Nearly, 41% of the students came from the Scheduled Caste community, 23% from Scheduled Tribes, and 30% from Other Backward Castes. Sixty-four percent of the fathers and 30% of the mothers were illiterate. Interestingly, 66% of the mothers had passed at least their matriculation. The data on household employment shows that a majority (65% of fathers) of the household members were employed as daily wagers with 72% of the mothers being homemakers, indicating the impact of the pandemic and lockdown being severe on the families and generating extreme levels of livelihood insecurities. All the respondents did mention that the pandemic has created severe financial distress. Most of the parents (49%) reported that their children have been spending an enormous amount of time either watching television or playing with their friends in the village. Almost all the parents felt that but for the pilot on blended learning implemented by Akshara Foundation, the pandemic would have created loss of an entire academic year for the children. A small percentage of students was enrolled for paid tuition adding additional financial burden on families. The strategy followed working with the selected students individually and track their learning process during a 4- to 5-month period. The students were selected based on their availability during the programme period and their readiness to participate. The next section presents the key ingredients required for creating an enabling ecosystem for effective implementation of the programme. The pedagogy designed for the programme followed the curriculum suggested by government and the syllabus prescribed in the textbooks for grades 4 and 5. Existing assets like textbooks and workbooks along with digital content were incorporated within the pedagogy.

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The programme followed the Dual Lesson Plan pedagogy. As the name suggested, there were two sets of math lesson plans. One allowed the student to follow the workbook and another enabled the student to practise math on the smartphone. The Dual Lesson Plan was aligned to the curriculum suggested by the state government and therefore allowed the student to follow the syllabus appropriate to her/his grade. One of the Dual Lesson Plans was mapped to the workbooks called Suvega designed and provided by the Government of Karnataka. The main features of the math textbooks and workbooks in Karnataka are that they provide students with graded learning activities, facilitate the drawing of inferences by understanding the concepts, provide enough opportunities to understand the new concepts, and help apply students’ mathematical knowledge in their day-to-day affairs and during different circumstances. During the COVID months, the government had ensured that each student had a textbook and workbook in her/his hands. However, in July 2020, the Central Government condensed the syllabus by 30% as a response measure to the COVID situation, and guidelines were given as per the state governments. Akshara’s lesson plans were developed based on these guidelines. Further, the mapping of the syllabus was carried out. The lesson plans for the Suvega transaction were developed for the pilot. The digital content developed by Akshara Foundation encompassed in its math app, Building Blocks, had already been approved by Department of State Educational Research and Training Karnataka and has been uploaded on the DIKSHA platform. The QR codes of the same have been embedded in the textbooks that have emerged as Energized Textbooks. The content is grade-compatible, aligns with policy guidelines, follows the mathematics syllabus, completely meshes with the textbook, has a problem-solving focus, and takes the concepts forward in a linear, systematic manner. Akshara Foundation’s second set of lesson plans was developed by mapping the games with the condensed syllabus mentioned above. Lesson plans for the digital content transactions were developed for the pilot. The smartphones lent to students have the Building Blocks’ games preloaded in them. On any given day the Field Facilitators, recruited and trained by Akshara Foundation, would deliver a Dual Lesson Plan that included the content and instructional guidelines of both the digital and non-digital lessons. The student was engaged in the learning process suggested in the Dual Lesson Plans. The teaching–learning resources were developed for both the Field Facilitators/ instructors and the students. The learning resources for students included a workbook, a square line notebook to practise the math problems, and a smartphone with preloaded digital content. Akshara developed a Teacher’s Guide that mapped the condensed syllabus, Dual Lesson Plans for each of the concepts prescribed in the syllabus, and the transactional modalities. Each of the Field Facilitators was provided with a copy of Suvega, the Teacher’s Guide, and a smartphone. Each Facilitator was provided with nine smartphones (eight phones for the students use and one for the Facilitator). The smartphones were preloaded with digital content from Building Blocks which has a

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child lock feature for the Facilitator to access the content without children getting hold of the data. The pandemic has not only challenged the opening of schools but created loss of learning and knowledge acquired by the students in the previous academic year. Addressing the problem, a strategy was developed that gave additional, regular inputs for students in the form of weekly worksheets. The worksheet enabled the students to practise math problems and follow specifics of Suvega and the digital content. The Facilitators distributed the worksheets to the fourth and fifth graders every Friday and Saturday, respectively. Students were expected to solve these worksheets with the help of their parents and siblings or on their own over the weekend. The Facilitators corrected these worksheets, documented the scores, and reported their reflections to the Field Programme Manager. The process ensured a comprehensive, continuous evaluation of students’ learning, along with involvement of the family. A Field Manager was appointed by Akshara Foundation for leading the implementation team. The Field Facilitators were identified from the local community. Priority was given to women with the aim to showcase the project as rural women’s empowerment and livelihoods project. The Field Facilitators implemented the programme in each of the villages. Thirteen out of 15 of the Field Facilitators were women. All the Field Facilitators had an educational qualification of grade 12 and above, some of them had completed their post-graduation and some a diploma in education. The pilot envisaged that these field staff would track 16 students each and coach them one-to-one at the students’ respective homes using the blended pedagogical tools of digital content and workbooks. The Field Manager managed these 15 Field Facilitators. He was responsible for addressing field-level challenges and undertaking administration-related troubleshooting. All 15 Field Facilitators received a preliminary orientation course about the project on how to run the project and their key role in ensuring success. The Akshara Foundation team instilled in them the need for assiduity, commitment, integrity, and adherence to COVID-related safety precautions. The team took the Facilitators to the homes of the children they would visit and familiarised them with their wards and their parents before the programme’s induction training.

12.7

The Process of Engaging Students

The programme designed a strategy wherein the Facilitators would be prepared before visiting the homes of the students. The preparation process included tasks like preparing daily plans, preloading the content suggested by the weekly plan, and reviewing the Suvega component of problem-solving that the students had done on that particular day. The Facilitators would consult the Akshara Foundation Resource Team if there were any challenges regarding pedagogy and take suggestions.

Day-3

Day-1

• Plan and prepare for day's engagement • Lesson plan -1- Hand over smartphone for Building Blocks' pracce • Lesson plan 2- Homework with Suvega • Collect smartphones & sanise

Engage Grade 4 Students

• Plan and prepare for day's engagement • Lesson plan -1- Hand over smartphone for Building Blocks' pracce • Lesson plan 2- Homework with Suvega • Collect smartphones & sanise

Students Day-2

Engage Grade 5

Engage Grade 4 Students

• Plan and prepare for day's engagement • Lesson plan -1- Hand over smartphone for Building Blocks' pracce • Lesson plan 2- Homework with Suvega • Collect smartphones & sanise

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All Facilitators followed the weekly timetable. Every alternate day, they would visit the houses of grade 4 students and grade 5 students. They would follow safety guidelines like masking, sanitising the device, and sanitising hands, and spend quality instruction time with the students.

12.8

Process of Engaging Parents, Teachers, and the Community

The programme designed a multifaceted strategy of community engagement, and got inaugurated at the Gram Panchayat level in the presence of community members. The Field Facilitators and the Field Manager met the Head Teachers and the teachers of the concerned schools at least once a fortnight to communicate the progress of the programme. The Field Facilitators met the parents once a week for discussion on the learning levels of their wards. As mentioned above, the Field Facilitators assigned the worksheet task to the family, thus allowing for engaging the home as a learning space more effectively.

12.9

Learning Outcomes

The programme had envisaged learning outcomes as one of the metrics for evaluation. Embedded in the strategy of assessment was a component of assessing students for determining their learning status and working with them towards improving their learning outcomes. The tests developed were based on competencies that the student had acquired in the previous academic year (during the non-COVID year). The 40-min written tests, tested the learning levels of the students, and were conducted at the beginning of the programme. The tests developed were based on the following assumptions: • Due to COVID, schools were shut and learning levels would not be at the gradeappropriate level. • Students would have learnt the concepts suggested by the state syllabus in the grade before the current level. The test administration was customised to COVID protocols. The tests were administered at the student’s home adhering to test conditions, including discouraging family to interfere during the assessment process. The Field Facilitators were trained in the significance of assessments, the assumptions, and the nature of the tests. They were also trained in the test administration process and evaluation of test papers. The assessment was administered to all the students in December 2020. A total of 240 students from grades 4 to 5 took part in the baseline test. By the time, the endline test was administered around six students had migrated from the villages. The test

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scores were analysed and the table below presents the learning outcomes of grades 4 and 5 across different bands. Distribution of students by score bands in math baseline and endline comparisons.

Score bands Zero Below 35 35–59 60–85 Above 85 Total

Grade 4 N ¼ 110 Baseline % of students 3 (3) 61 (67) 21 (23) 15 (17) 0 (0) 100 (110)

Endline % of students 0 (0) 3 (3) 11 (12) 46 (51) 40 (44) 100 (110)

Grade 5 N ¼ 124 Baseline % of students 2 (2) 44 (54) 31 (39) 15 (19) 8 (10) 100 (124)

Endline % of students 0 (0) 1 (1) 4 (5) 35 (44) 60 (74) 100 (124)

Source: Field survey # Data in parentheses is absolute number of students

The Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) in Karnataka has benchmarked a score of 35% as the pass percentage. Scores between 35% and 59% are considered as second class and 60% and 85% as first class. Scores above 85% enter the distinction band. Keeping this as a criterion, the learning outcomes were analysed to find out the impact of the blended learning effort in the pilot geography. In grade 4, while 114 students enrolled in the programme initially, we have considered the students (i.e., 110) who participated both in the baseline and endline assessments. Similarly, 126 students from grade 5 were enrolled in the programme, but we found that 124 students participated in both the baseline and the endline assessments. Analysing the data of students who participated in both the baseline and endline, against the benchmark set by the Secondary School Leaving Certificate, we find that around 64% of grade 4 students (70 out of 110) and 46% (56 out of 124) of grade 5 were unable to score 35% and therefore could NOT pass the test based on grade 3 and grade 4 competencies at the baseline. However, the pilot programme seems to have made a significant difference in the learning process of the participants. The above table clearly shows that 3% of grade 4 and 1% of grade 5 could not score marks required for the pass percentage. The percentage of students attaining first class in grade 4 had jumped from 17% to 51% by the endline assessment. A substantial percentage of students (44%) gained distinction in grade 4 by the endline assessment when previously in the baseline none of them fell in that band. It was found that a substantial percentage of grade 5 students moved to higher score bands of first class (from 19% to 44%) and the distinction category (from 10% to 74%) by the time of the endline assessment. The pilot programme made a noticeable difference in the learning process of students in mathematics. A competency-wise analysis of grade 4 students shows that there has been a major learning loss due to the pandemic for fourth graders. Around three students studying in grade 4 could not attempt any of the questions given in the baseline test. The test administrators reported that students were struggling to read the instructions

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and they felt that lack of language proficiency impacted the test taken by the students at the time of the baseline. The fifth graders were relatively better in learning as compared to the fourth graders at the base line. Informal discussions with the Field Facilitators revealed that many children struggled to read and comprehend the instructions given in the question paper, indicating students’ lag in language proficiency. The teachers worked with students on language proficiency as well, for students to comprehend the math problems.

12.10

Concluding Observations

COVID-19 has added a strong sense of crisis to the existing inadequacies and inequities in our already resource-deprived education system. Learning opportunities often remain closed for children from disadvantaged communities when schools are shut. Education forms the worst affected sector during the pandemic. The uncertainty on schools opening has led to many innovations around engaging students meaningfully in learning. Evidently, many innovations have emerged in tackling the issues around primary education in almost all countries, rich or poor, around the world. The Paryaya Ganitha Kalika Yojane pilot demonstrates a blended teaching model during these unprecedented COVID times and beyond. The learning outcomes at the baseline show that the learning loss in math has been severe amongst students of grades 4 and 5. While testing for math skills, we found language skills as a huge challenge for both the fourth and fifth graders as none of them could comprehend the question statements related to word problems during the baseline assessment. However, the pilot demonstrates that a blended pedagogy could be the way forward with close monitoring of the learning process of children. The endline results are encouraging and suggest that the pilot could be replicated. The system must address several challenges, starting from children dropping out from school, to starting old normal ways with COVID protocols. The learning loss in language and math will hit the system badly unless some emergency measures are taken to arrest the Learning Emergencies. While the model focuses on processes and possibilities in math education, the same could be adapted to other subjects as well. Catch-up programmes should be designed for children to recap on what has been lost during the COVID year and prepare them for the grade that they should be attending in the academic year 2021. The pilot gave insights into issues of human insecurities during the pandemic amongst the socially and economically deprived communities. While household members view education as an equaliser and enabling them to achieve social and economic mobility, a pandemic of this nature will have a long-lasting negative impact on their lives and livelihoods. Parents unanimously felt that some alternate arrangements needs to be made to ensure a continuum in the education process during these unprecedented times. Programmes and policies should tackle the threats and vulnerabilities caused by the pandemic and ensure comprehensive, long-lasting, and trans-sectoral coverage. The policies and programmes should be built on people’s resilience so that today’s crisis will not hinder tomorrow’s progress.

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References Adams MJ (2011) Technology for developing children’s language and literacy: bringing speech recognition to the classroom. The Joan Ganz Cooney Centre at Sesame Workshop, New York. Retrieved from http://joanganzcooneycenter.org/Reports-30.html Azevedo JP, Hasan A, Goldemberg D, Iqbal SA, Geven K (2020) Simulating the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on schooling and learning outcomes: a set of global estimates. Policy Research Working Paper No. 9284. World Bank, Washington, DC Azim Premji University (2021, February) Loss of Learning during the Pandemic, field studies in education Beg S, Lucas AM, Halim W, Saif U (2019) Beyond the basics: improving post-primary content delivery through classroom technology. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA Chitra R, Ayyar R (2016) Smartphone, apps come to aid healthcare in rural India, 2016. The Economics Times. Telecom.com; https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ smartphone-apps-come-to-aid-healthcare-in-rural-india/55806286 Deloitte, GSMA, CISCO (2012) A GSM report. What is the impact of mobile telephony on economic growth? Education (2019) The education crisis: being in school is not the same as learning Goggin G, Clark J (2009) Mobile phones and community development: a contact zone between media and citizenship. Dev Pract 19(4/5):585–597 Gramvaani (n.d.) Mobile Vaani: a social media platform for rural India. http://www.gramvaani.org/ Jena PK (2020) Impact of COVID-19 on education in India. Int J Curr Res 12(7):12582–12586 Jenny A (2009) Does digital divide or provide? The impact of cell phones on grain markets in, Niger Kirkorian HL, Wartella EA, Anderson DR (2008) Media and young children’s learning. Futur Child 18(1):39–61 Kudva R, Tandan M, Misra A, Nautiyal S (2017) Innovating for the Next Half Billion. Omidyar Network Kuhfeld M et al (2020) Projecting the potential impacts of COVID 19 school closures on academic achievement. Working paper no. 200-226, Brown University, version May 2020 Liu M, Hsieh P, Cho Y, Schallert D (2006) Middle school students’ self-efficacy, attitude, and achievement in a computer-enhanced problem-based learning environment. J Interact Learn Res 17(3):225–242 Mosa ASM et al (2012) A systematic review of healthcare applications for smartphones. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 12:67 Muralidharan K, Singh A, Ganimian AJ (2019) Disrupting education? Experimental evidence on technology-aided instruction in India. Am Econ Rev 109(4):1426–1460 Oxfam India (2020) Status report-government and private schools during COVID-19 findings of rapid surveys by Oxfam India Piper B et al (2016) Does technology improve reading outcomes? Comparing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of ICT interventions for early grade reading in Kenya. Int J Educ Dev 49:204–214 Plowman L, McPake J, Stephen C (2011) The technologisation of childhood? Young children and technology in the home. Child Soc 24(1):63–74 Roschelle JM et al (2000) Changing how and what children learn in school with computer-based technologies. Futur Child 10(2):76–10 Satchu S (2009) Rebuilding a shattered nation: the impact of wireless communication and mobile banking in Afghanistan. Published in Proparco’s magazine titled ‘what are the economic and Social impacts of the Mobile phones sector in developing countries? Issue No: 4 Social and Rural Research Institute (2014) National sample survey estimation of out-of-school children in the age 6–13 in India Tandon PS et al (2011) Preschoolers’ total daily screen time at home and by type of childcare. J Pediatr 158(2):297–300

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The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2020) Estimates of learning loss in the 2019– 2020 school year. Stanford University The World Bank (2019) The education crisis: being in school is not the same as learning—January 22, 2019 Thomas et al (2014) Teacher perceptions of mobile phones in the classroom. Presented in International Society for Technology in Education Conference, Atlanta, GA UNDP Report (2020) Policy brief: education during COVID-19 and beyond, 2020. https://www. undp.org/sustainable-development-goals#quality-education UNICEF (2021, March) Direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 pandemic and response in South Asia Vaijayanti K (2019) Smartphones as educational tools: a reality check from rural India. In: Technology in education, the gap between policy and praxis. Centre for communication and Development studies, Pune. www.digital equality.in

Chapter 13

Implications on Gender During the Pandemic Channamma Kambara, S. Manasi, Malini L. Tantri, and G. Shivakumar Nayka

Abstract The Novel Coronavirus has hardly left any corner of the society and economy untouched. Apparently, response to the pandemic across the globe and its impact on society and economy are clearly dependent on the pre-existing social economic and cultural setup of the nation. Among others, the fear of the pandemic reversing the state of human security achieved in the past two decades, stays strong, specifically the one associated with gender. In this context, the chapter taking the case of women working in the formal sector and those living in slums of informal settlement attempts to locate the gender response to human security in the urban setup of Bengaluru, India. The analysis based on field insights backed by secondary literature helps us to argue that gender dimensions of pandemic and its response indeed need due acknowledgement of the situation and also sensitization to prevent its multiplier effect in due course of time. Keywords Gender · Pandemic · COVID-19 · Online teaching · Sanitation

13.1

Background

The Covid-19 pandemic started in the last leg of 2019 has already led to social and economic losses all over the world, with a large number of jobs, lives, and incomes being lost. Global economic growth is projected to decline by 2% and trade by as C. Kambara (*) · S. Manasi Centre for Research in Urban Affairs, Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. L. Tantri Centre for Economic Studies and Policy, Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected] G. Shivakumar Nayka Grassroots Research and Advocacy Movement (GRAAM), Bangalore, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_13

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much as 32% (World Trade Organization [WTO]). As the pandemic has not shown signs of disappearing anytime soon, agencies all over the world have made predictions of long-term socioeconomic effects due to the virus. Several of these predictions point toward Covid-19’s worsening effects on already existing gender inequalities all over the world in the health, economic, and other social sectors. Globally, women make up more than 70% of all health workers who have been in the frontline combating the virus daily. In countries of high development, women make up more than 85% of nursing personnel, and are at significant risk of contracting the virus from taking care of existing Covid-19 patients (Rivera et al. 2020). As health resources and funds are being increasingly diverted toward providing Covid-19related services and developing a vaccine, the resources to provide essential contraceptive and reproductive services to women have also reduced; UNDP estimates that around 47 million women will lose access to essential reproductive services, including 18 million in Latin America and the Caribbean alone (United Nations 2020a). UNFPA in April 2020 predicted that a few months of lockdown, coupled with lack of access to reproductive services could lead to more than seven million unintended pregnancies. Studies during the Ebola and Zika epidemics in Africa found that due to health resources being diverted toward emergency responses to these diseases, maternal mortality rates increased more than 70% in West Africa, a region which already has amongst the highest such mortality ratios in the world (Wenham et al. 2020). In India, since the lockdown was announced in March, pregnant women have faced issues in accessing skilled medical care due to health care staff being diverted toward combating Covid-19, because of which institutional deliveries have dropped by 43% (Amnesty International 2020). Another cause for the increase in unintended pregnancies has been the rise in domestic violence on account of women being confined in their homes due to nationwide lockdowns, usually with the people inflicting the violence on them. The UK Institute for Fiscal Studies found that during the first nationwide lockdown in France, there was a rise in domestic violence cases by 33%, and in Australia by more than 75%. The economic instability that has been caused by Covid-19 could increase the risks of child marriage for women, as marriages continue to be seen amongst certain families as a means to financial stability for their daughters. On the other hand, forced early marriages do increase the risks of girls facing domestic violence, further ruining their education and economic prospects (CARE 2020). Due to the nature of the virus, alternate arrangements such as keeping children with the elderly or other family members have also been discouraged, leaving working mothers with few alternate options (Alon et al. 2020). In addition to this, women occupy lower positions of employment such as domestic work, especially migrant women and those with low qualifications, which makes them more susceptible to economic shocks (EIGE 2020), and they are over-represented in self-employment and small businesses which are fragile (De Paz et al. 2020). Close to 19 million domestic workers in Latin America have been laid off without any social or legal benefits (Sprechmann 2020), while travel restrictions and growing xenophobia have restricted domestic workers from Southeast Asian countries from traveling overseas to work and support their families (CARE 2020). Data from the UN find that during the first month of the pandemic, around 740 million women who work in the informal sector saw their incomes

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reduce by 60%, while 1 in 4 self-employment women lost their jobs compared to 1 in 5 men (Azcona et al. 2020). Moreover, 72% of domestic workers who were studied lost their jobs, 80% of whom were women. Industries most affected by the pandemic such as the hospitality, restaurant, and retail industry, happen to mostly employ women. The UK Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that women are 33% more likely to work in sectors such as retail and hospitality, which have been heavily affected or shut down due to the pandemic. Also, women are more likely to work in fields where working from home options are unavailable (Henrique 2020). Millions of women garment workers in Bangladesh, who depend on the sector to escape poverty and prostitution, were laid off, and close to 60% of 700,000 jobs that were lost in the UK were held by women (De Paz et al. 2020). In Fiji, women make up more than 80% of market vendors, and more than 40% of rural farmers. Due to closure of market places, and restrictions on mobility, women who depend on weekly sales of their produce for income have suffered, since they do not receive any unemployment benefits, and their savings are too little to withstand months of lockdowns and what not (Moriarty et al. 2020). In India, while close to 1 in 5 jobs before Covid-19 were held by women, 94% of which are in the informal sector (Amnesty International 2020), McKinsey data suggest that 23% of overall job losses would be suffered by women. In fact, the time that women have spent on household activities in India during the lockdown has been estimated to increase by 30% (Madgavkar et al. 2020). Since due to the virus children are forced to study from home, women are again at a disadvantage because they are 20% less likely to use the Internet on their mobile which would reduce their ability to complete assignments and attend courses from home. Moreover, in middleand low-income countries, girls are expected to attend to household chores, decreasing their chances of receiving good education after the pandemic ends, and less than 30% of women use the Internet (Rivera et al. 2020). All the above literature points out to the fact that women are vulnerable to the adverse effects of the pandemic either directly or indirectly. These narrate the reproductive health risks, employment uncertainties, domestic violence, difficulty to continue education faced by the women and girls which indicate lack of security from means of both violent, and nonviolent threats and thereby jeopardizing their rights. In other words, human security is no longer confined to the political/military security or the state, but is people-centric. Hence, the Commission on Human Security, a product of the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, define human security as “protecting fundamental freedoms-freedoms that are essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means creating political, social, environmental, Economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity” (Coomaraswamy 2005). As women face different insecurity than men, gendered human security has gained prominence in human security discourse (Jolly and Ray 2006). Given the backdrop capturing the varied challenges of women during the crisis in general and India in particular, this chapter focuses specifically on (1) the implications of pandemic on the female teaching faculty who were exposed to the new ways

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of teaching and had to teach from home itself and (2) the implications of the pandemic on the urban poor living in slums and informal settlements with specific reference to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector at large and women in specific. The data was collected both from primary as well as secondary sources. Primary survey was conducted in Bengaluru, capital of Karnataka state. To arrive at the understanding about the teaching faculty, a structured questionnaire was framed and circulated among the lecturers through Google Doc format. We received 60 responses which are tabulated and analyzed. Information pertaining to slums was collected from 6 slums in Bengaluru, namely Maya bazar slum, Kogilu Bande slum, Mariyamma Colony slum, Kasturba Nagar slum, PG Halli slum, and KEB quarters slum, near ring road. Focus group discussion consisting of 8–10 female respondents was conducted by following the social distancing protocol and hence the the slums were observed in person. The chapter is organized as follows. The following section (Sect. 13.2) delineates the challenges of the teaching faculty as they had to gear up to online teaching without prior preparation. Section 13.3 outlines how pandemic has impacted water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) challenges of the urban poor living in slums. The last section provides summary of the chapter.

13.2

Coping with the Pressures of Online Teaching

Education is a fundamental human right. Nevertheless, the pandemic compelled to close the educational institutions as a preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19, thereby disrupting the education system. According to an estimation by mid-April 2020, 94% of learners worldwide were affected by the pandemic, representing 1.58 billion children and youth, from pre-primary to higher education, in 200 countries (United Nations 2020b). As a result of which, all the educational institutions switched to remote learning by starting online classes at all levels of education. The transition from physical classes to online virtual classes has received mixed response from teachers. Shenoy et al. (2020) and Joshi et al. (2020) have attempted to understand the experience of online teaching from teachers perspective where they have focused on technical issues disturbances from family, lack of online security of their personal data, and so on. Hence, this section moves further by including perspectives from female teachers and understand their problems. Sixty female teaching faculty in Bengaluru teaching in various colleges like Jain, KLE, ST. Joseph’s, BES, BNM, Bangalore University, Christ Deemed to be University, RBNMS, Government colleges across Bengaluru namely, Malleshwaram, Kengeri, Sheshadripuram college, etc. teaching pre University, Bachelor’s Degree, and Post-graduation were approached with the Google Form. These are the lecturers with experience varying from 1 to 35 years, teaching various subjects like languages, humanities, science, and law. To understand the nuances of virtual teaching experience few case studies were also conducted. The following sections reveal the experience of online teaching by the female lectures during pandemic.

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13.2.1 Initial Response for Class Online Teaching When the decision for conducting online/virtual classes was taken, many of the lecturers had a mixed feeling toward using the technology for teaching. Hitherto, they were familiar with browsing Internet for getting aiding material for teaching and other entertaining purpose. As classroom teaching involves direct interaction with the students, initially many were unsure about the success of online teaching. In term of percentage, only 23% of the faculty welcomed the idea of online teaching (Fig. 13.1), 35% were curious, 19% were apprehensive and 23% were hesitant. Eventually, as they embraced technology to teach online, 55% of the faculty felt technology as a good instrument to teach online (Fig. 13.2), 41% opined their experience was average whereas 4% did not have a good experience with online teaching as they strongly support it. Majority of the lecturers (85%) were happy with the timings of the online classes The workload of the faculty in the study varied from 3 to 22 h per week. For 70% of the faculty, the same workload existed before lockdown. Though the number of classes was same, around 60% noticed their work had increased considerably. One of the reasons was slashing of part time faculty. With removing of part time faculty from job, the existing faculty had to bear the additional teaching responsibilities. Apart from this the activities of the college also changed to suit the online criteria. As a result along with teaching (28.3%), other additional work like conducting tests (28.3%), assessing assignments (31.7%), NAAC work went online as well, and the female faculty had to forgo their personal time to adjust to the increasing burden of college work. The colleges also had to conduct webinars regularly which the faculty felt, was an additional work. Almost all the faculties felt the classes were prolonged as compared to pre-lockdown period and this meant spending more than usual time for class preparation. The faculty also had to visit colleges when required for NAAC

Apprehensive, 19% Curious, 35%

Hesitant, 23%

Welcoming, 23%

Fig. 13.1 Initial response for online teaching. (Source: Primary survey)

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Fig. 13.2 Faculty’s experience with online teaching. (Source: Primary survey)

Not good 4%

Average 41%

Table 13.1 Workload during the pandemic

Workloada Suitable class timings Faculty who felt workload increased Types of workload Conducting test Teaching Assignments Assessing students’ progress Others

Good 55%

Percentage 85 60 28.3 28.3 31.7 31.7 16.7

Source: Primary survey More than one response

a

work, other administration work, etc. Repeated exams and evaluation of tests, test paper evaluations on online platform—all these added to their workload (16.7%) (Table 13.1). According to Pre-University faculty teaching Physics, the State Board of Education generally allot 120 h to complete the syllabus. However these number of hours are inadequate and generally require 150 h to clear doubts and conduct discussion on the topic, repetition of explanation, etc. However, after starting online class, she was able to complete the syllabus in 120 h. Another change she noticed included teaching for entire 1 h in the class with hardly any student interaction. Hence, the teacher had to prepare for 1 h whereas earlier, they would prepare their lecture for 45 min, with 15 min for student interaction. Many lecturers shared this opinion mentioning the increase in the preparation time for class.

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13.2.2 Challenges of Online Classes Apart from the workload, the lecturers also had other challenges at home. Due to online classes, the classroom was shifted to their home. Finding a place with adequate light and without disturbance from children was a real challenge (Table 13.2). Around 38% of the faculty had the difficulty in finding an appropriate room with neutral background as regular houses hardly have a study room. Similarly, 42% of them had the difficulty in finding a place with adequate lighting. They had to have enough light focussed on the board they use and also on their face. Along with these issues, as the whole family had to stay within the households, there were demands from aged parents, in-laws, and small children which often would be disturbing (27%). Furthermore, the teachers had to deal with extra burden of typing notes, managing students’ pranks online like playing music in the background, efforts to make online class very interesting, etc. In spite of mixed responses for online teaching, the faculty recounted its advantages and the disadvantages. For 68% of the lecturers, the biggest advantage of online classes is saving travel time between college and home. This not only saved their time but their energy too. Around 40% felt sharing notes, study material was easy online and they were able to reach to each and every single student. In the regular classroom, physical notes got circulated without the teacher knowing if the notes had reached everyone in the class. With online teaching they are sure of having done their part. Around 38% were relived from standing for long hours in the classroom. Whenever they had continuous classes for 2–3 h, they had to stand and impart lecture irrespective of their health conditions. Online class was a relief during such long and continuous hours of class. Along with these advantages, around 7% of them felt nice to have flexibility of time, place, and at the same time have more freedom to manage house and work at own pace and above all not required to be loud to be heard, in large classes consisting of more than 50 students. A lecturer in English to some extent found online teaching as a solace to the hardship she was experiencing due to her health condition on normal days of college. She was going through severe menopause symptoms. Irrespective of this, on regular college days she had to climb up and down the stairs in the college building for different classes several times in a day. She was relieved from this when online classes were announced (Table 13.3). Yet, the lectures were not satisfied with online teaching as they missed the realtime interaction with their students. Around 70% felt online class was lacking the Table 13.2 Nontechnical issues faced by the faculty

Nontechnical issuesa Suitable space at home Adequate lighting Demands from family members Others Source: Primary survey More than one response

a

Percentage 38.3 41.7 26.7 3.3

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Table 13.3 Advantages and disadvantages of online teaching

Perceptions on online teachinga Advantages No traveling to college Easy to share PPT online No standing while teaching Others Disadvantages No interaction with students No effective communication More preparation for class Others

Percentage 68.3 40 38.3 6.7 70 53.3 33.3 8.3

Source: Primary survey More than one response

a

Table 13.4 Opinion about online teaching

Opinion about online teaching Satisfaction with online teaching Effective mode of teaching

Percentage 35 25

Source: Primary survey

charm of the offline class which was bubbling with students’ noises and questions. Over 53% felt virtual classes were not being an effective medium of communication with the students. And as the medium is largely one way, with less or no student interaction, 33% felt they required more time for class preparation. Apart from these, other reasons for dissatisfaction for 8% faculty were lack of student identification during class participation and technical problems making attendance difficult for some students. Also, as many lecturers were teaching from their mobile phone, it was disturbing when they got other unexpected calls (Table 13.4). Only 35% of the faculty has got the satisfaction of teaching online, and only 25% of them feel online as an effective mode of teaching. Online teaching has enabled them to teach during pandemic. In fact online teaching was considered easier, with the further belief of online teaching can improve students’ concentration and listening skills. Online platforms a more convenient method for sharing and uploading study materials and the lessons can be replayed by the students any number of times. Online provides flexibility to both students and teachers, and helps the teachers manage their time effectively by balancing household and teaching. For students, online provides them to attend classes from the comfort of their space and replay class audio/videos in their convenient time. A teacher mentioned online teaching being more effective as she was able to show more examples to explain a concept. For the other 75% faculty, this was certainly not an effective mode to teach students. Apart from technical reasons like lack of network and electricity issues, these lecturers feel that the joy of learning in classroom being lost. Due to lack of physical interaction, classes will not be effective and teachers will not be able to assess the level of students’ understanding. Moreover, only few students are regular

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and interact during the class. Due to lack of eye-to-eye contact, many students shared their inability to understand the concepts online. Gaining students’ attention, therefore, poses as the biggest challenge. They do not respond to questions nor do they ask questions, making the classes challenging for teachers in addressing the issues of weak students. This has called our attention toward quality learning. Further, some students had returned to their homes in rural areas and reaching them was very challenging especially for the government college lecturers. Further it was expressed that online class becomes particularly difficult for few subjects like Mathematics, where student–teacher interaction is crucial at every step of an equation. Furthermore, other subjects like Physics and Chemistry face similar issues. Apart from learning and teaching, many faculty share the opinion of holistic development being difficult through online teaching due to lack of physical interaction with the students. They cannot be disciplined online. A teacher’s responsibility toward student generally extends beyond teaching and includes nurturing their interests and disciplining them by engaging them fruitfully, which the online teaching does not allow. On many occasions during the regular college, the lecturers also counselled their students thereby helping the students with emotional support, which was lost during online teaching. During online classes, only the lecturers will switch on their cameras while teaching and it was not mandatory for students. According to an English faculty, all students do not turn on their videos. Even when questions are asked by calling out the names, the students do not respond and the teacher wonders if the student actually attends the class or logs in to show his/her presence while doing something else. They are unable to teach effectively as they cannot feel the pulse of the students’ learning, and are unable to give individual attention to each student. And moreover, as the classes are recorded, many teachers fear disciplining may get misinterpreted and misunderstood by parents and the principal..

13.2.3 Technology-Related Challenges Teaching online has posed several problems to the teaching faculty. Around 20% of them had mobile-related problems like storage, quality of the camera, size of the screen, etc. Around 77% had problems related to Internet connection and around 12% had challenge to use mobile to their teaching requirement like drawing graphs, storage issues, etc (Table 13.5). Table 13.5 Technologyrelated issues

Technology-related issuesa Mobile-related problems Network issues Others Source: Primary survey More than one response

a

Percentage 20 7.7 11.7

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Teachers were hitherto did not have any account online nor did they have the necessity to explore the possibilities over their phone. They were now compelled to do so and get acquainted to the wider scope of technology in a big way unknown previously. They had to teach online, upload study material, interact online, use interactive technology to teach, think about Internet data, and understand the storage space in their mobile, opening having email accounts and checking emails regularly, recording their lecture, and so on. These have been learnt through trial and error method increasing their digital competencies and skills. A teacher shared how earlier none of the family members thought that she also might require a laptop, but now she has her own laptop and also an online platform (Zoom) account. She feels happy for being able to understand technology relevant to her and believes that as a biggest personal advantage of online teaching. Having expressed the positive aspects of going online personally, the lecturers also shared about their struggle with it. Majority of the faculty have encountered problem related to Internet network while teaching online. They have made certain changes to avoid such a situation. Some of them had to reschedule their class timings; some had to buy different sim cards with good data package, many of them got new Wi-Fi connection, some shifted to high speed Internet connection, some ported their mobile numbers to different service providers to get access of good Internet data package, few of them also bought new smart phones with more storage, few of them went around the house where network signals were strong and some of them bought data banks to keep their mobile recharged constantly. A language lecturer narrated how despite changing the network connection, she could not get uninterrupted internet. Hence she had to go out of the house and stand in the corridor of her house to teach. Similarly, electricity was another problem she faced. Hence she would reschedule her class timings occasionally. In general, almost all of them have invested one way or the other to blend into the new method of teaching. Many lecturers have invested in touch-screen laptops, mobile stands, enhanced data package, Wi-Fi connections, white boards etc. Some of them also bought pen tablets to enable them to have smart board option as their subject could not be taught effectively on mobile.

13.2.4 Online Bullying Apart from technology-related issues, teaching faculty had to face different problems from the students. The log-in ids and passwords of accessing the class were made very confidential. In spite of this, there were unidentifiable people in the class who disturbed during the ongoing class. Sometimes the sound from students end would be unbearable. A pre-university lecturer had an awful experience while teaching. A boy misbehaved in online class and she admonished him gently. However, this was taken as an offence by the student who spread a word on the teacher having used abusive language to him. As a result, his parents complained against her to the principal. However, the complaint was dismissed as the class recording proved

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otherwise. However, the teacher’s email id was hacked and abusive mail was sent to the same student from her mail id. While the case was proved baseless, this incident emotionally disturbed this teacher who has long years of experience in teaching and also known for handling mischievous students with patience and maturity. There were instances of students cross-chatting with classmates ignoring teacher’s presence online, playing songs loudly, dancing with camera on, and distracting other students while the class is in progress. Many a times, students would log in from a different names while creating such nuisance and could not be traced.

13.2.5 Work–Life Balance Women generally have double burden of work which they often fail to notice being accustomed to house work. On the question on household chores, women feel comfortable as they are habitual in doing household chores. This was the case in our sample also. Around 34% of the faculty did not have any issues because of work from home arrangement. Nonetheless, 66% have had tough time with work from home. Though they taught from the comfort of their house and felt happy to save on travel time, and from standing for long hours in the class, this posed another serious problem of balancing their household chores and professional work. With all the family members being at home, balancing both personal and professional life became difficult for some. This was more so in case of mothers with small kids, as toddlers found difficulty in apprehending their mother being at home and yet unavailable to them! And even after office hours, there would be meetings, webinars, and preparation for the next days’ class, making the day much more hectic for the female faculty. A faculty narrated her experience with her five year old daughter while the class was in progress. Her daughter would just walk in and sit with her mother. As there no in-laws or parents to take care of the child, the faculty could not lock her room while teaching. Hence she had placed a small chair beside hers, placed in a way not visible to the students. When the child would start talking, she would give some work to students and mute her audio. She being a Physics lecturer had focused the camera on the board. She carried on like this many times, ensuring the daughter was not visible on video and distract the class. Apart from this, there were also other embarrassing situations to these lecturers. They had to cope with demands from the family members, especially by the demanding and aged in-laws, the pressure cooker whistle blown during the class, less time given to family members as their after-class hours was occupied with meetings, webinars, elaborate preparation for class, and the stress of being available to students’ queries all the time. With increase in college work and the household chores, they suffered double burden of work in the same place. Many had to balance their time by preparing for class in the late nights. Some teachers were emotionally disturbed when they could not pay attention to their children attending online classes as they were busy teaching their students. They

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were available to respond to their students’ queries but could not help in their children’s school work. Nonetheless, they have managed to emerge successful with the support and cooperation of family members, by organizing themselves to manage time effectively, by working late nights, with the suggestion of other colleagues, etc. with the hope of returning to normalcy soon. The pandemic has made them confident about their adaptability to the technology.

13.3

Pandemic and the WASH Challenges of the Urban Poor Women

The 2030 Agenda emphasizes “Water and Sanitation” as an important component by devoting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 for water and sanitation besides linking to other Goals on health, gender, food security, climate change, and many others. However, the grappling water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector is further challenged with the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic in meeting the expected standards world over. The World Bank (2019) emphasized effective WASH and waste management practices can curtail the spread of the Coronavirus. With WHO/UNICEF reports highlighting the inadequate supply of these services, the implications of these inadequacies for preventing infections and control during the pandemic can be foreseen. Of the many challenges faced by urban India, providing adequate water and safe sanitation are critical concerns. Water supply sector in India suffers from inadequate levels of service, an increasing demand–supply gap and deteriorating financial and technical performance. In addition, poor sanitation infrastructure is evident with 673 million people practicing open defecation as of 2019. Women suffer furthermore, as sanitation practices mean more than defecation and urination and include carrying water, washing, bathing, menstrual management, and changing clothes. Although, SDG 6 aims to achieve universal access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation and hygiene to all by 2030, the pandemic makes the issue an even bigger challenge. In this section, we attempt to capture how the pandemic further intensified the problems for the women living in slums of Bengaluru. We interviewed women through telephonic surveys1 and captured their experiences. Further, we draw some policy options that need immediate perusal. For the urban poor, particularly women, the situation remains grim with a mismatch in the further demand for water and sanitation access needed in maintaining hygiene standards, a pertinent factor to curtail the spread of Coronavirus. The urban poor, particularly women, have been struggling as the water utilities lack capacity and infrastructure to ensure a continuous, equitable, safe water supply,

1

We have contact details of slum households, based on an earlier study we had conducted in slums for the Human Settlements Management Institute, New Delhi.

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and access to sanitation facilities (toilets). Other prevailing issues of water quality, nonrevenue water, inadequate finances, poor infrastructure, etc. are overwhelming the water sector. The sanitation sector faces poor quality of infrastructure, poor operation and maintenance, behavioral issues, and related concerns. These already prevailing conditions have increased the problems in providing WASH services during the harsh conditions created by the pandemic. The first line of defense has been the emphasis on hand washing, which needs adequate and access to clean water, which prevents morbidity and mortality extensively. The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India released simple guidelines with safeguards and measures for limiting the spread of the pandemic in heavily populated areas. This was more specific to areas where toilets, washing, and bathing facilities are shared. The proposed measures stress on the sanitation and hygienic practices besides suggesting key interventions to avoid the spread of Coronavirus, by putting in place mechanisms like installation of do-it-yourself hand washing stations in these communities for residents to wash hands regularly. Hence, there are unprecedented challenges for the government in providing the infrastructure facilities, more so in the COVID times.

13.3.1 The Bengaluru Situation Bengaluru forms a typical example of urban agglomeration subject to the problems of rapid urbanization and unplanned growth. Several of the poor migrants have established informal settlements in available land spaces resulting in proliferation of slums, causing severe stress on basic amenities. Bengaluru’s official records indicate 587 slums; however, several studies have indicated more than 2000 slums and informal settlements in the city. In the study, we will focus specifically on toilet access in these dwellings. Several institutions are involved in providing water and sanitation access in the city. Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is responsible for water supply and sanitation services (sewerage) and Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the municipal body has been striving to improve sanitation services in the city. However, there are several issues like abandonment of toilet maintenance by contractors due to nonprofit, aaccumulation of water, and power bills and disconnection, water scarcity leading to temporary shutting down of toilets, strikes by Safai Karmacharis due to nonpayment of salaries, lack of women friendly toilets ensuring proximity and safety, lack of children friendly toilets etc. While the latest Census 2011 data indicates 5.2% of households lack toilet facility and 94.8% have access to toilet facility in Bengaluru, the absolute numbers of households that lack toilets are still high, majority of which comprise the large segment of the population living in poorer pockets of the city. This also has been evidenced by a study in Bengaluru, in which 67% of households have access to individual toilets (in-house toilets), while a significant percentage of the households (19.5%) are dependent on shared/pay-and-use public toilets. Another 13.5% of the households remain denied

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of toilet facility of any kind and use open spaces/lands for defecation (Manasi et al. 2017). Community toilets in majority of the slums (40%) had several quality issues, for instance, blockage of underground drainage, pit collapse, etc. that denied them access, often forcing household members to defecate in the open (Manasi et al. 2017).

13.3.2 Capturing WASH Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Bengaluru Slums The outbreak of the virus is a major concern in slums. Slums are typically densely populated, overcrowded with poor living environments leaving no room for physical distancing. In Bengaluru, there were no special initiatives taken by the Karnataka Slum Development Board or the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) in improving water and sanitation services in particular. Discussions revealed BBMP emphasis on sanitizing the slum through spraying of disinfectants and checking for COVID-19 incidence, creating awareness about its symptoms and food supply. Tests were conducted in slums where more of ILI and SARI cases were reported. BBMP partnered with cab aggregator Ola to visit the containment zones to conduct rapidantigen tests as they are relatively easy and less expensive method compared to the real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. BBMP has been working with more than 50 civil society organizations2 during the pandemic situation. These NGOs have been working on various issues to uplift the weaker sections of society and pitched in to promote food distribution, hygiene, awareness creation about the pandemic, and symptoms. Density of the urban slums is high with 420 people living in each square kilometer (Altstedter 2020). If the COVID-19 penetrated intensely into the slums, tracing and treating will be almost impossible. Media captured several occurrences, for instance, fear and panic engulfed the Hongasandra slum when a laborer was affected with the virus during April 2020. More than 1000 people, mostly laborers working on the metro rail project live here. A total of 184 people were quarantined after the tests. Similarly, in Ragigudda slum, 2 positive cases created panic among residents and stigma associated with the infected patients were colossal causing trauma. Residents from DJ Halli and Tannery Road slum panicked when a resident form SK Garden was tested positive and tracing was not done; hence, PCR tests were done across the slums to confirm the spread of COVID-19. Given this background, we were keen on understanding the awareness about the pandemic among the slum residents, precautions taken, incidence of the pandemic and WASH facilities as hygiene is one of the critical factors in preventing the spread of the pandemic.

2

The United Foundation, Heera Foundation, Mercy Mission, Action Aid, Citizen for Bengaluru, Janaagraha, Azim Premji Foundation, Centre for Internet and Society, Reap Benefit, Sensing Local Foundation, Hasiru Dala, Whitefield Rising, Slum Mahila Sanghatana.

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13.3.3 Prevalence of Awareness Our observations in the study slums revealed awareness levels about the pandemic were high across all the slum residents. The BBMP officials had worked closely, visited the slums and discussed about the pandemic, and educated them extensively about precautions to be taken, possible symptoms and how the residents could reach out to the public health center if they had symptoms. BBMP workers sanitized the slums during the pandemic. In some slums, BBMP sanitized the slum during the peak of the pandemic and conducted the COVID-19 tests twice. Besides, majority of the residents own television sets and were watching the news about the pandemic and were well aware about the symptoms. Interestingly, the slum residents were taking precautions by wearing masks (either purchased or used a hand kerchief of cloth) diligently, with few exceptions. However, children were not adhering to wearing masks always. Washing hands was practiced after they reach home and before they get on to any activities. The residents have been washing their hands at least eight to ten times in a day during the initial few months of the pandemic compared to earlier which was about three times in a day. However, they also admitted going back to their earlier practice of washing hands three times a day (before meals) in the recent times. In other words, people have relaxed with the panic of the pandemic having reduced and the practice being hard to follow anyways. People use soaps to wash hands and do not use sanitizers. However, BBMP had supplied sanitizers in the initial months of the pandemic and people used them however, not purchasing them due to high cost. Few of them also washed their hands with plain water. However, none of the respondents were aware about the hand washing steps of the WHO to be followed. Hand washing was practiced more diligently in Kasturba Nagar slum, as few cases of COVID-19 were noted. Children are supervised about washing their hands. Furthermore, housewives and others staying at home are able to wash their hands frequently, while street vendors and small merchants/sellers are unable to practice on a regular basis.

13.3.4 Access to Water and Sanitation Facilities Access to water is an issue in few slums and the burden on women has been more with the pandemic. Fetching water more number of times and maintaining hygiene is a challenge. For instance, in Kogilu Bande slum, purchasing water from tankers by pooling money was observed. While in KEB quarters ring-road slum, the community does not have any issue with water supply as the local politician, an MLA has helped them get Cauvery water connection. During shortage of water, he has also provided help by providing water supply through tankers. However, no water counters for hand washing were set in the slums we surveyed. Access to toilets remains a concern in all the slums. All the slum residents had no choice but to use the community toilets. Women have not seen any intervention by

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any government organization in making access to toilets or in improving the quality of toilets. The issues encountered prior and post COVID-19 remains worse, given the fear of infection from the pandemic. For instance, in the Maya bazar slum, more than 450 households from among the 600 households depend on the community toilet (16 numbers of which 10 are partially usable) which are in poor conditions. Most of them do not have doors, missing latches, garbage strewn all over, and the condition remains the same even during the pandemic. People opined that, during earlier times, the officials would respond to complaints regarding the toilets, however, with the pandemic, the officials are busy and the situation of the toilets have now become worse. Hence, people have repaired them at times and shared the expenses. The charges for pay and use toilets have increased from Rs. 3 to Rs. 5 during the pandemic. The caretaker cleans the premises once in 3 days, which is inadequate. Some of the families in the slum use community toilets while some of them have individual toilets. At the Mariyamma colony slum, more than 50 families use community toilet, a complex of 8 toilets. The quality of toilets remains an issue as five of these toilets do not have doors. Toilets are cleaned once in 3 days by the caretaker. Sometimes, the caretakers do not come regularly in the slum and the community toilets are poorly maintained, bad smell menace is a major issue in these toilets. Construction workers from nearby local sites use these community toilets and do not pay the user fees. Women are not comfortable to use the toilets when the caretakers are not present, as they are concerned about safety issues, particularly during late evenings. Two households have individual toilets, while the rest of them depend on the public toilet located close to the nearby bus stop. The toilet is open from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. and charge Rs. 6 per time usage. Access to toilets beyond the standard open timings is a challenge, particularly for women and young girls. During the lockdown, high number of jobs were lost in the unorganized sector, and women are the worst affected. Most of the women in the slums surveyed were working as domestic help, in small hotels and restaurants as cleaners, etc. They lost their job once lockdown was announced and lost the source of livelihood. In such a situation, paying Rs. 6 whenever they had to use washroom was very expensive for them. Along with the existing woes, the doors of the toilets are not in a proper shape adding to the insecurity for women.

13.3.5 Incidence of COVID-19 Incidence of COVID-19 has been surprisingly less in the slums surveyed and may be attributed to precautions taken by BBMP and NGOs, low reporting, asymptomatic cases, younger population with minor symptoms who have recovered, and herd immunity. Except in Kogilu Bande slum, as some of residents are pourakarmikas who are engaged in waste collection and as sanitary workers contacted and recovered from COVID-19 (five people) after treatment, there were no instances reported. Although no COVID-19 cases are recorded in the Mariyamma colony community, BBMP officials frequently visit the slum and are conducting COVID-19 tests. In the

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KEB quarters slum, they have not encountered any case of COVID-19 as the local politician has been supportive by taking precautions, supplying masks, sanitizers besides food supplies during the lockdown. The BBMP has also sanitized the slum and the nearby localities apart from conducting COVID-19 tests in the community.

13.4

Discussion and Conclusion

The study has attempted to understand experiences of the people from two diverse backgrounds in the wake of pandemic. One, pertaining to the situation of people living in informal settlements who are mainly less educated and dependent largely on unorganized sector of the urban areas for employment. Whereas, the other section pertains to the educated people living in the urban residential areas and are largely employed in organized sector. As women are responsible for the cooking and caring responsibilities at home, they had a tough time in managing their work from home. Most of them were receiving half the salary during pandemic. The respondents reported that many part-time lecturers being discontinued from service to reduction of costs. To make matters worse, many businesses run by the household male members incurred huge loss due to lockdown. The economic insecurity compelled the teaching faculty to get acquainted to technology. Being in the information technology (IT) hub of India, majority of them faced the network issues and majority of them were not satisfied with the method of teaching. They had their own problems of managing the household and teaching responsibilities. However, with the pandemic their adaptive nature to new ways of delivering their services is proved. This has been a boon to explore the technology as well as disadvantage as they felt such teaching was not effective thereby affecting the quality learning. However, online teaching has belittled the essential role of a teacher. A teacher apart from formal teaching also plays a major role in shaping the personality of the student by correcting them, counseling them, and so on. This is lost in the gamut of online teaching. Teachers also had to go through disturbed online bullying, taking a toll on their emotional being. On the other hand, poor women in slums have different challenges. Along with the uncertain or almost no employment conditions, they also had threat to basic personal health living in Bengaluru city. Access to WASH services has always been challenging for urban poor. A common misunderstanding exists on the poor communities getting WASH services for free. However, urban poor generally end up paying higher charges for water and sanitation as compared to the middle-income communities, since they are dependent on an unregulated market to buy water, or on “pay-per-use” community and public toilets. However, even these paid and unregulated services are not meeting the needs of the urban poor during the pandemic. Hence, strengthening the public services for water, sanitation and hygiene becomes important for the urban poor. Along with the breakdown of pandemic, they had to lose their jobs in the informal sector, straining the livelihood option they had. In such a situation, they had to shell out money even for the nature’s call. But this did

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not ensure them the safety they should have as the doors of the public toilets are not secure. Moreover as the toilets were not well managed, they also feared for urinary tract infection (UTI) diseases. Hence, it was the fear of COVID, question of security and threat of infections together that bothered the women in slums. Given the shocking situation that the pandemic has created, a need for paradigm shift is evidently the way forward. The economic stability and dignity form the vital core of human lives. The women considered in the study faced insecurity in their own way regarding these factors. The pandemic proved that how the sudden change can affect the women both working in formal sector belonging to middle income group as well as women dwelling in slums who are mainly found in informal sector. The pandemic has posed indirect threat to their socioeconomic, health, community, and personal safety. To overcome these risks, the following the government should intervene, understand gender-specific problems, and address their insecurities through structural changes.

13.4.1 Recommendations to Promote Human Security Proper guidelines for college should be given to set limited hours of work to the teaching faculty. The teaching faculties are seen working beyond office hours which creates confrontation and conflicts at home front that has larger effect on their productivity, health of self, and well-being of the household members. Stipulated working hours will help them to balance professional and family life and increases their productivity. Secure Jobs during Pandemic: There are many female headed households and in many families, women are the main workers. Hence, to sustain their livelihood, the government should mandatorily not expel workers during pandemic and thus ensure economic security to their lives. Pressing Need to Strengthen WASH Facilities: Given the situation, a need is there to establish long-term sustainable solutions in the WASH sector to ensure that the current shock is addressed but also to face the future challenges along with safeguarding the interests of women. Ensure Safety of Toilets: An imminent need to strengthen the operation and maintenance of toilets. Currently, the condition remains pitiable, with bad smell menace, leakages of underground drainage (UGD), no doors, and latches, etc. The existing toilets must be repaired with proper and secure doors and also their operation and maintenance should be improved. Improve Water Facilities: Water facilities should be improved so that people are able to handwash more frequently and without fear of UTI even due to lack of proper water facilities. Emphasis should be laid on prevention through establishment and strengthening of water and sanitation facilities in slums. The number of users of toilets in proportion to the number of toilets is awfully less; making health concerns

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an issue, more so during the pandemic. For instance, supply of hygiene kits for women and young girls will be important. Free Accessibility: During the unforeseen situation like pandemic, the government can declare free accessibility of toilets, and thereby not impinging on the meager savings of the women. User fee for water and sanitation must be waived during the pandemic as majority of their livelihoods have been affected, with low income and no income for some of them. There is further need for collaboration between government, private sector, civil society, and people at large in the WASH sector. Makeshift water counters and mobile toilets should be installed till the pandemic recedes which would make the lives of women bit easier as the burden of fetching water and maintaining hygiene rests largely on women. Similarly, personal protective equipment to be provided to all the sanitation workers, including women as they are caretakers in the community toilets. The efforts taken by the government are appreciable during the pandemic times. However, further strengthening WASH facilities to suit the needs and specifications of women will go a long way in supporting the family and society.

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Chapter 14

Access to Green Spaces: Consider Green Infrastructure Implementation with/Post-COVID-19 World Ai Tashiro and Masaki Kotsubo

Abstract When the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic hit the world, many countries had no choice but restricting industrial and human activity and lockdown cities for preventing the spread of infection. However, COVID-19 has indirectly had a positive impact on our environments. Substantial evidence shows water and air quality improvements in many countries due to the lockdowns. The COVID-19 crisis has brought attention to new ways of thinking about sustainable planetary health and human health and security. Green infrastructure (GI) is desired as a new sustainable nature-based solution that helps people achieve better mental and physical well-being with improved air quality. GI incorporates natural or seminatural features, including parks, open spaces and blue/green spaces. What kind of green spaces function can be utilized at a specific place forms a critical issue for future GI planning. Thus, this chapter focuses on green spaces and examines the association between access to green spaces and air quality under the political mobility restrictions, and suggests more appropriate greenspace designs for addressing GI with/post-COVID-19 world.

14.1

Introduction

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdowns have affected not only human health and activities but also planetary health. Regarding human health and activities, a broad body of research suggests exposure to natural environments (bluegreen spaces such as parks, lakes, and riversides) has beneficial effects on physical and mental health, including spiritual wellness (Pouso et al. 2020; Ugolini et al. 2020). Green infrastructure (GI) includes such nature environments, utilizing a combination of green and gray infrastructure offering a wide range of ecosystem A. Tashiro (*) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Tokushima, Tokushima, Japan e-mail: [email protected] M. Kotsubo Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_14

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functions and services to human well-being and green sustainability (Mulligan et al. 2020; O’Brien et al. 2017). The fragility of environmental conditions causes stress and a person with underlying diseases who lives in poor environmental conditions falls into the lethal outcome of COVID-19 (Hanzl 2020). Thus, evaluating the environmental condition of GI and open spaces gives impetus to human health security during the pandemic situation. This chapter quests GI’s potential possibility, which prevents a poor environment, maintains human’s healthier lives, and secures human security in/post the pandemic situation. GI can withstand climate change and health crises and positively affect the human body and mental health during lockdown periods (Francesca et al. 2021). De Beli et al. report spending time in gardens being linked to benefits for health and wellbeing similar to those gained by living in wealthy areas (de Bell et al. 2020). The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) reported living with a regular view of green space provides health benefits worth £300 per person per year (UKRI 2020). However, COVID-19 pandemic measures such as full or partial lockdowns have restricted people’s movements and limited their access to green spaces more than before (Fig. 14.1). Although ensuring open access to parks and green spaces has been recommended for supporting people’s mental health and well-being (Slater et al. 2020), unequal access is common in most countries. Geographic inequality is at play here. In cities, high population density means that green space per person is lower, creating an issue for people living in densely populated areas across the globe. When examining another aspect of the inequality problem, green space exposure has also been reported to reduce health inequalities associated with deprivation. Mears et al. (2019) reported green space distribution varying with socioeconomic deprivation. It arguably has significant implications where pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities in the use of green and open may have been made worse by the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions. Moreover, green access inequalities vary with socioeconomic deprivation and are reported mainly from Europe and the United Kingdom. Whether the same association can be seen in other countries and regions, including other developing countries, remains unexplored. Suppose the evidence applies at the global level. Consequently, the pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities in the use of green and open spaces may have been made worse by the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictive green space access measures adopted for control provide a natural experiment to investigate the links between nature exposure and mental health under extreme conditions. Another effect of COVID-19 lockdowns has been a reduction in air pollution (Nigam et al. 2021). COVID-19 control measures have improved air quality locally and around the world in the short term by limiting human activity (Seo et al. 2020). In China, the presence of particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) decreased by 17% in locked down cities within a matter of weeks compared to pre-lockdown measures (He et al. 2020). Seo et al. (2020) reported PM2.5, PM10, and NO2 concentrations decreasing significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, by 31%, 61%, and 33%, respectively, compared to the previous 3 years. Conversely,

Fig. 14.1 Global difference restrictions on movement and access to green space during lockdown. (Source: Modified the design of Steve Cinderby/Stockholm Environment Institut 2020)

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Bekbulat et al. (2021) reported substantial COVID-19 response measures not lowering PM2.5 levels across the United States beyond their normal range of variability (Bekbulat et al. 2021). Ali et al. (2021) explored the linkage between PM2.5 levels, COVID-19 responses, and socioeconomic conditions in Pakistan. They found a higher rate of COVID-19 spread in major cities with poor air quality conditions than in other areas (Ali et al. 2021). Human health, green space deprivation, and air quality are related to each other (Kumar et al. 2019). For instance, even if people can access green space and ease their stress through exposure, the air quality of the place might be poor, which damages the human body through gas exchange in the lungs. In this case, green access will not improve health. Countries scoring high on mental health and wellbeing but low on green space access would do better to prioritize air pollution control over green space access during the pandemic. Thus, there exists a trade-off between human security, green space deprivation, and air pollution issues. Toward responding to the realities of a with/post-COVID-19 world, new technologies and strategies are needed to address solutions that also come with downsides in relation to their impact on air quality and human health. Therefore, establishing the data and guidelines required to implement effective greening strategies becomes necessary. However, development pathways linking health benefits and air pollution problems via nature-based solution have received little study so far. Thus, this chapter attempts to gain a better understanding of how these differential impacts might indicate future global development pathways for making countries and regions more livable, equitable, and ultimately sustainable to the benefit of both human security and planetary health. As the nature-based adaptation of natural science and epidemiology approach, GI gets regarded as a potential measure to mitigate pollution impacts and improve human health benefits through green space access. However, the perception of GI and its optimal uses may differ across countries. The trade-off between human health and air pollution problems should be considered for the post-COVID-19 situation. Income levels and government pandemic measures in a region can result in critical differences in the availability and accessibility of green spaces. When implementing GI to solve these problems, understanding human mobility patterns and the trade-off between human health and air quality becomes crucial as well, considering the differences in countries’ socioeconomic situation and policy responses to COVID-19. This chapter analyzed the associations between (a) the impacts of COVID-19, (b) government response policy stringency, (c) human activity related to the visitation of parks and outdoor spaces, (d) human activity related to staying at home, and (e) air quality change (PM2.5) at global, regional, and national levels.

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14.2

265

Method

14.2.1 Data Collection We obtained the data in this study from Our World in Data (n.d.-b) and the SDG-Tracker, which are collaborative data publication efforts of researchers at the University of Oxford (Our World in Data n.d.-a, c, d, e). These sites cover multisectional data of poverty, disease, human activity, climate change, existential risks, and inequality. The full data period runs from January 2020 to December 2020. The data used consist of the following: (a) The impacts of COVID-19: These data represent daily new confirmed COVID19 cases per million people. Raw data on confirmed cases and deaths for all countries were sourced from the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (Our World in Data n.d.-a). (b) Policy measures: These data represent the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index (Stringency Index). This is a composite measure based on 9 response indicators, including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans, rescaled to a value between 0 and 100 (100 ¼ strictest) (Our World in Data n.d.-c). (c) Green space access: These data show the number of visitors to parks and outdoor spaces relative to the period before the pandemic. This includes places like local parks, national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens. The baseline day is the median value from the 5-week period between January 3 and February 6, 2020. This index is smoothed to a rolling 7-day average (Our World in Data n.d.-d). (d) Stay-at-home: These data show the stay-at-home requirements during the pandemic. This composite measure is a simple additive score of 9 indicators measured on an ordinal scale, rescaled to vary from 0 to 100. The scale is divided into no measures, recommended measures, required measures (except essential), and required measures (few exceptions) for staying at home (Our World in Data n.d.-e). Regarding air quality index, we used the data, “Q1 to Q4 of the COVID-19 Air Quality worldwide 2021 dataset,” published by Air Quality Open Data Platform (2020). (e) Air quality (PM2.5): Regarding the air quality index, we used the “Q1 to Q4 of the COVID-19 Air Quality Worldwide 2021 dataset” published by Air Quality Open Data Platform (https://aqicn.org/data-platform/covid19/jp/). The data include several air pollutant types (PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, etc.). Among these types, most countries in the set include data on PM2.5. Thus, we applied PM2.5 as the measure of air quality in this study.

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Fig. 14.2 Survey areas. AFR African Region, AMR Region for the Americas, EMR Eastern Mediterranean Region, EUR European Region, SEAR-WPR South-East Asia Region and Western Pacific Region

In the process of creating our data set, the period of analysis and the data of the target countries were matched. As a result, the period of analysis runs from February 2020 to December 2020, which matches with 70 target countries (Fig. 14.2). The countries were classified into five regions following the WHO classification (WHO n.d.). The South-East Asia Region and the Western Pacific Region were combined, considering the variation with other regions. For the countries’ socioeconomic status, we used gross national income per capita in 2019 obtained from the World Bank (n.d.) Country-level mental health data were obtained from Our World in Data and focus on mental health or substance use disorder; these include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, alcohol or drug use disorders, and schizophrenia. The latest data were from 2017, and we used these to indicate the mental health level for each country. Moreover, to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on mental health, neurological, and substance use services, we added regional levels of the ratio of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) multisectoral coordination to the data set. These data were obtained from the WHO assessment report (WHO 2020). In this report, 130 (67%) WHO Member States, across all WHO regions, submitted answers to the survey. Data were disaggregated by region, income group, and stage of transmission of COVID-19. MHPSS should be treated as an integral component of public health emergency responses as part of a range of approaches, such as case management, risk communication and community engagement, the continuation of health services, and coordination within countries. Mental health forms an essential part of universal health coverage and crucial to the overall recovery of individuals, communities, and countries after emergencies.

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14.2.2 Analysis We first summarized the five statistical data (a)–(e) by regions and income levels. Then, we assessed the findings related to the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and examined regional trends during the study period. Third, we investigated the association between green space access and other categories (change in the number of confirmed cases, the stringency index, and air quality). In this part of the analysis, we examined unique trends by country and region. Finally, based on the results of these analyses, we assessed whether GI could be used to address green access and air pollution issues by country and region. Furthermore, we evaluated which countries were suitable for applying green strategies and MHPSS as part of their development pathways with/post-COVID-19 world.

14.3

Results

14.3.1 Statistical Characteristics Out of a total of 70 countries, the European region had the largest number of countries among the regions (44%), followed by the Asia-Pacific region (21%), the American region (17%), the Eastern Mediterranean Region (10%), and the African region (8%) (see Table 14.1). Sorted by income groups, 75% of countries were in high- or upper-middle-income groups (high-income: n ¼ 36, upper-middle income: n ¼ 17). A total of 6% of countries were in the low-income group (n ¼ 4). Within the African region, there no high-income countries. In the American region, the upper-middle-income group was the most common (67%). In Asia, the lowermiddle-income group made up the largest proportion (54%), while 33% of countries were in the high-income group. In the Eastern Mediterranean and European regions, the proportion of developed countries was the highest (58%, 78%, respectively). Figure 14.3 shows the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 per million people between February 2020 and December 2020 by regions. In the African region, South Africa had the highest number of infections per million each month. The number of infected people was highest in July. After this peak, the number decreased, yet the number of infected people increased in total from January to December 2020. In the other countries in the region, the number of infected people per million was lower than in South Africa, but the overall trends were similar. In the American region, Chile saw the highest number of infected people per million in May and June, after which its caseload decreased. The number of infected people per million in the United States peaked in November and December to become the highest in the region. In the Eastern Mediterranean region, Bahrain had the greatest number of infected people per million between June and October but saw a decree in cases starting in September.

268 Table 14.1 Data distribution by region and World Bank Income Group

A. Tashiro and M. Kotsubo Region AFR (N ¼ 5, 8%) Low income Lower-middle income Upper-middle income High income AMR (N ¼ 12, 17%) Low income Lower-middle income Upper-middle income High income EMR (N ¼ 7, 10%) Low income Lower-middle income Upper-middle income High income EUR (N ¼ 31, 44%) Low-income Lower-middle income Upper-middle income High income SEAR-WPR (N ¼ 15, 21%) Low income Lower-middle income Upper-middle income High income

N ¼ 70

%

2 2 1 0

40% 40% 20% 0%

0 1 8 3

0% 8% 67% 25%

1 1 1 4

14% 14% 14% 58%

1 1 5 24

3% 3% 16% 78%

0 8 2 5

0% 54% 13% 33%

The number of infected people per million in the United Arab Emirates started growing in August and peaked in December as the highest in the region. Most of the other countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region showed similar trends (i.e., a decrease after the month of September). Among the European countries, a first wave can be seen during spring (between March and June), followed by a second wave in late summer and autumn (between July and September), and a third wave in winter (between October and December). The third wave saw the largest number of infected people throughout the year. The number of infected people per million in Serbia was lower than in the other European countries until October, after which it drastically increased to become the highest in the region in December, at which point Georgia, Croatia, and Turkey have the second, third, and fourth highest caseloads, respectively. In the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore, Nepal, and India showed unique trends. The number of infected people per million in Singapore was the largest in the region during the first wave in spring but gradually decreased after May. The number of infected people per million in Nepal saw a large surge in autumn and became the largest number in the region by October. The number of infected people per million

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Fig. 14.3 The number of confirmed cases per million

in India was the greatest in the region in September during the third wave. Other countries in the Asia-Pacific region showed similar trends with three distinct waves and growth in cases toward the end of 2020. Figure 14.4 shows changes (%) in visits to parks and outdoor spaces across the world in 2020 compared to pre-pandemic numbers. The global average of green space access was 5.6, and the range was 71.7 to 429.9. Compared to the pre-pandemic situation, access to green spaces increased throughout the year, mainly in Western countries. However, Mali in the African region, Afghanistan in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and Mongolia and Korea in the Asia-Pacific also saw an increase in the number of visitors to parks and outdoor spaces. On the other

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Fig. 14.4 Annual changes of the number of visitors to parks and outdoor spaces relative to the period before the pandemic in 2020

Fig. 14.5 Share of population with any mental health or substance use disorder in 2017

hand, in most of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Asia-Pacific, the annual average decreased. Figure 14.5 shows the percentage of the population with mental health or substance use disorders in 2017 by region. In this data set, New Zealand and Australia have the highest share of inhabitants with mental distress in the world. If we examine global trends, the high-income group score higher, and low- or lowermiddle-income groups score lower mental distress. In the American, European, and Asia-Pacific regions, there were large disparities in mental health scores between countries. The percentage of MHPSS showed the multisectoral coordination platform for COVID-19 by region and income group in 2020. MHPSS aims to protect or

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Fig. 14.6 AQI index (average annual PM2.5 concentration (μg/m3))

promote psychosocial well-being and prevent or treat mental health conditions. In Fig. 14.4, Asia-Pacific had the highest percentage of MHPSS (80%). On the other hand, the European region had the lowest (55%). When examining all the countries, 65% had multisectoral MHPSS coordination platforms for their COVID-19 response. A third (34%) of countries reported having no MHPSS coordination platform. Figure 14.6 shows the world air quality index (AQI) in 2019 by country-level and regional ranking based on average PM2.5 concentration (μg/m3) weighted by population. In Fig. 14.6, the AQI scores of most high-income groups were “moderate” (score ¼ 35.4) or lower. Bangladesh has the worst score of 83.3. There is little difference between the AQI of the African and American regions. In contrast, there was a large AQI disparity between the Eastern Mediterranean region and the AsiaPacific region. Regarding global trends, the AQI of high-income groups tended to be “good” (AQI < 12) or met the WHO target score (AQI < 10).

14.3.2 Annual Average by Countries and Region in 2020 Figure 14.7 shows the annual average for each category by country and region in 2020. Regarding changes in visits to green spaces, the countries in the European region, the United States, and Canada showed the highest annual average of green space access. Countries in the African region and Eastern Mediterranean region scored lower and showed a negative annual average. In the Asia-Pacific region, Mongolia and South Korea had a positive annual average. Japan saw a negative average (2.1). India had the lowest average (38.5). The largest disparity in

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Fig. 14.7 The annual average of each categories by country and region in 2020

changes in green space access was seen in the European region, which had averages ranging between 20.1 and 104.2. Considering global trends for the AQI, low- or lower-middle-income groups had higher AQI scores (equaling poorer air quality) than high- or upper-middle-income groups in every region. The AQI scores of the African and Eastern Mediterranean regions and Bangladesh, Mongolia, and India in the Asia-Pacific region were poorer than those in the American and European regions. The AQI gap was particularly large in the Asia-Pacific region. The AQI in high-income groups tended to be low even within the region. When combining these results, the American and European regions had both positive changes in green space access and low AQI scores. Low- or lower-middleincome groups in the African and Asia-Pacific regions had positive changes in green space access but high AQI scores. The Eastern Mediterranean region combined relatively high AQI scores with lower green space access. Regarding policy measures as measured by the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index (stringency index), upper-middle or lower-middleincome countries had the highest scores (Argentina ¼ 74.3, Kazakhstan ¼ 59.9). Among the regions, the African and American regions tended to have higher stringency index scores. In the Eastern Mediterranean region, Afghanistan had the

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lowest stringency index score. Within the Asia-Pacific region, New Zealand and Japan had lower stringency index scores. Examining the association between green space access and policy measures, high-income groups tended to have positive changes in green space access combined with lower stringency index scores. Within the African region, the stringency index scores were relatively high, and green space access was low. In the Eastern Mediterranean region, Afghanistan was highly loosely regulated with high green space access. Within the European region, the less regulated countries had green space access. In the Asia-Pacific region, lowermiddle-income groups were more regulated, and green space access was lower compared to other countries within the region. As an exception, Mongolia imposed strict regulations (Q3) yet had the highest green space access in the region. Regarding stay-at-home orders, the American region tended to score higher on the scale than other regions. Conversely, the European region tended to have fewer stay-at-home measures than other regions. In the African region, there was a tendency of low green space access and midrange stay-at-home scores. In places with poor AQI, stay-at-home measures were in place even if the regulation was not strict (e.g., Uganda). Mali had high green space access and tended to score low on the stay-at-home measure. The AQI in Mali was also unhealthy (AQI ¼ 109). In the American region, green space access was high with looser regulation and lower stayat-home scores. The AQI showed low to mid-range scores. In the Eastern Mediterranean region, green space access and stay-at-home scores tended to be inversely proportional. Afghanistan combined a low stay-at-home score with loose regulation. The country had the highest green space access in the region and an “unhealthy for sensitive groups” AQI score. In the European region, stay-at-home measures and green space access tended to be proportional in high-income groups. Regulations were loose, and AQI scores healthy. Within the Asia-Pacific region, there were significant differences in the stay-at-home scores among the countries. Singapore’s green space access was low and stay-at-home measures were high. In contrast, Mongolia’s had high green space access and low stay-at-home scores.

14.3.3 Changes in Green Open Access by COVID-19 Waves Figure 14.8 shows the association between green space access and the stringency index by region and country in the survey period. At the country level, the period was divided into three spans in 2020 (q1: February to April, q2: May to August, and q3: September to December). Bubble sizes indicate PM2.5 scores. Figure 14.8a presents the change in these indexes in the African region. At the regional level, the stringency index increased, and green space access decreased during the first wave (q1). During the second wave (q2), green space access increased as the stringency index decreased. During the third wave (q3), green space access fluctuated while the stringency index decreased, and in December, green space access became positive. At the country level, the stringency index scores in Mali and Cote d’Ivoire were lower than in the region, and the index scores

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Fig. 14.8 Time trends of changes in gree open access, stringency index, and AQI

decreased as time passed. The PM2.5 score in Mali also grew in q3, and the change in green space access was positive. Conversely, in South Africa and Uganda, the stringency index scores increased from q1 to q2 and decreased from q2 to q3, while green space access increased regardless of the change in the stringency index. Figure 14.8b shows the results of the American region. At the regional level, as stringency index scores increased, green space access decreased by April. After this point, the stringency index did not drastically change, but green space access increased during the second wave. From September, as the third wave began, green space access decreased. At the country level, the trends move in opposite directions in North and South America. In Canada and the United States, stringency index scores and green space access increased from q1 to q2, with AQI scores remaining low, but green space access decreased from q2 to q3 with little change in the stringency index. Countries in South America tended to have high stringency index scores, negative changes in green space access, and poor AQI scores.

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Figure 14.8c shows the results from the Eastern Mediterranean region. At the regional level, green space access decreased while stringency index scores increased in q1. After this period, green space access increased as stringency index scores decreased from q2 to q3. At the country level, low- or lower-middle-income groups showed similar trends. Stringency index scores increased during the first wave with no change in green space access, while green space access increased from the second to the third wave. Notably, the AQI of Afghanistan and Pakistan was poor, but the countries had positive changes in green space access. Countries in high-income groups tended to have negative changes in green space access throughout the year. Figure 14.8d shows the results from the European region. Regarding regional trends, the range of stringency index scores was between 50 and 70. Green space access was positive throughout the period. At the country level, high-income groups tended to see positive changes in green space access, although access decreased between q2 and q3. Low-, lower-middle and upper-middle-income countries such as Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan tended to have lower green space access and poor AQI scores. Figure 14.8e shows the results from the Asia-Pacific region. Change in green space access was negative throughout the year at the regional level. Stringency index scores were around 60 between q2 and q3. However, trends differed from country to country. The stringency index scores of New Zealand and Japan were lower than in other counties with negative changes in green space access. Green space access in Mongolia and Bangladesh was higher than in other countries, and AQI scores were poor.

14.4

Discussion

This chapter showed how global trends in COVID-19-related issues such as the number of infected people, changes in access to open green spaces, policy measures, and air pollution problems have evolved during the pandemic. The COVID-19 has highlighted both positive and negative trends related to human health security and planetary health issues stemming from socioeconomic inequality and healthcare systems disparities across the world. The pandemic induced lockdown reminds us that our existence depends on planetary health and nature-based pathways. To realize these pathways, people should understand the trade-off between human health and planetary health and build countermeasures. Accessing green spaces for improving mental health has been recommended in many previous studies, but few studies examine the impact of air pollution in these green spaces (Vieira et al. 2018). To implement GI with/post-COVID-19, region or each country should regenerate the environmental strategy of GI in a global context (Paital 2020). Long-term environmental exposure to poor air quality has a negative impact on the human body (Manisalidis et al. 2020). Thus, consider the effects that environmental change and environmental inequality have on human health security becomes important.

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Table 14.2 Green infrastructure strategy for with/post-COVID-19 AQI

AFR ✓ Poor Inequality

AMR

EMR ✓ Poor

EUR

✓ Good High inequality ✓ ✓ High Inequality Stay at ✓ ✓ ✓ home Low High Low MHPSS ✓ Low Applicable green infrastructure strategy for with/post-COVID-19 Strategy Prioritize Desirable to Prioritize Promote mental to solve promote meato solve improvement poor AQI sures to poor AQI measures that problems improve men- problems combine through GI tal health with through GI MHPSS and GI GI Green spaces access Stringency

SEAR-WPR ✓ Poor High inequality

✓ Good (north)

✓ Inequality

✓ High Better to focus on prioritizing measures for countries with poor AQI through GI.

Table 14.2 summarizes the findings of our study and suggests potential measures for post-COVID-19 developments based on the sustainable nature-based solution of GI according to the situation in each region or country. In the African region, the AQI was at a moderate level in 2019, but this worsened during the pandemic. Green space access was low in the region, but the number of mental health disorders was low, according to the 2017 data. Thus, in this region, post-COVID-19, it would be better to prioritize solving environmental issues (such as air pollution problems) through GI, which would ultimately improve human health. In Mali, especially, the air quality is notably poor, yet green space access is high. In the high-income countries of the American region, green space access was high, and AQI scores were low under the policy restrictions. Thus, implementing GI can be useful as part of an integrated strategy to improve mental health by promoting green space access. In the Eastern Mediterranean region, AQI scores were very poor. Hence, an urgent issue would be to solve these air quality problems through GI. As previous studies have suggested, marked inequality is seen in green space access between countries in the European region. AQI scores are good, but mental health is lower than in other regions. Thus, an issue to be prioritized in this region would be to solve mental health care and green space access inequality through GI. It would also be necessary to build a support system of multisectional MHPSS. In the Asia-Pacific region, AQI scores in high-income countries were good, but those of low- or lower-middleincome countries (especially Mongolia and Bangladesh, who both have high green spaces access) were unhealthy. However, the implementation rate of MHPSS was the best in the world. Thus, the region should aim to prioritize measures to improve the air quality in lower-middle-income countries through GI. The stringency index

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differed from country to country. Thus, countries with poor AQI scores would need additional measures, such as restricting access to poor air quality areas, as part of their political stringency policies for the post-COVID-19 situation. The COVID-19 pandemic is not only a crisis but also a human security crisis, which deprives freedom from human mobility, raises mental stress, and takes away dignity health. The pandemic demands a comprehensive human security measure, across-the-board human protection and environmental innovation. Environmental disturbance and degradation can be regarded as harmful to human physical and mental health as well as social health (Bratman et al. 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to reconsider how to structure and integrate environmental and public health policies. It also invites thinking about long-term health and well-being strategies by evaluating co-benefits across environmental, social, and economic aspects. However, practical engagement with the links between environment and health has been discussed separately so far. Since there are no global data on the concept of GI, this chapter could not demonstrate the effects of GI on human and planetary health. However, we analyzed the current world situation relating to green space access, mental health, and air pollution during the pandemic. We expect that these issues can be improved by GI. In a post-COVID-19 world, when considering measures for improving environmental and human health through nature-based solutions, GI can be introduced for this purpose. However, considering problems by region or country and prioritizing countermeasures for environmental sustainability has distinct advantages to effectively safeguard against future pandemics and other global challenges.

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Chapter 15

A Sustainable and Resilient Urban Transportation System Rohit Singh Nitwal and Ashish Verma

Abstract Pandemics and other disasters significantly impact community and transportation system through disruptions in normal day-to-day activities, loss or damage to life, property, or environment. The majority of covid-19 cases are from urban areas demonstrating the urgent need for improving cities’ resiliency to prepare for pandemics. The urban sustainable development goal (SDG) 11, namely, “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” depicts the importance of resilient cities and resilient urban transportation system as well. Urban resilience is defined as urban system’s ability to absorb shocks (sudden social, economic, or environmental changes), to adapt to changes, and transform into a new system when coping becomes difficult in the current existing form. The urban transportation system needs to be resilient to deal with pandemics, natural, and biological hazards. The transportation system also supports pandemic propagation such as covid-19 through associated local and long-distance travel risks. Generally, long-distance travel introduces disease into a non-affected community, and the local travel disperses it. A resilient urban transportation system would lead to a resilient city and decrease the negative impacts of pandemic and other calamities such as urban floods, climate risks, etc. Hence it is of utmost importance to evaluate the level of resilience of the urban transportation system and understand how a resilient and sustainable urban transportation system helps in achieving SDG 11. The objectives of the chapter are to; identify how urban transportation connects with SDG 11, develop a framework of indicators to evaluate the resilience of the urban transportation system and its association with SDG 11, and highlight how the resilient urban transportation system would cope with disasters. To develop an indicator framework, indicators are examined from relevant literature. Further, the chapter includes measurements for selected indicators. The above indicator framework would help practitioners and policymakers in the selection of suitable transportation interventions.

R. S. Nitwal · A. Verma (*) IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab), Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_15

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Keywords Resilience · Urban transportation system · Indicator framework · Sustainable transport · Sustainable development goals

15.1

Introduction

Pandemics and other disasters significantly impact community and transportation system through disruptions in normal day-to-day activities, loss or damage to life, property, or environment. The majority of covid-19 cases are from urban areas demonstrating the urgent need for improving cities’ resiliency to prepare for pandemics. Transportation system forms an integral part of a city and critical to support passengers and freight mobility in urban communities. To reduce the effect of disruptions on the transportation system, it needs to be made resilient (Reggiani et al. 2015). In general, the concept of resilience gets defined as the capacity of a system to withstand shocks (such as sudden social, economic, or environmental disruptions), to evolve to changes, and transform into a new functional system. In September 2015, United Nations (UN) declared the 2030 development agenda for sustainable development and prepared a set of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The 17 goals are to be achieved by all the UN member states by 2030 (United Nations 2015). One hundred ninety-six targets are present in 17 SDGs for which 231 unique indicators are identified in a global indicator framework (UNSD & DESA 2020). Indicators are variables used to represent a characteristic of interest (Gudmundsson et al. 2016). The ambitious goals include basic human security principles. Eradicate poverty, enhance food security, improve the quality of education, etc., are some of the principles. The transportation system, if made sustainable and resilient, would then address different human security dimensions. The transportation system provides access to various services and plans inclusive access to these services as well. Transportation also has different negative externalities such as loss of life in accidents, greenhouse gas emissions, congestion, air, and noise pollution. A sustainable and resilient transportation system is safe, resilient to disasters, inclusive, and provides access to various services such as access to healthcare facilities, food supply, education, and job opportunities, etc. Hence, different human security dimensions such as health security, food security, economic security, and environmental security are taken care of by a sustainable and resilient transportation system. Sustainable development goal 11, also known as urban SDG, aims to make cities resilient and sustainable, and depicts the importance of resilient cities and resilient urban transportation system. Therefore, measuring the urban transportation system’s resilience becomes important, which can be done using appropriate indicators. Studies monitoring the transportation system’s level of resilience should use dimensions of transportation resilience to categorize the selected indicators. Some studies do not use resilience transportation dimensions and refer to general resilience

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dimensions (Hughes and Healy 2014; Machado-León and Goodchild 2017). The studies have classified their indicators using the Bruneau et al. (2003) community resilience dimensions. This dimension classification does not include the important environmental dimension, which indicates the significant negative impacts of the transportation system on the environment (Demirel et al. 2008; Titos et al. 2015). Even studies using the resilience transportation dimensions face problems due to the existence of various transportation dimensions (Murray-tuite 2006; Ta et al. 2009). This study aims to address these gaps and proposes a conceptual framework using which suitable indicators are identified. These indicators are then mapped with targets relevant to resilience in the 2030 development agenda. Proposed indicators can be used to evaluate urban transportation’s resilience level. When used for the assessment over multiple regions, the indicator set could also help to identify regions with lower levels of resilience. Thus, the indicator framework would help practitioners and policymakers in the selection of suitable resilient transportation interventions. This chapter contains five sections. Section 15.1 gives the introduction and the gaps addressed in the study. Literature survey and gaps are documented in Sect. 15.2. Section 15.3 presents the conceptual framework along with the criteria to select urban transportation resilience indicators. The section also includes measurements for proposed indicators and a relationship matrix of indicators and key resilience properties. Section 15.4 presents a discussion on how the proposed indicator framework helps attain a sustainable and resilient urban transportation system and addresses different human security measures. Finally, the chapter ends with the main conclusions of the research.

15.2

Literature Review

15.2.1 Resilience in Transport Urban system’s ability to absorb shocks (sudden social, economic, or environmental changes), to adapt to changes, and transform into a new system when unable to cope in the existing form defines urban resilience. The shocks are a threat to the existing transportation system. Researchers consider different definitions when studying the transportation system’s resilience. To address the variation in definitions and understanding, Gonçalves and Ribeiro (2020) defined resilience as “the capacity of a system to resist, reduce, and absorb the impacts of a disturbance (shock, interruption, or disaster), to maintain an acceptable level of service (static resilience), and to restore the regular and balanced operation within a reasonable period of time and cost (dynamic resilience).” Bruneau et al. (2003) highlighted community resilience could be evaluated using four main properties of a resilient system, namely, redundancy (the extent

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of alternate elements), resourcefulness (using resources human or human-made), robustness (the strength of components of a system), and rapidity (the ability to fulfill goals at target time), also known as the 4R framework. The framework was mainly used to evaluate the seismic resilience of communities. Other than the four properties, efficiency, interdependence, preparedness, adaptation, flexibility are also considered in literature pertinent to the urban transportation system’s resilience (Cox et al. 2011; Leu et al. 2010; Liao et al. 2018; Nakanishi et al. 2014; Reed et al. 2009). Among the different properties, there are five main properties of the transportation system’s resilience: robustness, adaptation, redundancy, preparedness, and rapidity (Gonçalves and Ribeiro 2020). The properties can be used to assess various interventions for a sustainable and resilient urban transportation system and support policymakers to identify interventions that strengthen the resilience of transportation system.

15.2.2 Resilience Transportation Dimensions Resilience is a complex phenomenon and often misunderstood. Different dimensions are used in various resilience studies: population and demographics, community capital, economic, social, health, government, physical, etc. (Cutter 2016; Li et al. 2016; Manyena et al. 2019; Mihunov et al. 2018; Singh-Peterson et al. 2014; Yoon et al. 2016). Assarkhaniki et al. (2020) identified five frequently addressed resilience dimensions (FADs) and claimed that the FADs include all other peripheral dimensions (PDs), making these FADs as key dimensions. The five key dimensions are environmental, social, economic, infrastructural, and institutional. The key dimensions include sectors other than the transportation system, such as health, energy, education, etc. However, for our indicator framework, we require resilience transportation dimensions. We can define key resilience transportation dimensions using the FADs as follows: environmental dimension (is the environmental impacts of transportation system which includes air quality, impact to wildlife, etc), social dimension (is the social impact of transportation system which includes reduced mobility, lesser urban walking spaces, etc.), economic dimension (is the economic impact of transportation system which includes the financial capacity of people), infrastructural dimension (includes accessibility, quality, and functionality of transportation infrastructure), and institutional dimension (measures the government performance, mitigation strategies, preparation for response and recovery).

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15.2.3 Pandemic and Transportation Cities hosting a high concentration of population often become hotspots of pandemic infections. The transportation system supports pandemic propagation such as covid19 through associated local and long-distance travel risks. Generally, long-distance travel introduces disease into a non-affected community, and the local travel disperses it. Studies have shown that global air transport supports the spread of any disease on a global scale (Colizza et al. 2006; Grais et al. 2003). To reduce the risks of spreading the virus, commuters should minimize the use of shared vehicles. As per Harris (2020), a New York’s subway ridership and coronavirus infections demonstrate a positive correlation. Teixeira and Lopes (2020) investigated the effects of covid-19 on the urban transportation system in New York. They found that the bike-sharing system had a lower decrease in ridership (70% vs. 91%). They also detected a modal shift to the bike-sharing system from some subway users. A study done by Campisi et al. (2020) demonstrated participants shared a positive judgment on using micromobility (mono-wheel, e-bike) during the pandemic. Literature claims non-motorized modes as being more resilient to the pandemic. The urban transportation system needs to be resilient to deal with pandemics, natural and biological hazards. A resilient urban transportation system would lead to a resilient city and decrease the negative impacts of pandemic and other calamities such as urban floods, climate risks, etc. Further, the system would not act as a carrier of pandemic infections. The pandemics introduce uncertainty in the system’s operation, which calls for resilience as a response to tackle its negative impact and recover the system to its normalcy. Hence evaluating the level of resilience of the urban transportation system and understanding how a resilient and sustainable urban transportation system helps in achieving SDG 11, becomes important.

15.3

Conceptual Framework

To develop a set of indicators, we need to define the conceptual framework using which we classify our indicators. The framework identifies suitable indicators for monitoring urban transportation system’s resilience. Figure 15.1 shows the conceptual framework used to develop appropriate indicators. There are five main properties of a resilient urban transportation system: Robustness, Adaptation, Redundancy, Preparedness, and Rapidity, which are described in Table 15.1. These are essential qualities of resilience. To be resilient, the transportation system needs to be robust to limit the damage of any shock, adaptive in order to deal with the new stresses, redundant to put up with evacuations, prepared with mitigation measures to minimize the negative impact of disturbances, and rapid to reach the system normalcy or new business scenario.

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Fig. 15.1 Conceptual framework

Table 15.1 Properties of resilient urban transportation system Property Robustness Adaptation Redundancy Preparedness Rapidity

Definition Robustness is the strength of the system to resist current pressure without significant loss of function Adaptation is the ability of the system to change and still function during new stresses Redundancy is the latent capacity of some parts of the system which can be used over failed parts at disruptions Preparedness is the readiness to tackle potential disruptions using precautionary measures Rapidity is the ability of the system to achieve recovery in target time to evade future stresses

It is important to select the key dimensions to obtain suitable indicators that help in assessing resilience. Hence, we have used the key resilience transportation dimensions in the conceptual framework to categorize selected indicators. The dimensions are environmental, social, economic, infrastructural, and institutional. Indicators are selected from relevant literature based on suitability regarding five key dimensions and five main characteristics of a resilient urban transportation system. The key resilience transportation dimensions help categorize the indicators representing important characteristics of a resilient urban transportation system. Hence, the characteristics are added in the conceptual framework to prepare the indicator set.

15.3.1 Urban Transportation Resilience Indicators Using the above-mentioned conceptual framework, 15 indicators are proposed. These urban transportation resilience indicators are presented in Table 15.2.

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Table 15.2 Urban transportation resilience indicator framework

Dimensions Environmental

Social

Economic Infrastructural Institutional

Indicators Percentage forest land acquired for building roads Number of days within a year in which pollutant (O3, SO2, and PM10) concentrations exceed the standard Number of traffic accidents Post-event travel times Number of alternative transportation modes Cycling and walking flows Current level of service (LOS) Transportation cost to commuters Number of alternative routes Network vulnerability Response time Number of trained people available in transportation institutions Time to reach the system normalcy or new business scenario Expense on mitigation plans Level of integration in planning and operation of various components of transportation system

SDG resilience targets (1.5, 13.1) (11.5, 13.1) (11.5) (11.5) (1.5, 11.b) (1.5, 9.1) (1.5, 9.1) (11.5) (9.1) (1.5, 9.1) (11.5, 11.b) (11.5) (11.5, 11.b) (11.b) (11.b)

The 2030 development agenda addresses resilience in 6 targets present in 5 SDGs. The SDGs are goal 1 (is about ending poverty by 2030), goal 2 (includes improving nutrition, food security, and sustainable agriculture), goal 9 (to build resilient infrastructure), goal 11 (to make cities resilient and sustainable), and goal 13 (to combat climate change). The 6 targets are 1.5, 2.4, 9.1, 11.5, 11.b, and 13.1. Target 1.5 focuses on developing the resilience of people in vulnerable situations and the poor. Target 2.4 talks about the application of resilient agricultural methods. Building resilient infrastructure forms the focus of target 9.1. Target 11.5 aims to reduce deaths and economic losses due to disasters. Target 11.b includes using integrated planning to address disaster resilience. Furthermore, target 13.1 aims to enhance disaster resilience for different climate-related risks. Mapping of indicators to the resilience relevant targets is included in the indicator framework as well. The mapping is done by first identifying the target-specific aspects (i.e., what these targets try to achieve). The analysis further argues if the indicator values are in the desired direction, then one of these aspects/targets are fulfilled. For example, a low “network vulnerability” indicator value shows the infrastructure is resilient (target 9.1) and the resilience of people in vulnerable situations is developed (target 1.5). Hence, the “network vulnerability” indicator is mapped to resilience targets 1.5 and 9.1. The mapping makes the proposed indicator framework useful to understand the progress made toward the resilience targets as well.

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The indicators can further be analyzed to prepare an urban resilient transportation index. When backed with reliable data, such an index can reveal the resilience of an urban transportation system.

15.3.2 Indicator Measurements As per the conceptual framework, measurements of the 15 identified indicators are presented in Table 15.3. The measurements make the indicators applicable in different scenarios as the analysis can be done using other measurements based on data availability and reliability criteria (Maclaren 1996).

Table 15.3 Indicator measurements Indicators Percentage forest land acquired for building roads Number of days within a year in which pollutant (O3, SO2, and PM10) concentrations exceed the standard

Number of traffic accidents Post-event travel times Number of alternative transportation modes Cycling and walking flows Current level of service (LOS) Transportation cost to commuters Number of alternative routes Network vulnerability Response time Number of trained people available in transportation institutions Time to reach the system normalcy or new business scenario Expense on mitigation plans Level of integration in planning and operation of various components of transportation system

Measurement % forest land acquired for building roads Number of days within a year in which concentrations of 1. O3 exceed 100 μg/m3 2. SO2 exceed 20 μg/m3 3. PM10 exceed 50 μg/m3 Annual number of road traffic fatalities per million inhabitants Obtained from field survey Number of alternative transportation modes in a zone Obtained from field survey Highway capacity manual (HCM) method to define LOS Monthly expenditure on transport Number of alternative routes other than the usually used route Number of critical points on a network that are prone to traffic congestion and disaster Time taken to initiate the first response to any shock after its occurrence Number of skilled personnel in transportation institutions Time taken to reach business as usual or new normal state after the occurrence of disruption Budget allocated on developing mitigation strategies in an urban transportation system Low to high

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15.3.3 Relationship Between Proposed Indicators and Key Resilience Properties To appreciate how the selected indicators define the key characteristics of a resilient urban transportation system, one can generate the relationship matrix between the indicators and key properties. The matrix shows that the proposed indicators help in assessing the key properties of the resilient urban transportation system (whether the urban transportation system is robust, adaptive, redundant, prepared, and rapid or not). Table 15.4 shows the relationship matrix of proposed indicators and key properties of a resilient urban transportation system. The above matrix clearly shows that an indicator can define multiple resilience properties.

15.4

Discussion

The proposed indicators are carefully selected from relevant literature. These indicators define essential features of an urban resilient transportation system, such as “number of traffic accidents,” “post-event travel times,” “network vulnerability,” “level of integration in planning and operation of various components of transportation system,” etc. Measurements of these variables will indicate the existence of problems that can then be solved using different policies. These policies act as steps to move toward urban transportation resilience. One can monitor the indicators preand post-event (shock) to obtain the variation that helps us identify trends in the system performance and further develop potential plans to achieve resiliency. The framework also includes the mapping of indicators with relevant resilience targets. These targets being part of the 2030 agenda of sustainable development show that using these indicators to analyze an urban transportation system’s resilience also gives us a sustainable transportation system. The urban transportation indicator framework shows the link of different transport indicators with SDG resilience targets. The targets focus on improving the resilience of people in vulnerable situations and the poor, applying resilient agricultural methods, building resilient infrastructure, reducing deaths and economic losses due to disasters, and enhancing disaster resilience to different climate-related risks. One can directly imply how different human security dimensions are addressed here in the different SDG targets of the 2030 agenda. As the indicator framework depicts the mapping between the selected indicators and the SDG targets, the transport indicators help achieve security from different threats and insecurities such as economic, health, food, and environmental insecurities. The selected indicators in the study can also be categorized for each human security component linked with the transportation system, which includes economic security, food security, health security, and environmental security. The indicators

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Table 15.4 Relationship matrix of proposed indicators and key properties of a resilient urban transportation system Indicators Percentage forest land acquired for building roads Number of days within a year in which pollutant (O3, SO2, and PM10) concentrations exceed the standard Number of traffic accidents Post-event travel times Number of alternative transportation modes Cycling and walking flows Current level of service Transportation cost to commuters Number of alternative routes Network vulnerability Response time Number of trained people available in transportation institutions Time to reach the system normalcy or new business scenario Expense on mitigation plans Level of integration in planning and operation of various components of transportation system

Key properties Robustness Adaptation ✓ ✓

Redundancy

Preparedness ✓

✓

Rapidity ✓ ✓

✓

✓

✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓ ✓

✓

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✓

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✓ ✓ ✓

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✓

✓

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can be monitored for subsequent years to check how many of such threats/insecurities are addressed. Hence, the proposed indicator framework helps practitioners and policymakers select suitable resilient transportation interventions which are sustainable as well.

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291

Conclusion

This chapter presented a conceptual framework to develop an urban transportation resilience indicator framework. The proposed framework incorporates both properties and dimensions of a resilient urban transportation system to identify and classify the indicators, and hence is different than other existing frameworks. The five key properties of an urban resilient transportation system are defined. These properties are then used to obtain the indicator framework. Further, the indicators are also mapped to resilience targets in the 2030 development agenda. The targets also include the basic human security principles such as disaster resilience of the poor. Such steps are taken to propose indicators usable in a pandemic situation, for example, variables like “cycling and walking flows” are added in the indicator set. The literature review supports the argument for non-motorized transport being more resilient to a pandemic. Since the indicator framework includes the mapping of transport indicators with different SDG resilience targets, the transport indicators can also help monitor the progress made in the SDG resilience targets. The resilience targets from the 2030 agenda include the basic human security principles such as resilience of the poor in vulnerable situations (economic security), resilience in agricultural methods (food security), building resilient infrastructure, reducing deaths and economic losses due to disasters (health security), and enhancing disaster resilience to different climaterelated risks (environmental security). Hence, these dimensions of human security are also checked with the monitoring of progress made in the relevant SDG targets. As per the data quality, different indicator measurements can be used. One such measurement is shown in the chapter. Since the indicator framework contains classification based on resilience dimensions, it can be used to develop an urban resilient transportation index. The next step in the research is to prepare a database for measuring these variables. The proposed indicators in the framework can be monitored to prepare an urban resilient transportation index for different cities. This helps to obtain the resilience ranking of the regions and identify steps used by high resilient regions to achieve a high index value. The conceptual framework developed in the chapter can also be used to define indicators related to the rural transportation system’s resilience. Those indicators can be used to assess the resilience level of a rural transportation system. The resilience index helps us understand the resilience level of the transportation system, and helps in improving access to basic healthcare services, food supply, and areas providing job opportunities. Improvement in road users’ safety and mitigation plans to reduce the impact of different threats, such as climate-change risks, can also be addressed after analyzing the resilience index.

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Chapter 16

Responses for COVID-19 in the Pacific Small Island Countries Lilian Yamamoto

Abstract Pacific Small Island Countries (PSICs) could have been heavily affected by COVID-19 in terms of human security due to their healthcare limited capacity, reliance on food imports, and tourism industry, but because of their rapid response, the spread of the virus in their territories was prevented. The chapter will make a review of the region responses to the pandemic by examining the recommendations of the UN framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19. Since the region is one of the major international aid recipients, the study will review international aid through multilateral and bilateral channels in addition to national and community level responses on public health and socio-economic areas. The sources of the analysis are the database of global governmental measures to combat COVID-19 (ACAPS), governmental websites, international organizations regional reports on COVID-19 and scientific articles. Keywords Pacific small island countries · COVID-19 · Socio-economic responses · International aid · Community responses

16.1

Introduction

COVID-19 has been presenting a great human security threat in the Pacific Small Island Countries1 (PSICs) since the pandemic impacts the health, survival, and livelihood of the people in the region. Nevertheless, the PSICs have been successful in preventing the proliferation of COVID-19 in their territories (Pryke and Dayant 2020) by closing their borders and imposing travel restrictions. As of January 2021, only Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Fiji have had meaningful outbreaks and the 1

Pacific Small Island States are Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands (Republic of the), Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

L. Yamamoto (*) South American Network for Environmental Migrations (RESAMA), University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_16

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other countries mostly remained without infections (Ferris 2020). However, success in preventing the pandemic occurs at expense of the economic downturn in these countries. PSICs face challenges because of remoteness, poor infrastructure, restrictions of health systems, food imports dependency, climate change, and state security. The gross domestic product (GDP) in the Pacific is among the lowest in the world and forces them to rely on official development assistance, overseas remittances, and imported goods (United Nations Pacific 2020). In fact, the PSICs’ reliance on the international aid and official development assistance is higher in the Pacific than in any other region (Dornan and Pryke 2017). In addition, human security in the Pacific region gets affected as the region forms one of the most disaster-prone areas in the world. The IPCC AR5 points out a set of risks threatening the PSICs, which includes loss of livelihoods, coastal settlements, infrastructure, ecosystem services, economic stability caused by rainfall, cyclones, sea level rise, ocean acidification among others (CDKN 2014). As a recent example, from 6 to 10 April 2020, cyclone Harold caused the death of dozens of people and left many people homeless, posing challenges on government’s recovery, and logistics of humanitarian aid (Tan 2020). The storm arrived as a category 5 storm in Vanuatu, decreased to category 4 in Fiji, causing floods and struck Tonga during a king tide (WMO 2020). These countries suffered damage on their crops and losses to businesses, homes, and crops. Hence, other than economic consequences of COVID-19, the cyclone aggravated the long-term recovery (Tan 2020). Most of the Pacific islands have limited access to quality health services due to lack of qualified staff, infrastructure, and equipment. Ten out of 14 of the Pacific island countries spend US$500 or less per capita per year in health services, while the global average is around US$1000 per year. Twelve out of 21 Pacific island countries and territories—mostly those with close connections with developed countries (for example, Guam or New Caledonia)—have met the goal set by World Health Organization (WHO) of 4.5 health workers per 1000 islanders. Of the expenditure in the Pacific, 82% is paid for by domestic governments, 8% derives from private contributions, or out-of-pocket payments. The remaining amount derives from foreign aid (Pryke et al. 2020). Furthermore, since most of the PISCs do not have laboratory equipment, they send the samples to other countries for analysis. As a few cases of COVID-19 would be able to overwhelm their health systems (Gunia 2020) governments took quick responses for preventing the spread. Thus, these countries took public health and socio-economic measures to prevent the proliferation of COVID-19 in their territory by closing borders to avoid community transmission and collapse of health systems (PIFS 2020). Borders closure resulted in hotels and resorts shutting down and layoffs in countries who had economic activities (about 20–30%) heavily relied on the tourism sector such as Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Palau, and Vanuatu (IMF 2020; Griffith Asia Institute 2020). Since COVID-19 has restricted labor mobility, remittances were also affected. Remittances play an essential role in the GDP of the Pacific islands, i.e., 10% of the GDP in the Pacific islands and exceed 40% in Tonga, and about 15% in Samoa and

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Marshall Islands (IMF 2020). In addition, international aid supports the governments since the region has 9 of the 15 most aid-dependent countries (Lowy Institute 2019). This chapter examines the national public health and socio-economic responses from these countries and reviews the measures taken by the international community in terms of providing human security measures on with regards to health and socioeconomic response to the pandemics in the PSISs. Furthermore, since the implementation of measures should be grounded on human rights, the chapter reviews the consequences on the field as well. The study uses deductive methodology by analyzing the region adherence to recommendations of international organizations. The sources of the analysis are the database of International Monetary Fund Policy responses to COVID-19 tracker, governmental websites, international organizations regional reports on COVID-19 and scientific and journalistic articles.

16.2

The United Nations Guidelines on Socio-economic Responses to COVID-19

The United Nations (UN) launched an appeal for action to provide an immediate health and socio-economic response to the pandemic “Shared responsibility, global solidarity: responding to the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19” (UN 2020) in March 2020. The document also stresses on the necessity of economy and livelihoods receiving fiscal support to mitigate unemployment and businesses losses (UN 2020). The UN prepared three components as a response to COVID-19: (1) health response led by the World Health Organization (WHO); (2) humanitarian response planned by the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan, a collective effort by the members of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), which includes the UN and other international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with a humanitarian mandate in order to assist countries which are already in crisis; (3) the UN framework for the immediate socioeconomic response to COVID-19 which was launched by the UNDS for pursuing a comprehensive socioeconomic impact assessment and an effective response. The UN framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19 stresses that responses to COVID-19 should be implemented with respect to human rights and dignity of all people without discrimination (UN 2020) and suggests ten human rights indicators for supporting national and international efforts toward a human rights-based policy response to the crisis. The document identifies the need for disaggregating indicators by sex, age, disability, national origin, nationality, migratory status, race, income, geographic location, and other characteristics relevant in national context. In addition, the UN framework designates the human rights which should be respected: peaceful assembly, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, freedom of expression, press freedom, gender equality and the inclusion of women, among others (UN 2020). Human security stresses on partnerships with various actors from governments, academia, civil society, and

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private sector (UN Human Security 2020). Accordingly, the UN framework suggests five topics to be addressed by governments, development partners, and non-state actors: 1. Ensuring essential health services are still available and protecting health systems. 2. Helping people cope with adversity through social protection and basic services. 3. Protecting jobs, supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises, and informal sector workers through economic response and recovery programs. 4. Guiding the necessary surge in fiscal and financial stimulus to make macroeconomic policies work for the most vulnerable and strengthening multilateral and regional responses. 5. Promoting social cohesion and investing in community-led resilience and response systems (UN 2020). The above-mentioned elements contribute to ease the socio-economic consequences of the pandemics. In a multilateral level, the UN has drafted documents covering areas heavily affected by the pandemic, i.e., health, humanitarian aid, and socio-economic impacts. In the next section, the study will review how national governments and communities addressed the above-mentioned topics by using the database of International Monetary Fund Policy responses to COVID-19 tracker.

16.3

National Government Measures

All PSICs have introduced travel restrictions2 by closing international airports, restricting residents from traveling, and imposing quarantine.3 Closure of schools,4 canceling, and prohibiting public gatherings,5 establishing lockdowns,6 declaring state of emergency,7 curfew8 of business, and transport were also implemented. The government of Tuvalu has encouraged unemployed citizens to return home by providing financial assistance for boat fares (IMF). The Republic of Marshall Islands and Nauru have established safety requirements for carrier vessels in order to keep transhipment services (IMF). In April 2020, Kiribati government suspended all international flights and closed the borders (Radio New Zealand 2020). Consequently, I-Kiribati nationals who were stuck overseas have received government’s

2

Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu. 3 Nauru, Kiribati, Mashall Islands, Solomon, Tuvalu. Fiji. 4 Fiji, Kiribati, Palau, Solomon Islands. 5 Palau, Tonga, Vanuatu, Samoa. 6 Papua New Guinea, Tonga. 7 Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea. 8 Tonga, Vanuatu.

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financial assistance (Ministry of Information Communication Transport and Tourism Development of Kiribati 2020). Kiribati also has received assistance from Childfund New Zealand which delivered hygiene kits and conducted awareness on COVID-19 in the community (Radio New Zealand 2020). Public health measures have had a high impact on the economy of the PSICs forcing the governments to take fiscal measures. Most of the measures are related to food security, unemployment assistance program, and support for businesses. Micronesia’s government created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program of US$36 million (9% of GDP), supported by the US Department of Labor (IMF). In addition, a package to support businesses, social security tax of US$ 15 million was implemented (IMF). In Fiji, supplementary expenditures on public health, tax, and tariff reductions, loan repayment holidays aimed to promote food and health security (IMF). In addition, unemployment assistance was provided as well as fiscal and import duties on over 1600 items were reduced or eliminated (IMF). There were cuts to the environmental tax and departure tax (IMF). In order to guarantee food security, Fiji also provided a Farm Support Package for boosting short-term crops through seeds and material distribution (IMF). In Kiribati, specific measures included unemployment support, employer cost sharing for off-shore observers, sea farers, fruit packers, business stimulus, and loan support which relied on donor funds (IMF). In the Republic of Marshall Islands, the government approved the national preparedness plan in response to the global health pandemic with an initial budget of US$42 million (IMF). Grant support of US$19.6 million from Asian Development Bank was granted to cover the Outer Islands Covid-19 preparedness plans (IMF). Economic relief package to businesses was also provided (IMF). In Nauru, Nauru Airlines received subsidies of AUD5.1 million and cash buffers to repatriate Nauruans were provided (IMF). In Palau, the economy was supported by measures in order of US$20 million, which included unemployment benefit, new temporary job creation, and lending for the private sector (IMF). In Samoa, the government prepared an economic package of 66.3 million Samoan tala, which included medical response, temporary exemption on import duties on most commonly bought food items, grace period of the 3 months for all loan payments, and support for citizens (IMF). There was also temporary reduction of electricity and water bills (IMF). Solomon Islands approved an economic stimulus package of SI$319 million with funds of government and donors in order to support households and firms (IMF). As part of the economic recovery plans, a Development Bank of Solomon Islands (IMF) was established as well. International assistance to Solomon Islands has been arranged by Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States (IMF). Tonga established a 60 million Tongan pa’anga economic and social stimulus package for providing short-term assistance to health sector, tourism, transport, agriculture, education, and security (IMF). Tuvalu has established a strategic COVID-19 economic and financial relief package for the health, medical equipment, ventilators, and testing equipment (IMF). Furthermore, relocation to outer islands, repatriation of citizens who were studying abroad also took place (IMF). The

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Development Bank of Tuvalu has allocated funds to assist private sector in the island as well (IMF). All PSICs implemented measures are for easing the socio-economic and health impacts of COVID-19. However, governments are not the only ones working to cope with the crisis. The following section addresses community’s response to the pandemic.

16.4

Communities Response

The affected communities who have lost income due to tourism crisis in the South Pacific could deal with the effects of the pandemic by relying on subsistence agriculture and bartering as demonstrated by the study of Scheyvens and Movono (2020) which did an online survey and in-person interviews between June and September 2020 in six locations where the tourism was essential to the local economy in Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, and Cook Islands. Three main factors contributed to sustaining community livelihoods even without income from tourism: (1) people had access to customary land to grow food, (2) the community assisted more vulnerable individuals, (3) there was knowledge on how to grow food and fish (Scheyvens and Movono 2020). Furthermore, people started various activities to get cash, such as selling products of their farms and the sea, preparing food for selling in the market, selling flowers, doing home renovations in exchange for essential items among others (Scheyvens and Movono 2020). In Vanuatu, the non-profit organization ACTIV Association has started a farmer’s market in Port Vila which would support the farmers and income for women during the pandemic (Westoby et al. 2020). In Bucalevu village in Fiji, a restructuring of the agriculture work 3 months before the COVID-19 restrictions was able to secure food for all the households (Leweniqila and Vunibola 2020). Hence, although populations who relied on tourism have lost their jobs, they found creative solutions to guarantee their food security through communal support.

16.5

Human Security and International Aid

Financial, medical, and technical assistance to the PISCs have been offered by international organizations and the country donors or bilaterally, by traditional partners such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and China (Poling and Natalegawa 2020). The aid preserves population’s human security in respect of health by preventing the spread of the COVID-19 at the same time protects livelihoods from poverty by building the capacity of healthcare systems, educating the public on the pandemic, and protecting the most vulnerable people (UN Human Security 2020). Based on the specific needs of the PSISs, the World Health Organization (WHO) with the sponsorship of the Australian Department of Foreign

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Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has prepared a Western Pacific Regional Action Plan for response to large-scale community outbreaks of COVID-19. The plan attempted mitigation of the public health impact (WHO-Western Pacific Region 2020) by building up public health and clinical services to quickly detect, trace, test, and treat cases of COVID-19 in the Pacific (WHO-Western Pacific Region 2020). This also included deployment of medical resources from Fiji and Guam to other less equipped countries, screening passengers at major checkpoints, and requiring exposed persons to undergo quarantine (WHO-Western Pacific Region 2020). In April 2020, cyclone Harold caused damage in Pacific Islands such as Solomon, Fiji, Vanuatu, and Tonga (Roche et al. 2020). The Red Cross funded the affected areas through the National Red Cross Societies (Roche et al. 2020). Furthermore, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) established the Pacific Humanitarian Pathway in order to coordinate assistance provided by the UN agencies, governments, regional and multilateral organizations, NGOs, donors, development partners (WFP 2020) and supported the transportation of technical experts, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) members (SPC 2020). The European Union (EU), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the Pacific Community (SPC) signed an agreement on 25 January 2021 in order to consolidate their partnership. The EU will contribute with over US$24 million to support Cook Islands, Kiribati, Fiji, the Republic of Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu (WHO 2021). Australia has been the major donor for the PISCs over the last decade and the aid exceeds the total aid of the next four largest donors in the region, i.e., New Zealand, China, Japan, and the United States (Schultz 2020). Only in 2017, Australia donated almost four times as much as New Zealand, the second-largest donor (Lowy Institute 2019). Australia has been playing an important role in providing assistance to the PISCs with many initiatives in the region, and established partnerships for recovery: Australia’s COVID-19 development response assists Pacific Island States, TimorLeste and Indonesia to face COVID-19 and provides aid in areas such as health security and maintains social stability (Australian government-DFAT 2020a). Following this plan, Australia has deployed health and medical staff to the WHO regional office in Fiji and the Solomon Islands Ministry of Health, provided protective equipment, medical supplies, and financial support to Pacific island governments for maintaining the essential services (Australian government-DFAT 2020a). Australia has provided Papua New Guinea (PNG) with containerized medical clinics to PNG and medical staff. Australia has also announced funding of AUS 20 million for PNG (Australian National University 2020). In addition, Australia and UNDP program have also supported a program which distributed farming tools and vegetable seeds in Solomon Islands (Australian National University 2020). Australia has provided USD 84 million in relief assistance to Fiji (Australian National University 2020) and focused the assistance on health and education system support, food security, climate-resilient economic reform, and maritime security (Australian

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government, DFTA 2020b). In Kiribati, Australia provides aid on health systems, economic recovery, education, food security, infrastructure, security, and law enforcement. Furthermore, Australia offered the PSICs COVID-19 vaccines as part of a 500 million Australian dollars for the full immunization coverage in the region (Scott 2021). New Zealand provided financial aid to 12 Pacific countries in the form of medical equipment (oxygen machines, isolation facilities, ventilators, personal protective equipment), and COVID-19 tests (Kings 2020). NZ also recognized the need for financial contributions since the pandemics would hit the economic situation in the region (Kings 2020). Tonga received NZ$four million of support to cope with general impacts of the pandemic and NZ$1,100,000 million for implementation of the Pandemic plan (Government of New Zealand 2020). The United States’ aid came from diverse governmental sources. While the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has donated more than US$27.7 million to Pacific Islands, US$90 million were donated jointly by the Department of the Interior, Department of Health and Human Services, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Education, and Department of Labor. The fund supported the US Freely Associated States, namely Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau. As of August 2020, the US government donated over US$118 million to the region (USAID 2020). Over the last 20 years, China has increased investments in the Pacific Island States, in general terms, in order to exploit resources for China’s industrial base and reduce diplomatic recognition of Taiwan (Pierkarski 2020). Hence, state companies have injected over a billion dollars in nickel and cobalt mines in Papua New Guinea. Furthermore, in other countries, China has interest in tuna fishing grounds (Pierkarski 2020). With regards to the aid provided during the pandemic, China held two online meetings with Pacific Island States (Zhang 2020). The first one was held on 13 May 20209 and as a result the parties agreed on maintaining and strengthening their mutual support and “coordination in global and regional affairs,” maintaining the UN-centered international system, safeguarding the legitimate rights, interests, and development space of developing countries (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 2020a). The second meeting was held on 30 November 202010and while China “reaffirmed the commitment of making the development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccine a global good,” the PSICs made a statement defending the One-China principle (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 2020b). Chinese aid of US$1.9 million to PSICs had the objective of funding grants and medical supplies, having donated US$300,000 to Papua New

The following countries participated of the first meeting: Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Federated States of Micronesia, Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati. 10 Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Federated States of Micronesia, Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati. 9

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Guinea, US$200,000 to Samoa and US$100,000 to Vanuatu (Zhang 2020). As of January 2021, the Chinese government has donated over one million masks, 100,000 protective suits, and 23,000 protective face shields and goggles (Zhang 2020). The Jack Ma Foundation also provided facial masks to Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia (Zhang 2020). Chinese government at all levels has donated a large number of basic materials such as masks, isolation goggles, and gloves to the island countries. In addition to the epidemic-fighting assistance, China did not stop its assistance in other spheres. On 30 June 2020, the combined assistance by the China’s Ministry of Agriculture was delivered to local farmers in Vanua Island, Fiji, promoting the development of agriculture, and fisheries in Fiji. In order to help the island countries improve their people’s livelihood, on 10 July 2020, the Chinese Embassy in Tonga provided financial assistance to a Nukunuku community’s pig raising project on Tongatapu, the country’s main island (Yang 2021). On 7 April 2020, the Pacific Island Forum member nations established the Pacific Humanitarian Pathway on COVID-19 in order to foster cooperation and distribution of medical and humanitarian aid (Filho et al. 2020). A pooled donation from New Zealand, Australia, South Pacific Community (SPC), WHO, and UNICEF funded the testing capacity of Fiji. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has donated funding to support remoted working of the politicians in Samoa (Australian National University 2020). Australia is the major donor for the PISCs and the United States focused their assistance in Micronesia, due to the Compacts of Free Association. China has provided the region with personal protective equipment and sharing practices to respond to the pandemic (Poling and Natalegawa 2020).

16.6

Conclusions

The study examined how the PSICs implemented response in terms of human security in respect of public health and socio-economic measures to safeguard their societies from the economic downturns in their territories. The PSICs successfully prevented the proliferation of coronavirus, but their economies have suffered due to the tourism crisis and the decrease of international remittances. The communities in the PSICs have taken measures to provide food security to the inhabitants and for the most vulnerable individuals by applying traditional knowledge in fishing and agriculture. People also began selling food and flowers as well as offering home renovation services. National public health measures included closure of international airports, lockdowns, closure of schools, prohibition of public gatherings, curfew of business, and transports. Support on health services, testing, and vaccination has been taken place with the collaboration of international organizations and traditional partners such as Australia, New Zealand, United States, and China. Join efforts such as the Pacific Humanitarian Pathway on COVID-19 could guarantee the distribution of medical

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and humanitarian aid. Expectantly, PSICs will rely on foreign aid to recover from the pandemic scenario, but local initiatives based on communal principles also assisted individuals to overcome their subsistence needs in a first moment.

References Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2020a) Partnerships for recovery: Australia’s COVID-19 development response. https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/ partnerships-for-recovery-australias-covid-19-development-response.pdf Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2020b) Tuvalu COVID-19 development response plan. https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/covid-response-plantuvalu.pdf. Accessed 15 Jan 2021 Australian National University (2020) Covid Pacific Island response matrix. https:// socialprotection.org/discover/publications/covid-19-pacific-island-response-matrix. Accessed 5 Feb 2021 Climate & Development Knowledge Network (2014) IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report-what is in it for Small Island Developing States? https://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/IPCC-AR5Whats-in-it-for-SIDS_WEB.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Dornan M, Pryke J (2017) Foreign aid to the Pacific: trends and developments in the twenty-first century. Asia Pac Policy Stud 4(3):386–404. https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/ 2017-05/apo-nid189541.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Ferris E (2020) Countervailing pressures: climate change, migration and COVID-19 in the Pacific. https://environmentalmigration.iom.int/blogs/countervailing-pressures-climate-change-migra tion-and-covid-19-pacific. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Filho WL, Lütz JM, Sattler DN, Nunn PD (2020) Coronavirus: COVID-19 transmission in Pacific Small Island developing states. Int J Environ Res Public Health 17(15):5409 Government of New Zealand (2020) New Zealand provides significant COVID-19 support to Tonga. https://reliefweb.int/report/tonga/new-zealand-provides-significant-covid-19-supporttonga. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Griffith Asia Institute (2020) Responding to the economic fall-out of COVID-19 in Pacific island countries. https://blogs.griffith.edu.au/asiainsights/responding-to-the-economic-fall-out-ofcovid-19-in-pacific-island-countries/. Accessed 10 Dec 2020 Gunia A (2020) COVID-19 is reaching the last coronavirus free nations on earth, time. https://time. com/5910456/pacific-islands-covid-19-vanuatu/. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 International Monetary Fund (2020) Pacific Islands threatened by COVID-19. https://www.imf.org/ en/News/Articles/2020/05/27/na-05272020-pacific-islands-threatened-by-covid-19. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Kings J (2020) Pivoting New Zealand’s Aid Programme to respond to COVID-19. https:// devpolicy.org/pivoting-new-zealands-aid-programme-to-respond-to-covid-19-20200508-3/. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Leweniqila I, Vunibola S (2020) Food security in COVID-19: insights from indigenous Fijian communities. Oceania 90(1):81–88 Lowy Institute (2019) Pacific Aid Map. https://pacificaidmap.lowyinstitute.org. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2020a) Joint Press Release of The Vice Ministers’ Special Meeting on COVID-19 between the People’s Republic of China and Pacific Island countries. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/t1778780.shtml. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2020b) Joint Press Release of the Second Vice Ministers’ Special Meeting on COVID-19 between the People’s Republic of China

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and Pacific Island countries https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/t1836701.shtml. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Ministry of Information Communication Transport and Tourism Development of Kiribati (2020) Kiribati extends its border closure amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.micttd.gov.ki/ news/kiribati-extends-its-border-closure-amidst-covid-19-pandemic. Accessed 15 Feb 2021 Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (2020) Forum Economic Officials Meeting. https://www. forumsec.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PIFS20FEMM.4bRev.1-Socio-economic-Impactsof-COVID-19_Final.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Pierkarski K (2020) Playing the long game: Chinese COVID-19 aid in the Pacific Island States. https://intpolicydigest.org/2020/05/18/playing-the-long-game-chinese-covid-19-aid-in-thepacific-island-states/. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Poling GB, Natalegawa A (2020) The Pacific islands are a COVID-19 priority. https://www.csis. org/analysis/pacific-islands-are-covid-19-priority. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Pryke J, Dayant A (2020) The Pacific has pulled off a coronavirus miracle. But it comes at a price. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-15/coronavirus-pacific-economy-foriegnaid-china/12754068. Accessed 5 Jan 2021 Pryke J, Dayant A, Izumi T (2020) Health spending and foreign aid in the Pacific. https://www. lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/health-spending-and-foreign-aid-pacific. Accessed 15 Dec 2020 Radio New Zealand (2020) Childfund NZ supporting Kiribati with COVID-19 preparedness. https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/413528/childfund-nz-supporting-kiribatiwith-covid-19-preparedness. Accessed 10 Dec 2020 Roche C, Tarpey F, Flint J (2020) Is COVID a window of opportunity for localizing aid? Learning from a natural experiment in the Pacific. https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/is-covid-a-window-ofopportunity-for-localizing-aid-learning-from-a-natural-experiment-in-the-pacific/. Accessed 10 Jan 2021 Scheyvens R, Movono A (2020) Development in a world of disorder: tourism, COVID-19 and the adaptivity of South Pacific people. Massey University. Institute of Development Studies, Palmerston North Schultz A (2020) The humanitarian hole: Australia’s foreign aid cuts see disease increase abroad, Crikey. https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/07/24/foreign-aid-pacific-coronavirus/. Accessed 20 Jan 2021 Scott J (2021) Australia’s influence in Pacific Islands grow as China’s wanes. https://www. Accessed japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/01/06/asia-pacific/australia-influence-pacific-islands/. 15 Jan 2021 SPC (2020) Pacific humanitarian pathway on COVID-19 https://php.spc.int/sites/default/files/ eventfiles/2020-07/2020%20PHoH%20TP2%20Item%202.2%20Pacific%20Humantarian% 20Pathway%20for%20COVID-19%20%28PHP-C%29.pdf. Accessed 5 Jan 2021 Tan Y (2020) Cyclone Harold and coronavirus: Pacific Islands face battle on two fronts, BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52268119. Accessed 4 Jan 2021 United Nations (2020) Shared responsibility, global solidarity: responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sg_report_socio-economic_ impact_of_covid19.pdf. Accessed 10 Dec 2020 United Nations Human Security (2020) Human security newsletter—the importance of human security in the age of COVID-19. https://www.un.org/humansecurity/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 09/United-Nations-Human-Security-Newsletter-Summer-2020-min.pdf. Accessed 6 Apr 2021 United Nations Pacific (2020) UNCT Fiji COVID-19 Multisectoral Response Plan. https://unsdg. un.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/FJI_Socioeconomic-Response-Plan_2020.pdf. Accessed 5 Jan 2021 USAID (2020) The US government’s COVID-19—response in the Pacific islands. https://www. usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/The_Pacific_Islands_Fact_Sheet_on_COVID-19_Assis tance_-_final_Aug_2020.pdf. Accessed 10 Jan 2021

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Westoby R, Loehr J, Fleming C (2020) Pacific islands tourism during COVID-19: time to rethink. Griffith Asia Institute. https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0036/1197189/ Pacific-islands-tourism-during-COVID-19.pdf. Accessed 5 Feb 2021 World Food Program (2020) Delivering vital medical supplies, humanitarian air service boosts covid-19 response efforts in the Pacific. https://www.wfp.org/news/delivering-vital-medicalsupplies-humanitarian-air-service-boosts-covid-19-response-efforts. Accessed 15 Jan 2021 World Health Organization (2021) Strengthening vital partnerships in the Pacific to support health sector responses to COVID-19. https://www.who.int/nauru/news/detail/25-01-2021-strengthen ing-vital-partnerships-in-the-pacific-to-support-health-sector-responses-to-covid-19 . Accessed 20 Jan 2021 World Health Organization Western Pacific Region (2020) WHO Western Pacific Regional Action Plan for response to large-scale community outbreaks of COVID-19. https://apps.who.int/iris/ bitstream/handle/10665/331944/9789290619154-eng.pdf?sequence¼1&isAllowed¼y. Accessed 5 Feb 2021 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (2020) Tropical cyclone Harold challenges disaster and public health management. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/tropical-cyclone-haroldchallenges-disaster-and-public-health-management. Accessed 15 Feb 2021 Yang MH (2021) When Fiji is in need, China is always there to help. Global Times. https://www. globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1212447.shtml. Accessed 2 Feb 2021 Zhang D (2020) China’s COVID-19 Pacific diplomacy. Development Policy Blog. https:// devpolicy.org/chinas-coronavirus-covid-19-diplomacy-in-the-pacific-20200527-1/. Accessed 15 Jan 2021

Chapter 17

Between Protection and Empowerment COVID-19: Haiti’s Older People’s Perception and Behavior Margot de Greef and Martín Coria

Abstract By proposing a dialogue between the findings of a Rapid Needs Assessment of older people and COVID-19 in Haiti and different components of the human security framework and UN policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on older persons, this chapter contributes to two ongoing and interconnected efforts to inform the global COVID-19 response and build-back-better initiatives: (1) efforts to make older people visible in COVID-19 response and recovery and (2) efforts to inform COVID-19 response through the lenses of the human security framework. While older people are all too often left behind and left out, the Rapid Needs Assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of older people in Haiti carried out by HelpAge International and Church World Service (CWS) in 2020 was a first step to make them visible. The study was carried out by CWS in collaboration with four local organizations in a context marked by a prolonged national political crisis, worsening food security situation, rise in insecurity and gang violence, and an above-average hurricane season. A total of 240 people in the capital city of Portau-Prince and in the remote rural Northwest department was interviewed between July 28 and August 13, 2020. The assessment resulted in the report “COVID-19 Rapid Needs Assessment of Older People, September 2020.” This chapter summarizes the respondents’ views on the themes of the COVID-19 awareness and behavior, food and income, health and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), as well as the initial feedback received from Haitian civil society representatives and participant rural NGOs. It concludes that a serious and sustained effort is required from member states and organizations to operationalize the full promise of the human security approach to older people, especially in fragile states and developing countries where human insecurities predate COVID-19, are systemic and interconnected.

M. de Greef (*) Church World Service (CWS), Port-au-Prince, Haiti e-mail: [email protected] M. Coria Church World Service (CWS), Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_17

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Keywords Older people · Fragile State · Human security · Haiti · Rapid needs assessment

17.1

Introduction

This chapter seeks to contribute to two ongoing and interconnected efforts to inform the global COVID-19 response and build-back-better initiatives: (1) efforts to make older people more visible in COVID-19 response and recovery (UN 2020a; HelpAge 2020a) and (2) efforts to inform COVID-19 response through the lenses of the human security framework (UN Trust Fund for Human Security 2020a). This chapter draws upon findings of a Rapid Needs Assessment of older people and COVID-19 in Haiti (hereafter referred to as RNA) conducted by Church World Service for HelpAge International in July–September 2020. The study was part of a series commissioned by HelpAge International (HelpAge International 2020b) in 10 of the top 30 countries listed in the Fragile States Index 2020 (The Fund for Peace 2020), and it surveyed 240 rural and urban respondents. At the time of the assessment, the people of Haiti—including older people—were coping with months of COVID-19 response measures as well as with multiple pre-COVID-19 forms of human insecurity: political crisis and state paralysis, rural food insecurity due to prolonged drought, widespread citizen insecurity, and systemic challenges to guarantee universal access to human rights to work, water and sanitation, healthcare, education, social security, and housing. This chapter seeks to answer the following questions: Can the human security framework contribute to short-, medium-, and long-term improvements in the human security of Haiti’s older people? Are Haitian older people’s demands limited to health-related ones? First, this chapter offers a contextual overview and summarizes the RNA process and methodology. Second, this chapter presents the RNA’s findings by each of the seven essential dimensions of human security: community, economic, environmental, food, health, personal and political security. Third, it backs with findings from the RNA some of the key statements made by the May 2020 UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons (hereafter referred to as May 2020 UN Policy Brief). Finally, this chapter ends by reviewing the potential to advance older people’s human security using the five human security’s fundamental principles— people-centered, comprehensive, context-specific, prevention-oriented, and protection and empowerment—as guidance.

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Contextual Overview and RNA Process and Methodology

17.2.1 Contextual Overview Sixteen percent of the world’s population is expected to be 65 or older by 2050 (WHO 2011). The U.N.’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates doubling of the number of older persons in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2030, at which point the age group will represent 16.7% of the population (UN ECLAC 2014). As a result, the region’s states, civil society, academia, and humanitarian sector have started to pay growing attention to older people’s issues and agendas, including their effective inclusion and participation in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. According to Article 29 of the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons, States Parties “shall adopt assistance measures specific to the needs of older persons in preparedness, prevention, reconstruction, and recovery activities associated with emergencies, disasters, and conflict situations” and “shall foster the participation of interested older persons in civil protection protocols in the event of natural disasters” (OAS 2015). In May 2020, 140 countries, including Japan, Haiti, and fourteen of the top 30 countries listed in the Fragile States Index 2020 (UN 2020b), released a statement in support to the UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons published earlier that month (UN Trust Fund for Human Security 2020b). The statement included references to key characteristics of the human security framework such as: • A strong call (“It is imperative”) to “fully empower older persons to allow them to effectively contribute to [sustainable development] efforts as rights holders and active, autonomous and independent agents and beneficiaries of change” (Protection-Empowerment Framework). • A strong belief that older people’s participation in COVID-19 response is a must (People-Centered). • A commitment to work with all partners to (. . .) “foster more inclusive, equitable, resilient and age-friendly societies” (Comprehensive Perspective and Multisectoral Framework). With data gathered from older people in urban and rural communities, the Haiti RNA validated several of the proposed directions and recommendations made by the May 2020 UN Policy Brief. In addition, the following key priorities for action proposed in the UN Policy Brief intersect with key characteristics of the human security framework: • Strengthen social inclusion and solidarity during physical distancing. • Fully integrate a focus on older persons into the socio-economic and humanitarian response to COVID-19.

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• Expand participation by older persons, share good practices, and harness knowledge and data. While COVID-19 presents risks for the population at large, the risks for older people are higher. Older people are more susceptible to disease or infection or face preexisting health conditions. Situations of malnutrition weaken autoimmune systems, increasing vulnerability to infection. Those living in residential homes face a higher risk of contamination due to the group-setting and number of residents. Moreover, the fatality rate for people over 60 is higher than for other age groups. In countries or areas with already weak healthcare systems, the impact is even more severe. At the same time, social isolation may result in mental or cognitive problems (WHO 2020; Benksim et al. 2020). While the Haitian constitution recognizes the government’s “obligation to guarantee the right to life, to health, to respect of the human being, to all citizens without distinction,” no law specifically protects older people (La constitution de la République d’Haïti 1987, authors’ translation). Government institutions responsible for promoting the rights of older people are the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Office of Protection of Citizens (MAST 2013). Haiti has a young population, with only 4.7% aged over 65 (570,325 persons, according to 2019 data of the World Bank) and a life expectancy of 63.7 (UNDP 2019). As of March 11, 2021, Haiti had 12,686 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (1887 aged 60 and above) and 251 deaths. Of these, 130 were of people aged 60 and above, accounting for 52% of the total of deaths, while the age category only represents 15% of all confirmed cases (MSPP 2021). COVID-19 related restrictions were in place from March to July 2020, affecting employment, education, business, etc. Since most people are day laborers, a day no work means no income. The few reserves of the families were completely depleted and assets sold, such as animals or seeds reserved for planting. In fact, 55% of respondents part of the RNA had no savings or had depleted their savings due to COVID-19. Haiti depends mostly on imported products. Given limited transportation and the closure of the border with neighboring Dominican Republic, prices increased, while the exchange rate fluctuated largely. On April 19, 2020, textile industry opened at 30%, with a focus primarily on the production of face masks, the use of which became mandatory as of May 11. The emergency health situation ended on July 20, while the airport opened on June 30, with a limited number of flights. Factories started operating fully again on July 6, while churches opened on July 12 and schools on August 10. Thus, HelpAge International initiated an assessment in several countries related to the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of older people, in order to inform future programming and advocacy. In Haiti, the assessment was carried out by Church World Service (CWS) in collaboration with four local organizations, in a context marked by a prolonged national political crisis, worsening food security situation, rising insecurity and gang violence, and an above-average hurricane season. Church World Service is a member of ACT Alliance, “a coalition of more than 145 churches and church-related organizations working together in over

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125 countries to create positive and sustainable change in the lives of poor and marginalized people” (ACT Alliance 2019, p. 7). Peace and human security forms one of the five pillars of its 2019–2026 global strategy. “By engaging with populations under stress to address the needs they identify, human security directly and positively affects the daily lives of people threatened in their survival, livelihood and dignity” (ACT Alliance 2019, p. 15). This relates to situations of conflict and peace, as well as the capacity of a dignified life where human rights are met.

17.2.2 RNA Process and Methodology HelpAge International used a standard questionnaire to address the same questions in different countries. Church World Service (CWS) invited four community-based organizations to interview a total of 240 older people, half of whom live in the capital city of Port-au-Prince and half in the remote rural Northwest department. The interviews took place between July 28 and August 13, 2020. Selection of participants was done based on beneficiary lists and input from local authorities. Interviews were conducted in person through door-to-door visits ensuring physical distancing, personal protective equipment worn, and interviewers following government guidelines. In total, 14 interviewers spoke with 120 persons in rural areas in the Northwest department and 120 in the greater Port-au-Prince area. The data of the 240 interviews was gathered manually and entered online into the Kobo toolbox for data analysis. Twelve percent of the data was verified (28 out of 240 interviews), comparing the paper version to the digital data. Four people did not complete the survey (all in Port-au-Prince), some because of extreme pain they were suffering, others because they were not willing to answer all questions. Three persons had not previously heard about COVID-19. Therefore, their interviews were ended early and information about COVID-19 was shared with them. The data was subsequently disaggregated by gender, age bands (10-year age cohorts), disabilities, and location. The report was produced by CWS with support from HelpAge International.

17.3

Contribution to Measure the Overall Human Security of Older People in Haiti

This section links the RNA’s findings to each of the seven essential dimensions of human security: community, economic, environmental, food, health, personal and political security. Previous research has looked at human-security aspects related specifically to older people. Sukanya et al. (2020) present a case study of older people in Thailand, discussing the importance of social security, economic means, participation in

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Table 17.1 Human security and findings of RNA Haiti (Authors’ own table) Human security components Economic (ensures basic income or publicly funded safety net) Food (ensures physical and economic access to basic food) Health (ensures a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity)

Environmental (ensures a healthy physical environment) Personal (ensures physical, mental, and emotional safety)

Community (ensures benefits derived through membership in a group [e.g., family, community, ethnic/racial group]) Political (ensures basic human rights)

RNA main findings 54% of older people interviewed depended on remittances as a source of income. 92% of older people had to reduce quantity or quality food, while 87% had a food stock of less than 2 days available at home. 98% of respondents did not know where the nearest testing or treatment center for COVID19 is located. 91% had a preexisting health condition, while 73% had difficulties accessing health services. 56% could not afford personal protective equipment, while 46% could not apply the handwashing principle due to a lack of water and soap. 52% of respondents had insufficient water. 56% had insufficient WASH facilities. 49% of the older people interviewed felt worried or anxious all or most of the time about the situation, while 46% felt depressed all or most of the time. Negative impacts of COVID-19 were higher for those living alone, with less food available at home, less access to healthcare, and more feelings of depression. Access to basic goods and services are not given for older people, with 72% of respondents considering limited food as a risk for older women (64% for older men) and 54% identifying limited health care as a risk for older women (52% for older men).

society, access to healthcare, and relationships with family, among others. Similarly, World Health Organization (2008) states that emergencies present serious threats to human security, with a greater vulnerability of older persons. WHO identifies several determinants of active ageing, which are affected in emergency situations. These factors include physical environment, social environment, economic determinants, health and social services, behavioral determinants, personal determinants, gender, and culture. Table 17.1 reviews the components of human security based on the results of the RNA carried out among older people in Haiti. • Economic Security (ensures basic income or publicly funded safety net). According to the 1994 Human Development Report, “economic security requires an assured basic income, usually from productive and remunerative work, or in the last resort from some publicly financed safety net.” This is part of Sustainable Development Goal 1: no poverty (UN 2015). The case study of

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Haiti shows economic security not being met for older people, as they have no regular income and an absent social security system. This makes retirement age only a theoretical concept and forces older people to keep working. In other countries, including European countries, older people receive a decent pension upon retirement, providing them with a regular income to take care of their daily needs. Haiti’s social security system only includes government and formally registered workers while the majority of the Haitian people are employed or selfemployed in the informal sector. Although retirement age officially is 58, older people generally keep active until they are no longer able to, since no activities mean no income. The survey confirmed the same, as only one person (a former government employee) had a pension, while 54% of older people interviewed depended on remittances as a source of income. • Food Security (ensures physical and economic access to basic food). Food security was defined at the World Food Summit in 1996 as existing “when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 2006, p. 1). This includes availability of quantity and quality food, access to food (affordability), utilization of food, and stability of having adequate food at all times. It is included in Sustainable Development Goal 2: zero hunger. The results of the Rapid Needs Assessment showed that 92% of older people had to reduce quantity or quality food, while 87% had a food stock of less than 2 days available at home. About 52% also had to make changes to what they usually eat. Even before COVID-19, in October 2019, the National Coordination of Food Security in Haiti found 35% of the population to be facing crisis or emergency food insecurity. In August 2020, the crisis had increased to 42%. • Health Security (ensures a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity). There is no universally accepted definition of health security, and it is understood as related to vulnerability for diseases, access to health services, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. Health security is addressed in Sustainable Development Goal 3: good health and well-being. Older people are the first group to be vulnerable to COVID-19, with an even higher rate of vulnerability for those who have preexisting health conditions. As the results of the Rapid Needs Assessment in Haiti showed, most older people interviewed had a health condition (91%), while the majority had difficulties accessing healthcare (73%), and 54% were unable to get the necessary medication. In rural areas, facilities for testing and treatment of COVID-19 are altogether absent. Regular healthcare suffers from increased pressure on the healthcare system, especially in those places where the healthcare system was already underperforming before the arrival of COVID-19. While 99% of older people interviewed could give examples of protective measures, not everyone was able to apply them. About 56% could not afford personal protective equipment, while 46% could not apply the handwashing

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principle due to a lack of water and soap. Of the respondents, 52% had insufficient water and 56% had insufficient WASH facilities. About 98% of respondents did not know the location of the nearest COVID-19 testing or treatment center. Rather, several of the 10 departments of the country have no testing facilities at all. A lack of trust in the government, fear, and stigma added to the reluctance of people with symptoms to take a test. Instead, an increase in consumption of natural medicine has been observed. Psychosocial support is not common in Haiti, despite the level of shocks people get to absorb, ranging from natural disasters to political instability, illness, and death. COVID-19 presented another shock. Of the older people interviewed, 49% felt worried or anxious all or most of the time about the situation, while 46% felt depressed all or most of the time. • Environmental Security (ensures a healthy physical environment). While different definitions exist of environmental security, according to Zurlini and Müller (2008, p. 1351): “The major challenge concerns the global environment change, focusing on the interactions between ecosystems and mankind, the effects of global environmental change on environmental degradation, the effects of increasing social request for resources, ecosystem services, and environmental goods.” Access to water forms an important part of environmental security, in fact, a daily necessity. In Haiti and many other countries in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean, most families have no indoor plumbing. Instead, they fetch water at natural sources, pumps, in rivers, or using rainwater catchment systems. This does not necessarily provide year-round regular access to water, nor purified or potable water. There is also pressure on land. Land ownership can lead to conflicts, but the use and exploitation of land can also reduce soil fertility. In rural areas, smallscale farming techniques including burning of soil are traditionally used, which kills the nutrients in the soil. Solid waste management impacts the environment as well and is not regulated in Haiti. For older people, access to water forms a specific issue of concern, while access to land can also be a challenge. Environmental security is addressed in several of the Sustainable Development Goals, including goal 6 (clean water and sanitation), 13 (climate action), 14 (life below water), and 15 (life on land). • Personal Security (ensures physical, mental, and emotional safety). Personal security is related to security from physical violence (UNDP 1994; Gierszewski 2017). Threats to personal security can be coming from the state, other states, other groups of people, gangs, or oneself (UNDP 1994). Violent crime presents a major source of fear. This can be illustrated by the high level of migration from Central American countries for reasons of gang violence and criminality. Similarly, an increasing rate of kidnappings and general insecurity in Haiti is an important incentive for migration. Violence can be aimed specifically at women or children. The case study in Haiti distinguished safety concerns for men from those for women, although most concerns were identified for both men and women. These included financial abuse, neglect, and isolation. Armed

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violence was more of a concern in urban areas than rural areas. Impunity and non-functional justice systems increase not only the risk of high violence but also the feeling of having no support as a victim. This is addressed through Sustainable Development Goal 16: peace, justice, and strong institutions. During COVID-19, an increase has been observed in domestic violence, femicides, as well as suicides (UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner 2020). Feelings of depression are more common. Older people feel deprived from liberty to take decisions, as restrictions first specifically targeted older people. • Community Security. Community security is related to membership in a group (Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities). COVID-19 has restricted most group activities, making it necessary for communities to come up with creative ways to connect and be a community. Community security is also concerned with traditional practices. For example, in Haiti child domestic servitude is a common phenomenon, a cultural reaction that was originally meant to facilitate access to education in urban areas for children from rural areas, but which has put children at risk of being deprived of their rights and being used as a free household servant instead, while they are often victims of violence. Persons with disabilities are excluded from activities in several societies. The position of older people differs. While they deserve respect and have a position of wisdom in some societies and families, in others they are considered a burden and neglected. • Political Security (ensures basic human rights). Political security refers to honoring basic human rights, as expressed in all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Despite 217 years of independence, the Government of Haiti struggles to ensure basic human rights for all citizens, including older people. As the case study showed, older people are struggling to have their right to food security fulfilled, their right to health, as well as their right to shelter. Their main safety risks are adequate access to food and healthcare.

17.4

The May 2020 UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons

The current section combines findings of the Rapid Needs Assessment, CWS field experience, and the May 2020 UN Policy Brief. Table 17.2 summarizes findings of the RNA validating the proposed directions and recommendations made by the May 2020 UN Policy Brief.

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Table 17.2 UN policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on older persons compared with findings of Haiti RNA (Authors’ own table) UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons, May 2020 Restrictions on freedom of movement and physical distancing can lead to a disruption of essential care and support for older persons.

The unprecedented nature of the crisis has highlighted the invisibility of older persons in public data analysis. Economic Well-being. The pandemic may significantly lower older persons’ incomes and living standards.

Mental health. Physical distancing can take a heavy toll on our mental health. The risks are higher for older persons living alone and being more digitally excluded than others.

Vulnerability. Essential care that older persons often rely on is under pressure. Older women often provide care for older relatives increasing their risk to infection.

Findings of the Haiti RNA, October 2020 91% of older people interviewed had a health condition, while 73% had difficulties accessing healthcare, and 54% were unable to get the necessary medication. 32% of older people reported that they adhere to social distancing without government restrictions, while 31% had no movement restrictions. 40% of those in urban areas had no movement restrictions, compared to 23% in rural areas. “I have heard neither government nor media speak about the lives of older people during COVID-19.” 55% of respondents had no savings or had depleted their savings due to COVID-19. 9% of older people interviewed rely on loans as their main source of income, and this is more common in urban areas (13%) than rural areas (5%). However, people are having difficulty repaying these loans. One of the respondents explained that she took a loan so that she can sell at school; but, since the schools are closed, she has no income and cannot reimburse the loan, which has a high interest rate. A woman in the northwest captured the impact of COVID-19, saying: “Corona finished with the little I had.” Only 1 of the 240 respondents received a pension. 54% of older people interviewed depended on remittances as a source of income. 49% of the older people interviewed felt worried or anxious all or most of the time about the situation, while 46% felt depressed all or most of the time. Perceived risk of isolation is a higher problem for older women in urban areas (22%) than rural areas (8%), which demonstrates more community feeling and solidarity in rural areas than in urban areas. While many older people depend on children and others, reduced activities of their children due to COVID-19 means that they cannot take care of their parents as they used to. One older person said: “Coronavirus has a major negative impact on the way I live, because my children give me money, but my children’s means have (continued)

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Table 17.2 (continued) UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons, May 2020

Abuse and neglect. With lockdowns and reduced care, violence against older persons is on the rise. Abuse of older persons has been on the rise and estimates before the COVID-19 pandemic suggested 1 in 6 older persons being subjected to abuse in 2017.

Older persons with disabilities and chronic conditions may experience further difficulties in accessing healthcare and become more marginalized.

Responders. Older persons are not just victims. They are also responding. They are health workers, caregivers, and essential service providers. Older women often provide care for older relatives and raise and care for children.

Findings of the Haiti RNA, October 2020 become very limited.” while a woman in the northwest responded: “Corona blocked the activities that allowed my children to take care of me.” 56% could not afford personal protective equipment. Financial abuse forms the third highest risk for both older men and older women. 41% of older people consider financial abuse a risk for women and 33% for men, referring to the risk of theft, extortion, or a lack of return on investment. The concern is higher for women aged 60–70 (53%) than those aged over 80 (26%). Financial abuse is less prevalent in urban areas (31% for women and 19% for men) than rural areas (52% for women and 47% for men). Physical abuse and emotional abuse for women are both considered a risk by 10% of older people, although both are a higher concern in rural areas (13% and 16%, respectively) than urban areas (7% and 3%, respectively). Regular armed violence on the other hand is a higher risk in urban areas (13% women, 18% men) than in rural areas (3% women, 6% men), which reflects the insecurity existing in the city. “I am not living in peace,” one man in Port-Au-Prince said. And a woman in the northwest: “Since this illness arrived in the country, I have not been comfortable at all.” the findings show concerns and risks being very similar for men and women, while they differ in urban versus rural areas. People with disabilities had preexisting movement restrictions, unrelated to COVID-19, due to limited mobility and limited services for transportation. Moreover, people with disabilities are stigmatized and often excluded from activities. Older people play an important role in caring for others, especially for those aged 60–70. The main type of care provided by older people is basic care and support (food and shelter). 54% of older people provide this kind of care, with 76% aged 60–70 versus 28% aged 80 and above. Both people with and without disabilities care for others; 52% of older people with disabilities provide food and shelter to others. (continued)

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Table 17.2 (continued) UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons, May 2020

Many older persons rely on home and community services and support, particularly those living alone.

COVID-19 is escalating entrenched ageism, including age-based discrimination and stigmatization of older persons.

Many older persons have limited access to digital technologies and lack necessary skills to fully exploit them. Older persons remain disproportionately offline. This digital divide can also impede older persons’ access to essential information regarding the pandemic and related health and socioeconomic measures. Older persons may rely on multiple income sources, including paid work, savings, financial support from families, and pensions, all of which may be in jeopardy as a result of COVID-19. The pandemic may significantly lower older persons’ incomes and living standards.

Findings of the Haiti RNA, October 2020 The second main type of care provided is financial support, such as paying school fees. 41% of older people provide financial support, once again mostly those aged 60–70 (61%). 36% of older people with disabilities provide financial support. The percentage of older people providing financial support is substantively higher in urban areas (52%) than in rural areas (31%). 16% of older people provide emotional support, which again is higher for those aged 60–70 (29%) and those living in urban areas (25% versus 7% in rural areas). 9% of women provided childcare versus 4% of men. Persons living alone are generally more depressed (51%). 87% of older people responded they have no food at all in their homes or only sufficient food for one day. In rural areas and for those living alone, the number is even higher (93%). None of the respondents living alone and aged 80 and above could tell where the nearest facility is for testing or treatment. People with disabilities are stigmatized and often excluded from activities. Information on testing centers has not been shared publicly due to the stigma of COVID19 and the fear of retaliation by communities where the facilities are located. In the northwest there are no facilities that test people for COVID-19. Only 2% of respondents would prefer to receive COVID-19 information from the internet. 63% learned about COVID-19 over the radio, the most important communication tool, and a preferred means of receiving information by 84% of respondents. Participants were asked to identify their top three priorities in the light of COVID-19. For 44% of respondents, the first and main priority was access to food, followed closely by income/livelihoods (39%).

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17.5

319

Operationalizing the Promise That the Human Security Framework Represents for Older People in Haiti

The Rapid Needs Assessment confirmed the human insecurities of Haiti’s older people—multiple and interconnected before COVID-19—have grown exponentially as a result of the pandemic. Based on the findings from the Rapid Needs Assessment, the follow-up dialogue with Haitian civil society partners and CWS’ own humanitarian, development, and advocacy experience, this section explores the potential of future human security initiatives in Haiti in relation to the human security framework’s guiding principles to make sure responses are people-centered, comprehensive, context-specific, and prevention-oriented, combined with a cross-cutting principle of protection and empowerment (UN Trust Fund for Human Security 2016). • People-Centered. Future application of the human security approach in Haiti should make older people (both rural and urban) visible in quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis efforts and ensure accurate representation by gathering age-specific data, detailed information on disabilities, and drawing urban-rural comparisons. Older people should also be involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs that concern them. In Haiti, they are ready and eager to be included and engaged in all three phases of the development of a human security approach (Phase 1: Analysis, mapping and planning, Phase 2: Implementation and Phase 3: Rapid assessment). • Comprehensive. Human security interventions should acknowledge the cross-sectoral consequences of natural hazards and their impacts on different human insecurities faced by older people and their informal networks and support systems. This includes the importance to fully capture the impacts of natural disasters on their caregivers but also on those cared for by older people. As evidence confirmed, a majority of them, especially in the 60–70 age range, are economically active. Older people have the right to participate in livelihoods recovery, economic empowerment, and financial literacy initiatives. • Context-Specific. Interventions should acknowledge the differences between urban and rural contexts, the varying cultural and community perceptions of ageing and disabilities that may exist across generations, and the structural mobility challenges faced by people with disabilities, especially those living alone. By building upon existing community structures in rural communities, like cooperatives, women groups and farmer associations, existing vegetable gardens, small-commerce loan programs, adult literacy, and income-generation initiatives can expand to include older people who face visible and invisible barriers to access these initiatives.

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Special attention should be paid to supporting homeless older people, both in rural and urban areas. • Prevention-Oriented. Efforts should be made to ensure access of older people living alone and those aged 70 year or older to water programs (creation, expansion, upgrades). Formal and informal community-based psychosocial support systems can be strengthened by training existing community volunteers so they can engage older people in safe, creative, and dignifying ways. Rural and urban economic empowerment should be made truly inclusive. Age-friendly livelihood and rapid income-generation activities should support older people, and/or their families, to achieve economic security. Haitian civil society including older people associations should be supported in their efforts to put the creation of a viable universal social security system on the policymakers’ agenda. At the same time, Haiti’s public healthcare and prevention system should be supported so that it can guarantee universal access to healthcare and prevention and remove access barriers for older people. • Protection and Empowerment. Protection and empowerment strategies are a cross-cutting principle among the above-mentioned four principles. Older people deserve to be heard. Thus, using a participatory approach becomes important and makes the voices of older people heard in all human rights areas.

17.6

Conclusion

Eight years after UN General Assembly resolution 66/290 of 2012 affirmed the universal value of human security, and almost 1 year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, both the human security approach and the May 2020 UN Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on Older Persons remain relevant and helpful guidance to member states and global, national, and local civil society. However, as documented in a series of Rapid Needs Assessments of older people conducted by HelpAge International and partner organizations in 10 of the top 30 countries listed in the Fragile States Index 2020 (The Fund for Peace 2020), a serious and sustained effort has to be made by member states and organizations to operationalize the full promise of the human security approach to older people, especially in fragile states and developing countries where human insecurities predate COVID-19, are systemic and interconnected. The case study presented in this chapter confirms that, when asked, older people have a lot to say, including about topics not directly or visibly connected to a preconceived older people’s agenda, like access to water or urban and rural livelihoods. Another Haiti, more just, resilient, and inclusive, is possible. Only with older people’s full inclusion and participation in all its three phases, will the human

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security approach realize its full potential in Haiti and address systemic developmental challenges in a comprehensive and truly inclusive manner. Once overcome, the COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly result in a new momentum to advance more and better partnerships both among states and within countries and will open a window of opportunity for reforms within global, multilateral organizations and regional bodies. Progress at both fronts will help to bridge the profound gap existing between ambitious statements of purpose and actual improvements.

Bibliography ACT Alliance (2019) A global strategy for ACT Alliance 2019–2026 Benksim A, Ait Addi R, Cherkaoui M (2020) Vulnerability and fragility expose older adults to the potential dangers of COVID-19 pandemic. Iran J Public Health 49:122–124 FAO (2006) Food security. Policy Brief Gierszewski J (2017) Personal security within the human security paradigm. Security dimensions. Int Natl Stud 23:51–66 Helpage International (2020a) COVID-19: building back better how to engage with the UN’s socioeconomic response and recovery framework at country level. Available at: https://www. helpage.org/silo/files/covid19-helpage-un-socio-economic-framework-toolkit.pdf [Viewed October 30, 2021] Helpage International (2020b) COVID-19: rapid needs assessments. https://www.helpage.org/ what-we-do/coronavirus-covid19/covid19-rapid-needs-assessment-rnas/ [Viewed January 4, 2021] Helpage International/Church World Service (2020) COVID-19 rapid needs assessment of older people Haiti – September 2020 La constitution de la République d’Haïti (1987). http://www.oas.org/juridico/PDFs/mesicic4_hti_ const.pdf. Viewed October 30, 2021 Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP) (2021) Surveillance de la COVID-19, Haïti, 2020–2021 Ministère des Affaires Sociales et du Travail (MAST) (2013) Résolution 21/23 du conseil des droits de l’homme. Les droits des personnes âgées. Situation de la protection et de la promotion des droits des personnes âgées en Haïti Organization of American States (OAS) (2015) Inter-American convention on protecting the human rights of older persons Sukanya A et al (2020) Human security of pensionable officials and elderly association members: the case of Thailand. Int J Econ Bus Adm 8(4):30–43 The Fund for Peace (2020) Fragile States Index United Nations (UN) (2012) 66/290, resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 10 September 2012 United Nations (UN) (2015) Sustainable development goals. https://sdgs.un.org/goals [Viewed December 26, 2020] United Nations (UN) (2020a) Policy brief: the impact of COVID-19 on older persons United Nations (UN) (2020b) Statement of support to the UN secretary general’s policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on older persons United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1994) Human development report 1994 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2019) Human development report 2019

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United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Carribean (UN ECLAC) (2014) Older persons in Latin America and the Caribbean. https://www.cepal.org/en/infographics/ older-persons-latin-america-and-caribbean [Viewed March 19, 2021] United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (2020) COVID-19 measures are ‘gender blind’, increase risk of violence against women, says UN expert. https://www.ohchr. org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID¼26369 [Viewed January 12, 2021] United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (2016) Human security handbook United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (2020a) Newsletter Summer 2020 United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (2020b) Statement of support to the UN secretary general’s policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on older persons. https://www.un.org/ development/desa/ageing/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2020/05/ENG_final_-with-countries.pdf [Viewed January 4, 2021] World Bank (2019) Population ages 65 and above, total – Haiti. https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO?locations¼HT [Viewed December 26, 2020] World Health Organization (WHO) (2008) Older persons in emergencies: an active ageing perspective World Health Organization (WHO) (2011) Global health and aging World Health Organization (WHO) (2020) Guidance on COVID-19 for the care of older people and people living in long-term care facilities, other non-acute care facilities and home care World Health Organization (WHO)/Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) (2019) Mainstreaming human security to build community resilience within the context of health: a strategy to implement the 2030 agenda for sustainable development at the community level Zurlini G, Müller F (2008) Environmental security. Encycl Ecol 2:1350–1356

Chapter 18

Government Responses to COVID-19 and Their Implications on Food Security in Indonesia Laely Nurhidayah and Riyanti Djalante

Abstract COVID-19 has triggered unprecedented movement restrictions measure and disrupted to the lives, economic and social, around the world. Indonesia continues to be severely affected by COVID-19. Pandemic inevitably threatens food security particularly for poor and most vulnerable groups. The poor and most vulnerable groups including lower income workers and informal sectors have less protection than formal sectors. In addition, increasing of unemployment has lowered the purchasing power and may threaten to access to food. To anticipate and mitigate the emerging global food crises predicted by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as result of COVID-19. There are two keys priority policy taken by government, (1) social safety nets program to reduce the economic burden of the low income society during the pandemic and (2) food estate program to strengthening government food reserves at local level with mega food estate project outside Java started in October 2020. These two programs are not without controversies and critics. This chapter examines COVID-19 and its implications on food security in Indonesia. We examine government response and challenges in strengthening food security in times of COVID-19 and its implications on the achievements of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1 and 2 zero poverty and hunger in Indonesia. This study uses literature review and published public materials to collect and analyze the data. We conclude that targeted social safety protection remains a critical policy in times of pandemic. In the implementation, it needs to be improved particularly on data of beneficiaries through one data policy to address food insecurity toward poor and vulnerable groups. Investing in a sustainable future forms a pillar of the COVID-19 response. Priority to strengthen resilience of the local food system and facilitate food production at local level with ensuring smallholders have financial support and minimizing the impact to the environment is critical rather than

L. Nurhidayah (*) National Research and Innovation Agency (PMB-BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia R. Djalante ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta, Indonesia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_18

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mega project with causing more land tenure conflicts and environmental degradation. Keywords Food security · COVID-19 · Poor and vulnerable groups · Governance · Local food system · Social safety net and protection · Sustainability

18.1

Introduction

COVID-19 has triggered unprecedented movement restrictions measure and disrupted to the lives, economic and social, around the world. The lockdown intended to contain the virus has created major disruption to the economic and food system. Pandemic is a global shock and disrupted supply and demand in the interconnected world economy. The pandemic has plunged most countries into recession in 2021. The pandemic has negative effect on short- and long-term food security and nutrition with the economic slowdown and poverty increase. Lower income and high prices of food have resulted in inaccessibility of healthy and nutritious food for many poor people. This situation undermines the right to food and stalling the effort to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 Zero hunger. The world is no longer on track to achieve zero hunger by 2030. If recent trends continue, the number of people affected by hunger would surpass 840 million by 2030 (UNESCAP 2020). Indonesia continues to be severely affected by COVID-19. As per March 14, 2021 the COVID-19 cases in Indonesia reached 1,414,741 with 38,329 deaths (Worldometers 2020). Since end March 2020, the government adopted large-scale social restriction intended to curb the spread of the virus. As the result of this measure, Indonesia entered into recession in the third quarter of 2020. The Ministry of finance has estimated that between 2.9 million and 5.2 million workers could lose their jobs during the pandemic. According to the Ministry of Labour Force, about 375,165 formal workers were laid off (PHK/employment termination) as of 12 May 2020 and an additional 1,032,960 formal workers had been told to stay at home, either unpaid or half-paid (WFP 2020). Informal workers are the most vulnerable groups as they are not covered by social security schemes and sometimes do not have health insurance. Rising unemployment among formal and informal workers is declining purchasing power and subsequently increasing the risk to food insecurity. Despite Indonesia made significant progress in terms of economic growth decreasing poverty and inequality as well as in reducing food insecurity, the ongoing COVID19 is likely to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and poses serious challenges to food security. Indonesia continues to set ambitious goals in achieving the SDGs of achieving a more inclusive development model. The Government’s vision for 2045—when Indonesia celebrates 100 years of independence—is to achieve highincome status and reduce poverty to nearly zero (World Bank 2020). To ensure the food security of the region, Indonesia has a framework under Food Law (No 18/

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2012) that aims ‘to realize food sovereignty, food security, food self-sufficient’. Rice forms the main staple food to measure the food security in Indonesia. This chapter will examine COVID-19 and its implications on food security in Indonesia. We examine government response and challenges in strengthening food security in times of COVID-19 and its implications on the achievements of UN SDGs 1 and 2 zero poverty and hunger in Indonesia. This chapter is divided into several parts—first introduction, second methodology, and the third part highlights the COVID-19 and global food security threat. Fourth chapter provides the highlight on Indonesia Government Responses to impact of COVID-19 on food security and fifth is discussion and conclusion.

18.2

Methodology

This research uses literature review and case studies on Indonesia government policy responses to the impact of COVID-19 and food security. Data is collected from various up-to-date secondary sources including scholarly articles, government regulation and websites, local and international news websites, publications and websites relevant from research institutes and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs); International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs); and International Organizations such as FAO. This chapter primarily examines the government responses toward the impact of COVID-19 to food security with case study in Indonesia. We analyze the literature from various international publications and INGO and experts how to respond on the impact of COVID-19 to food security (Fig. 18.1). From this analysis, we look in Policy options

Policy choices

Science Policy Interaction

Food and nutrition assistance

Social Protection

Strengthening one data policy

Keep the trade corridor open Food security monitoring system

Food Estate Program

Strengthen social protection Invest in sustainable future Transforming food system

Fig. 18.1 Methodology–science policy interaction

Sustainable system

local

food

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more detail at how Indonesian government chose their policy in response to the impact of COVID-19 on food security. From various policy options, this chapter will only focus on strengthening social protection and invest in a sustainable future as pillar to COVID-19 response. Sustainable future refers to sustaining and improving livelihood and at the same time preparing for a more inclusive environmentally sustainable and resilient food system. Finally, the chapter provides key considerations for national policing and planning by strengthening social protection with one data policy and strengthening sustainable local food systems.

18.3

COVID-19 and Global Food Security Threat and Responses

COVID-19 first emerged in China in late 2019. It has put many countries in the world to impose stringent lockdown measures and social distancing for months to control the spread of the virus. The impact of these measures is inevitably a disruption to mobility and economic activities and food security and nutrition. The economic sectors affected most by COVID-19 measures include: airline, travel, tourism garment, supply chain, retail, food and beverages, and manufacturing sectors. The pandemic poses serious threat to food availability and stability and access due to disruption of food supply chain and global economic slowdown. The recession and unemployment threatens global food security and nutrition of million people around the world (United Nations 2020). The pandemic has affected food security and nutrition in two ways, the first is threatened people’s access to food due to loss of income and second disruption of food system. Loss of income has been caused by increasing unemployment. With the closures of factories and workplaces and drop of sales, many businesses have had to close either temporarily or permanently and force to lay off and dismiss their workers. The International Labour Organization (ILO) anticipated 200 million workers being thrown into unemployment (Swinnen and Mcdermott 2020). Additionally, increased unemployment lowers the purchasing power and impacts the ability to buy food. The effect of this recession becomes stronger to the poor and vulnerable groups. The World Bank in its biennial poverty and Shared Prosperity Report has estimated that the pandemic will push additional 88–115 million people into extreme poverty (World Bank 2020). Most of the poverty increases would be in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, more than 820 million people were already identified as chronically food insecure (FAO 2020a). The latest data show food security of 135 million people categorized as crisis level or worse (FAO 2020a). The COVID-19 pandemic could now double the number, leaving the world not on track to achieve zero hunger by 2030. The pandemic is also disrupting the food system. COVID-19 will probably have a smaller direct impact to agricultural production than avian flu and swine flu which reduced animal sourced food output. The pandemic has disrupted food supply chain.

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Fig. 18.2 Food price indexes. (Source: World Bank 2020)

At the first stage of pandemic due to lockdown, there was logistic barrier which disrupted food supply chain. There are many reports that farmers were forced to destroy their product by burning or leaving them spoil. Dairy Farmers in America Co-operative are forced to dump 14 million liters of milk every day due to interrupted supply chain (Hufstutter 2020). Disrupted food supply chain also includes contamination of food by viruses even though the risks are low. Potential COVID-19 threatens food such as fresh fish, frozen seafood, meat, and poultry and has been reported in New Zealand, China, and Vietnam (White 2020). Additionally, the food price may increase rapidly due to trade restrictions as countries prioritize domestic demand which caused disruption in food supply chain around the world. The World Trade Organization (WTO) reported up to 80 countries and separate customs territories introduced export prohibitions or restrictions to date (ASEAN Policy Brief 2020). Those smaller and import-depended countries with no domestic production capacity suffer the most from the severe restrictions on food products and can risk their food security. For example, 8 out of 10 ASEAN member States importers of food products except Singapore and Thailand with Philippine, Cambodia, and Myanmar are the biggest importers (ASEAN Policy Brief 2020). The pandemic has affected supply and demand of certain products and their prices. The World Bank has predicted increase of food price. Following a projected increase of more than 3% in 2020, the World Bank’s Food Price Index is expected to gain an additional 1.5% in 2021 (Fig. 18.2). Certain products’ prices have increased, for example rice. It was reported to 7 years high due to stockpiling in the beginning of pandemic (Tan 2020). There is high demand of Thai rice after big rice exporters such as India and Vietnam faced export disruptions due to COVID-19. Asia produces 90% of the world’s rice supply and consume the same amount. In order to address this risk of food insecurity during pandemic, the FAO urged countries to meet the immediate food needs of their vulnerable population, boost social protection programs, keep global food trade going, keep domestic supply chains moving, and support smallholders farmers’ ability to increase food

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production (FAO 2020a). Food insecurity refers to lack of access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal human growth and development and an active and healthy life. There are four pillars of conceptual framework of food security that include: availability, access, utilization, and stability (FAO 2006). Availability corresponds to food supply, access refers to effective demand to food (economic access), utilization related to dietary quality, and stability capture food as daily necessity. The most important impact of COVID-19 pandemic is food insecurity through income decline. Therefore, food access and dietary choices may be affected and are at risk. Social protection programs could be in a form of cash transfer, public works, food transfer, or food voucher. To ensure food security, the food system has to keep running. Food systems include all elements (environment, people, input, processes, infrastructure, institutions) and activities related to the production processing, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food and the outputs of these activities including socioeconomic and environmental outcome (Deveraux et al. 2020). While the disruption to the food system has been minimized with measures such as most governments have exempted from national lockdowns workers engaged in agricultural production, most retail outlets are allowed to continue trading during the lockdown in most countries, and consumers are allowed to leave their homes to buy essential food and groceries. The Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) issued call for action to build better food system, and addressing the food security crisis include maintaining open trade, governments (with the help of the private and philanthropic sectors) need to adopt urgent measures to strengthen and expand their targeted food and nutrition programs, and income safety nets for social protection, the food and land use sector is properly funded with the long-term capital and incentives needed to reward the supply of nutritious, affordable food.

18.4

Indonesia Government’s Responses to the Impact of COVID-19 on Food Security

This section will focus on Indonesia government’s response to COVID-19 on food security. It highlighted two key policies: the social protection scheme and food estate program. Social protection is a well-known concept in Indonesia and in most countries in the world. Indonesia has a social protection system and social safety net, but not fully operational yet and confronts major challenges including structural, financing, and database (OECD 2019). Drawing from lessons from COVID-19, the necessity of reforming the social protection schemes is evident particularly on beneficiaries data base and deliver for vulnerable groups and poor people. Wellestablished social protection system and social safety net in a normal time can absorb the shock caused by the pandemic. It is estimated that 2.9 million to 5.2 million workers could lose their jobs during the pandemic and an additional one million formal workers had been told to stay at home, either unpaid or half paid. The jobs of

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around 316,000 informal workers have been affected by the social distancing measures (WFP 2020). In addition, this chapter will provide a highlight into the food estate program as policy to respond to anticipate global food crises as predicted by the FAO.

18.5

Social Protection and Safety Nets

Social protection and social safety net forms the core of recovery programs from COVID-19. As a response to COVID-19, there are several programs launched as social safety nets either initiated by central government and local government. The issuance of Government Regulation in Lieu of Law (Perppu) No 1/2020 on State Financial Policy and Financial System Stability to Counter the Coronavirus Pandemic 2019 (COVID-19) and/or in the Event of Dealing With Threats Endangering National Economy and/or Financial System Stability provides a new instrument to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on village economies. The Regulation has mandated an increase in the budget on health, social safety nets, and economic recovery. With this regulation, President Joko Widodo has announced a stimulus package of USD 28.8 billion. These include $5.33 billion for health expenses, $7.82 billion for social security, and $4.98 billion for tax incentives and micro-credit for the community, and $10.67 billion for economic recovery. For COVID-19 response, Indonesia launched a new social protection program. Previously, Indonesia had existing social protection programs including rice for the poor (Rastra), assistance for poor students (Kartu Indonesia Pintar), Social Health Insurance for the poor and near the poor, and conditional cash transfer (Program Keluarga Harapan). Social protection programs during pandemic include food aids. In early March 2020, the central and local government launched targeted distribution of food assistance to poor and vulnerable groups. Food aids are distributed by the central government through the Ministry of Social Affairs. The Ministry of Social Affairs has allocated 325,781,448 USD for social protection including the distribution of 15.2 million household recipients with food packages (BNPT) with an amount of 14 dollar (rice, green bean, potato, and chicken meat). The aid got distributed from March to December 2020 throughout every provinces in Indonesia. The mechanism of distribution is through a given card (Kartu Keluarga Sejahtera) to every targeted household recipient to buy food in place that provides e-warong (kiosk). In addition, local government also distributed food assistance, in Jakarta for example, the food packages value of 19 dollar (10 kg rice, 4 tuna can, biscuit, cooking oil, wheat flour, sauce, vermicelli, and soap) were distributed. The food aid in Jakarta is divided in several phase, phase 1 is targeted to 1.2 million people while phase 2 is targeted two million people. The food aids are distributed every month from April to December 2020. Implementation faces the problem of overlapping food aid between central and local government, and mis-targeted and unequal distribution of food aid due to lack of reliable recipient data. The root of the problem

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is central and local government has different database and no update regularly to the list of poor people. Poverty is dynamic, people who were poor this year could be better off, and people who are not poor could be become poor because of lost job due to COVID-19. That is why regular updates of database are necessary. Second is the cash transfer program. Indonesia deployed its largest cash transfer program as part of a social protection program. Cash transfer proved crucial in response during the financial crisis. Existing and new cash transfers can help alleviate financial barriers families face to access good and services. There are three types of cash transfer program. (1) Cash transfer (Bantuan Sosial Tunai (BST)) from the Ministry of Social Affairs to the poor people. With an amount 42 dollar every month, the government distributed this money to nine million targeted households from April to June 2020. The amount has been reduced to 21 dollar from July to December 2020. The government has extended the cash transfer program for vulnerable people affected by COVID to early 2021. The household recipients of BST is different from the existing Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) from Keluarga Harapan (KPH) program and food aid Bantuan Pangan Non Tunai (BNPT). To date, government social assistance programs use Social Welfare Integrated Data (Data Terpadu Kesejahteraan Sosial) of the Ministry of Social Affairs. (2) Cash transfer program from village funds (BLT) which targeted poor people in the village. The distribution of this village funds begins phase 1 in April to June with the amount 42 USD to every targeted household. BLT was distributed in 74.877 villages across Indonesia which targeted 7.426.707 million households and with a budget around 332,134,075 USD. Phase 2 from July to September with the amount reduced to 21 USD per household. (3) Cash transfer to workers who have a salary less than 535 USD per month. The Ministry of Finance has begun to transfer $4.5 billion of cash to 15.7 million workers and 12 million small business owners on August 2020.

18.6

Food Estate

Although Indonesia’s national food balance remains safe for major commodities, to anticipate and mitigate the emerging global food crises predicted by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as result of COVID-19, the government launched the program of food estate project in Kapuas and Pulang Pisau regency in Central Kalimantan and Humbang Hasundutan regency, South Sumatra. Food estate is an integrated food development concept that covers agriculture, plantation, and animal husbandry in one area. The agriculture commodities grown in the food estate include: rice, corn, bean, sweet potato, peanuts, cassava, sorghum, fruits, vegetables, palm oil, sugar cane, sago, chicken farm, and beef farming. Food estates will be developed by individual investors or from state-owned enterprises and the government encourages the corporations to have partnership with local farmers. The areas will be limited to only 10,000 ha in size in Kalimantan and South Sumatra and 20,000 ha for Papua (Litbang Pertanian 2020). As part of the National Strategic

18

Government Responses to COVID-19 and Their Implications on Food Security. . . Provinces

Area ha)

(Million

East Java

2.29

13.13

West Java

2.12

12.52

Central Java

2.01

11.42

South Sulawesi

1.18

6.02

North Sumatra

1.00

5.15

South Sumatra

0.98

4.77

Lampung

0.85

4.32

South Kalimantan

0.57

2.42

West Kalimantan

0.55

1.50

West Sumatra

0.53

2.77

331

Production (Million ton)

Fig. 18.3 Indonesia’s 10 biggest rice producing provinces. (Source: Modified from the Indonesian Agriculture Ministry, 2020)

Programs (PSN) of 2020–2024, the area designated as a food estate is expected to become a new national food barn outside Java Island. In addition, Jokowi also plans to develop food barns and facilitate collaboration between state-owned and Jakartaowned enterprises to secure rice stocks for food security challenges due to COVID-19. The government has developed 5000 food barns so far (Rahman 2020). These food barns are essential particularly during COVID-19 crisis as there are difficulties in importing. Expectantly, with effort the stocks by end of December 2020 are expected to reach 17.6 million tons with surplus 7.6 million tons and consumption ten million tons (Rahman 2020). Food security in Indonesia is measured by the availability of rice as main staple food. Below is the data of provinces which have biggest rice producers in Indonesia (Fig. 18.3) and food estate development plan (Fig. 18.4). To support the food estate program, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry issued the Ministry Regulation No 24/2020 on Forest Areas allocation for Food Estate to allow forests to be converted into farmland and provide guidelines to support government programs on food estate. The conversion of forest into food estate can be conducted in protected forest and production forest (article 19). According to the regulation, some forests can be converted to food estate including getting recommendation from an integrated team. The integrated team include: the ministries, local government, Indonesian Institute of sciences, academic, and other institutions.

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Area ha

1. West Kalimantan

120,000

2. Central Kalimantan

180,000

3. East Kalimantan

10,000

4. Maluku

1,200,000

5. Papua

1,700,000

Fig. 18.4 Food estate development plan. (Source: Modified from Indonesiabaikid, 2020)

In Kalimantan, the Ministry of Public Works and Housing is appointed to implement a food estate program and put the defense minister in charge in overseeing the project. The potential area for food estates in Central Kalimantan is 165,000 ha. The project began in October 2020. Most of the new estate will sit on peatland in 600,000 ha ex mega rice project. Water supply is the main key to the food estate development program in the province. To make this 165,000 ha peatland functional, the government needs to develop and rehabilitate infrastructures for irrigation with total budget rehabilitate irrigation channels with a total budget of 1.05 trillion rupiah. With the rehabilitation carried out in stages from 2020 to 2022.

18.7

Discussion

In this discussion, we will highlight the problem and challenges of two key government policies instruments namely social protection and food estate in effectively responding to the implication of COVID-19 to food security. This chapter argues that well-established social protection system and social safety net in a normal time can absorb the shock caused by the pandemic. In addition, social protection and social safety net should be core of recovery programs from COVID-19. That would ensure human security in longer term. Social protection and safety nets in Indonesia remain a great challenged. In social protection programs, while there are new various social protections launched, there is concern that coverage remains low, with inadequate benefits provided and the delivery system is fragmented and many leakage and mis-targeting due to un-updated data. In the recent advancement of technologies in big data, technologies and application including machine learning and artificial intelligence have spurred optimism and these technologies can address challenges involving healthcare and social protection (Arthur Glen Maail 2018). Therefore, we will highlight the one data policy as policy recommendation needs to be fixed for future improvement to social protection programs. While the initiative of food estate aims for improving food security, however there is concern that the

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program may lead to deforestation and targeted big investors rather than focus on improving small farmer productivity in providing food at local level.

18.8

Strengthening Social Protection with One Data Policy

Despite unprecedented scale of the program, various social protection schemes provided by the government including food aid, cash transfer, subsidy to utility bills in the implementation are not enough. Data of beneficiaries remain major challenges in effectively delivering the program. Data management has been a long-standing challenge in Indonesia, specifically on disaster-related data. Key data sets are often spread and incomplete among different ministries. Targeting has many flaws, leakage and many citizens are left without protection. There is exclusion and inclusion error among beneficiaries in participating in the program. One reason for use of inefficient targeting programs includes use of different databases. Datasets overlapping, lack of data quality, and difficulty in data sharing in every ministries and local government are some of the problems. Till recently, the government social assistance program utilizes the data from the Ministry of Social Affairs namely Social Welfare Integrated Data (DTKS). DTKS is an electronic data system which contains social, economic, and demography from 99 million individuals with the status of lowest welfare in Indonesia. The source of DTKS is the updated integrated data collected by The Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) in 2015. The data for Covid assistance comes from the old data from 2015. This data does not match with the real condition in 2020. There are difficulties in updating the data due to the dynamic nature of poverty. There are 92 regencies and cities in Indonesia that have not updated the poverty data since 2015. In addition, sectoral ego and lack of coordination between central government and local government forms a problem as well. However, not all safety nets programs use DTKS data, ad BLT or village funds allow for employment of musyawarah (community-based targeting). The involvement of community groups in identification of beneficiaries in their village may lead to better screening, monitoring, and accountability. Community groups may have better information for identification of needs, and households may in turn have less incentive or opportunity to provide false information on assets, income, or shocks (Conning and Kevane 2002). However, in practice community-based targeting may lead to or increase conflict and division within the community as their jealousy or disagreement on the certain groups of community to either targeting groups or the amount of village funds they receive. Good data should help inform good decision-making, and this pandemic has raised critical issues on collecting and integrating the data from various government bodies. To resolve the overlapping data issue, an attempt to have one data policy is underway with the enactment of the Presidential Regulation No 39/2019 on one data Indonesia. One data policy will help agencies to provide accurate, high quality data for decision-making. This mechanism that is used to identify individuals, families, and households entitled some form of protection or social security from central and

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local government (Office of Vice President 2015). While the attempt to unify the national targeting system has been conducted a long time ago, however little success has been achieved. Previously, with the Presidential Regulation No 15/2010, the government setup the National Team for the acceleration of Poverty Reduction TNP2K). The challenges in providing one data policy in Indonesia are mainly caused by the absence of data architecture and management. The Bappenas has a mandate to establish data architecture while the Ministry of Communication and Information (Kemkominfo) is responsible for the technology. Bappenas has delegated the responsibility of standardizing inter-ministry data to Statistics Bureau Indonesia (BPS), the Geospatial Information Agency (BIG), and the Ministry of Finance (Kemenkeu). In addition to this data architecture, Indonesia also has challenges to provide a single identity number to its citizens. The completion of the Single Identity number project has been hindered by corruption. Corruption in project of electronic Citizen Identity Card (e-KTP) became one of significant corruption cases because of the amount of loss that incurred to the state amounting to IDR 2.3 trillion. The other challenge in effectively distributing social security is rent seeking from officials. Indonesia Minister of social affairs was arrested for allegedly taking $1.2 million in bribes linked to food aid for those who were hit by a coronavirus pandemic in December 2020. The Commission on Corruption (KPK) suspected that Batubara received the money from two companies with a contract to distribute cash and basic necessities to ten million families whose economies have been impacted by the pandemic (Rayda 2020).

18.9

Strengthening Local Food System

Despite critics and disagreement on government policy toward recent food estate policy in Central Kalimantan, the project is currently underway. The criticism and controversies are particularly on the impact of the project on social and environmental issues. Environmental concern comes from the project being located in the peatland areas, where previously an ex mega rice project (PLG) has failed. The vast areas of peatland have been cleared and drained are very susceptible to fires. Based on the previous experience in the Mid 1990s President Soeharto’s project on PLG was a failure. It created mass environmental degradation with annually release of greenhouse gas emission due to forest fires in this location and social conflict toward tenurial with customary Dayak people. Social concern comes as state sponsored land in which development has always posed serious threats to the rights, welfare, livelihoods, and identity of local communities (Miranda 2020). The potential dispute with indigenous people has been acknowledged by president Widodo and he has tasked the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning to resolve the issue. The environmental activist argued government may repeat the same mistake with the previous project. The concern over government food estate projects not only comes from experts and environmentalists but also from the Farmer union (SPI) who

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rejected the food estate program as this policy does not address and give solution to the food crisis as food estates need to have huge investment. Further, SPI supported the FAO which stated that farmer and small-scale farming managed by farmers and their household is the source of global food supply (SPI 2020). Estimate family farms operate 75% of world agriculture land and vast majority of them are smallscale family farms with 95% have land smaller than 5 ha (FAO 2017). The FAO has suggested rebuilding the food system from upstream production for COVID-19. It requires connecting farmers with input suppliers, information, and service providers (including extension, credit, and finance), leveraging digital innovations, smart farm technologies, enhanced digital literacy for farmers, and increased flexibility across supply chains. Promoting food production for the local market (short value chain), encouraging community-led agro-ecological approaches to local food production and expanding small-scale home gardening, and underutilized indigenous crops are other ways to improve food security and rebuild food systems to be more resilient (FAO 2020b). In addition, WALHI environmental NGO stated that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry Regulation No 4/2020 potentially has a negative impact on the environment by increasing deforestation. Halting deforestation is a critical element in addressing climate change. WALHI further argued against rushing the program by using pandemic and food security concerns. Food security can be achieved improving the productivity of farmers without clear new land (Jong 2020). However, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry has dismissed concern over deforestation for food estates. According to the Ministry Forest that could be converted to support the food estate program areas that no longer entirely function as protected forest such as those have been illegally converted to farmland. The trees in the food estate Kawasan Hutan untuk Kebutuhan Pangan (KHKP) areas would also not be cut down but rather integrated into agroforestry system and silvo-fishery. However, a new report by the UN FAO expanding agricultural land as the major cause of deforestation is not the best way to ensure food security (Jobert 2016). Food security can be achieved through agriculture intensification and other measures such as social protection. Cutting down the forest destroy valuable ecosystems, carbon stocks, and natural barriers to pests. The FAO further suggested large commercial farming for export can bring certain economic advantages and improve food security but it may only contribute very little to local and national food security. The preference over large-scale and state sponsor development projects is based on new developmental agendas which have emerged seeking to address the food security problem by pursuing large-scale agricultural development schemes (Cotula et al. 2009). The option to have large-scale agriculture is based on the perception that corporate agriculture has the comparative advantage of easier access to capital and technology, a popular narrative holds that “large-scale initiatives [are] the key to success,” focusing on corporate-centered business models, public-private partnerships, and large-scale land acquisitions (World Economic Forum 2013). This view suggests that corporate investment can provide for greater efficiency in production through large scale production on “mega-farms.” Provided that land can be made available for more efficient producers, this approach aims to promote national

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self-sufficiency in strategic crops and reduce dependence on imports (McCarthy and Obidzinski 2015). This policy option can be contrasted with green revolution that seeks to have range of intervention including provide assistance to peasant agriculture in situ extending the use of new technologies into marginal landscapes where the promise of green revolution technologies has yet to be realized, or even adopting elements of agro-ecological approaches (Altieri et al. 2011). The policy option to have a large-scale agriculture development scheme rather than green revolution has been shown in Indonesia case since 1997–1998 with the one million ha ex mega rice project in Central Kalimantan in 1997. Learning from the failure and pro and cons of previous ambitious food estate project and environmental impact and social conflict with local people under Soeharto with ex mega rice project (PLG) and under Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) program. Similar food estate project in Central Kalimantan and North Sumatra program which is currently underway under Jokowi administration should consider the sustainability of the project or invest in sustainable future. Sustainability is measured by all aspects including social, economic, and environment. Social refer to minimization of the land tenure dispute with local indigenous people, and support local production, in short- and long-term and environment protect the natural resources, reduce green gas house emission, and avoid energy intensive industrial methods. The Bappenas has set out six criteria to develop a food estate program including (1) formal legal criteria (ownership, management and tenure system), (2) Environment criteria (soil, water and agro-climate). (3) Infrastructure criteria (irrigation, energy, transportation, logistics). (4) Cultivation criteria (growing environment, agronomic, production facilities, and production technologies-based good agricultural practices (5) Social and human resources criteria (demographic, employment, and productive sector activities) (6) Technology criteria (type, level, on-farm-off farm, and processing industries feasibility). There is no shortcut to food security, without the assessment to the sustainability of the project the same failure of large-scale project deem to happen. Priority to strengthen resilience local food system and facilitate food production at local level with ensuring smallholders has financial support and minimizing the impact to the environment is critical rather than mega project with causing more land tenure conflicts and environmental degradation.

18.10

Conclusion

COVID-19 has significant impact on food security especially for vulnerable and poor people. Restriction of movement and the lockdown intended to contain the virus has created major disruption to the economic and food system. There are several policy options taken by government to response to ensure food security and give assistance to poor and vulnerable people including food aid and assistance, cash transfer, food estate program, and other means of social protection. The government response by mobilizing resources using existing and well-established

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scheme of social protection and safety nets are critical in times of pandemic. Social protection and social safety net should be core of recovery programs from COVID-19. That would ensure human security in longer term. Indonesia is using new social protection as the existing social safety net is not fully operational as its potential. In the implementation, the deliveries of social protection both existing and new faced many challenges and not effective. These challenges include: leakage, out-of-date and different database of poor and vulnerable groups, mis-targeting, and corruption. There is a lot of need to be done to fix data of beneficiaries. One of the attempts to solve the problem is creating one data policy. One data shows the importance of quality and credible information that is easily accessible to the public. Good data should help inform good decision-making, and this pandemic has raised critical issues on collecting and integrating the data from various government bodies. In addition, government policy to ensure food security in times of pandemic by establishing large-scale and state-sponsored development food estates have invited criticism. The allowance of forest to be open for food estate has threatened widespread deforestation and disenfranchisement of small holder farmers and indigenous people. The government should ensure that the food estate program should consider sustainability. The sustainability refers to the program that does not jeopardize the environment such as creating deforestation or increasing greenhouse gas emission, socially supporting local farmers, and reducing tenurial conflict with local and indigenous people and economically viable people.

References Altieri MA, Funes-Monzote FR, Petersen P (2011) Agroecologically efficient agricultural systems for smallholder farmers: Contributions to food sovereignty. Agron Sustain Dev 32(1):1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-011-0065-6 ASEAN, ASEAN Policy Brief (2020) Trade measures in the time of COVID-19: the case of ASEAN, 3 July 2020, https://asean.org/storage/2020/07/ASEAN-Policy-Brief-3_FINAL_pdf Conning J, Kevane M (2002) Community based targeting: a critical review. World Devel 30(3):375–394 Cotula L, Vermeulen S, Leonard R, Keeley J (2009) Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural Investment and International Land Deals in Africa, Working Paper Devereux S, Bene C, Hoddinott J (2020) Conceptualising COVID-19’s impacts on household food security. Food Secur 12(4):769. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01085-0 FAO (2006) Food Security, Policy Brief, June 2006, no 2. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ faoitaly/documents/pdf/pdf_Food_Security_Cocept_Note.pdf FAO (2017) Defining small scale food Producers to monitor target 2.3 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Working Paper, June 2017. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6858e.pdf FAO (2020a) The impact of COVID-19 on food and agriculture in Asia and the Pacific and FAO’s response. FAO Regional Conference For Asia And The Pacific, Aug 2020. http://www.fao.org/ 3/nd476en/nd476en.pdf FAO (2020b) Novel coronavirus (Covid 19). http://www.fao.org/2019-ncov/en/. Accessed 20 Dec 2020

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Hufstutter PJ (2020) U.S. dairy farmers dump milk as pandemic upends food markets, Reuters, 3 April 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-dairy-insightidUSKBN21L1DW Jobert M (2016) FAO: deforestation not necessary to guarantee food Security, 21 July 21, 2016. https://www.euractiv.com/section/development-policy/news/fao-deforestation-not-necessaryto-guarantee-food-security/ Jong HN (2020) Indonesia’s ‘militarized agriculture’ raises social, environmental red flags, 27 Oct 2020. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/10/indonesia-militarized-agriculture-food-estate-kali mantan-sumatra/ Litbang Pertanian (2020) Buku Pintar Food Estate. http://www.litbang.pertanian.go.id/info-aktual/ 819/file/Bagian-1.pdf Maail AG (2018) Understanding barriers in the implementation of the one data policy in Indonesia: insights from health data journey modelling. ITU J ICT Discoveries Special Issue No 2. https:// www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/opb/journal/S-JOURNAL-ICTF.VOL1-2018-2-P09-PDF-E.pdf McCarthy JF, Obidzinski K (2015) Responding to food security and land questions: policy principles and policy choices in Kalimantan, Indonesia. In: An international academic conference land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environmental transformations: perspectives from East and Southeast Asia, 5–6 June 2015. Chiang Mai University. https://www.iss.nl/sites/ corporate/files/CMCP_47-McCarthy___Obidzinski.pdf Miranda RJ (2020) Food estate project new ecological disaster brewing in Kalimantan, Jakarta Globe, 20 June 2020. https://jakartaglobe.id/opinion/food-estate-project-new-ecological-disas ter-brewing-in-kalimantan OECD (2019) Social protection system review of Indonesia. OECD development pathways. OECD Publishing, Paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/788e9d71-en Office of Vice President (2015) Indonesia Unified database for social protection program, July 2015. http://www.tnp2k.go.id/images/uploads/downloads/Book%20%20Indonesias%20Uni fied%20Database%20for%20Social%20Protection%20Programmes%20Final.pdf Rahman DF (2020) Indonesia to develop food barns to secure rice stocks. Jakarta Post, 16 Nov 2020. https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/11/16/govt-to-develop-food-barns-facilitatecollaboration-to-secure-rice-stocks.html Rayda N (2020) Indonesia’s social affairs minister arrested for allegedly receiving kickbacks linked to COVID-19 aid. Channelnews Asia, 6 Dec 2020. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/ asia/juliari-batubara-indonesian-social-affairs-minister-corruption-13710796 SPI (2020) Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI) tolak Food Estate untuk atasi krisis Pangan, 25 Oct 2020. https://nasional.kontan.co.id/news/serikat-petani-indonesia-spi-tolak-food-estate-untuk-atasikrisis-pangan Swinnen J, Mcdermott ED (2020) Covid 19 and global food security. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRI). https://www.ifpri.org/publication/covid-19-and-global-food-security Tan H (2020) Rice prices surge to 7 year high as coronavirus sparks stockpiling. CNBC, 7 April 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/08/rice-prices-surge-to-7-year-high-as-coronavirussparks-stockpiling.html The World Bank (2020) COVID-19 to add as many as 150 million extreme poor by 2021. https:// www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-mil lion-extreme-poor-by-2021. Accessed 5 Dec 2020 UNESCAP (2020) SDG 2 Zero hunger. https://www.unescap.org/sdg/2-zero-hunger United Nations (2020) Policy brief on Covid 19’s impacts on food security, June 2020. https:// www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sg_policy_brief_on_covid_impact_on_food_security.pdf

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WFP (2020) Indonesia Covid 19: economic and food security implication. https://docs.wfp.org/api/ documents/WFP-0000116063/download/?_ga¼2.205865429.792762321.16030921931711241811.1600681143 White C (2020) COVID-19 might be able to travel on food, preliminary study results indicate, seafood sources, 27 Aug 2020. https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/food-safety-health/covid19-might-be-able-to-travel-on-food-preliminary-study-results-indicate World Economic Forum (2013) Strategic infrastructure steps to prepare and accelerate publicprivate partnerships. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/AF13/WEF_AF13_Strategic_Infrastruc ture_Initiative.pdf Worldometers, Indonesia (2020). https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/indonesia/

Part III

Technology

Chapter 19

Preparing for the Future Crisis: Frontier Technologies Hold the Key Sanjay Srivastava, Madhurima Sarkar-Swaisgood, Sung Eun Kim, and Maria Bernadet Karina Dewi

Abstract The hard lesson learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic is lack of understanding the risk and preparedness for response which resulted in millions of losses of lives and unprecedented cascading effects. This chapter analyzes how frontier technologies are supporting the key stakeholders to manage the COVID-19 crises— protect lives, livelihoods, and enhance the quality of risk governance in Asia and the Pacific. This chapter addresses five key lessons emerging from the COVID-19 response: (1) making risk assessment more dynamics, (2) empowering at risk communities, (3) managing a global risk with local action, (4) managing uncertainties, and (5) bridging the gaps in knowledge and understanding in systemic risks. This chapter also outlines three key enablers—frontier technologies, data science, and national innovation systems that help to prepare for the future crises. The nature and scale of risk has changed. In our increasingly complex interconnected world, managing risk forms the key to preparing for the future. Smart preparedness is the way forward. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Machine Learning, 5G technologies, drones, automated vehicles, robotics, etc., were used to track, monitor, warn, and support logistics as well as its rapid diagnostic and telemedicine. A wide-range of risk analytics such as impact forecasting and risk informed early warning, indexing and creating risk matrix to target at risk communities which have been developed and put to use in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its intersection with extreme climate events. Digital solutions can help enhanced preparedness to protect at risk communities but also strengthen their resilience. Keywords Cascading risk · COVID-19 · Health · Disaster · Technologies

S. Srivastava · M. Sarkar-Swaisgood · S. E. Kim · M. B. K. Dewi (*) Disaster Risk Reduction Section, ICT and Disaster Risk Division, UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_19

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19.1

S. Srivastava et al.

Introduction

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them—Albert Einstein.

It is the time to recall these words of wisdom and introspect—what to do to be more resilient and protect both health and economy in pandemic? what we leant in last 1 year battling with COVID-19 pandemic? How those learning experiences can help to build a resilient future? Frontier technologies have been at the frontlines in the fight against COVID-19. With high transmissibility and no effective vaccine or therapy of the COVID-19, countries worldwide have focused on containment and mitigation, with varying degrees of success. Countries that have maintained low COVID-19 per-capita mortality rates share similar strategies including early surveillance, testing, contact tracing, and strict quarantine. In many of the success cases, the scale of coordination and data management required for effective implementation of these strategies has relied on adopting digital technology and integrating the same into policy and healthcare (Whitelaw and Mamas 2020). The lead countries in the use of technology are deploying a range of tools at scale, less technologically advanced countries have also been successful in this area during the pandemic (UN ESCAP 2020a). Collaboration has been central to the technological response, with Governments harnessing the know-how of the private sector and academic institutions, among others. The emerging lessons from the battle against COVID-19 pandemic have been the criticality of frontier technologies, from enhancing our understanding of the virus’ transmission pathways and the complexity of the risks of the pandemic, to managing critical supplies and equipment, and developing digital platforms for health. Technological solutions offer the potential to transform not only short-term crisis management, but also long-term resilience building through smart preparedness, economic restructuring, productive diversification, delivery of social protection as well as human security dimensions (Human Security Handbook 2016). Some important lessons emerged from the experiences in several countries that need to be addressed for the future pandemic are illustrated below (Mishra 2020):

19.2

Risk Assessment Tools Must Be “Actionable” and More Dynamic

To constrain fast-spreading pandemics such as COVID-19, speed is essential. Preparedness measures must outpace the pace of transmission. Conventional disaster risk management tools, for example, risk hotpot mapping which has proven to be an effective preparedness strategy in previous complex and dynamic extreme disaster events is now being replicated in an epidemiological risk context and adopted by most of the affected countries. The context allows the countries to visualize COVID19 incidences through timelines in specific geographical locations, and also helps to

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predict the spread of the virus among local populations. By using a network perspective of identifying “super-spreaders” or super-spreading events, this approach visualizes the interconnectedness between cases and clusters of infections. The identification of dynamic risk hotspots allows countries to facilitate critical, risk-informed interventions for suppressing the exponential spread of the virus. For example, governments decide to impose lockdown measures on risk hotspots at different scales affecting airlines/transport services at the global level and insulating provinces and cities from the potential spread of the virus at the national and local levels to prevent community-level spread. Many countries are planning to contain local outbreaks of COVID-19 based on different categories of risk zones, establishing containment and buffer zones within the risk hotspots. Targeted interventions are implemented in specific zones based on dynamic risk assessments. The resulting cluster-containment response strategies are yielding positive results and helping countries to restrict the transmissions of COVID-19, especially within vulnerable communities (Srivastava 2020b). Many countries continue to experience an extended period of COVID-19 risks. There are no off-the-shelf solutions for managing such a complex crisis, in which measures to prevent transmission will have colossal economic and social costs. Countries are forced to confront hard choices of balancing the needs to save lives and to save livelihoods. The threat imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, needs a systematic approach, in which the restrictions, states of lockdown and exit strategies all balance public health, societal, and economic needs. A balanced approach will also require a seamless integration of emergency response, easing of restrictions, and the post-COVID-19 long-term recovery phase. Having leant from mega-disasters in the past, countries are adopting a range of innovative approaches such as indexing risk to transition step-by-step recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Risk zoning with red, orange, and green zones is already being used around the world to inform the implementation and easing of lockdowns. Risk zoning informs evidence-based, calibrated policy actions. The data science, especially geospatial tools, high-resolution satellite, Google and drone images, and big data analytics, help to define the zones, considering carefully their social and economic ties. The rules applying to each zone are clearly defined and risk informed. This emerging strategy builds public support, through the progressive enlargement of green zones, and offers a chance to rebuild post-COVID-19 social and economic interaction in a safe, efficient, and rapid way (Srivastava 2020c). While some of risk assessment tools and approaches proved useful but most such analyses were inadequate for decision making on three accounts: (a) the information is not granular enough to target the risk informed interventions, (b) the information is not dynamic enough to capture the pace of virus spread, and (c) the information does not able inform the local drivers of the risk. The risk analytics, therefore, need to be refined and put in place to implement such risk informed policy interventions. This is essentially an unmet need in line with the commitment to a scientific-evidence based approach to mitigating and managing the impacts of the COVID-19 and to enhance the capacities of the government to manage future pandemic.

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Technologies Must Empower At-Risk Communities

As the virus insidiously jumps from one host and another, social distancing, quarantine, and hygiene are the key strategies to prevent the transmission. An efficient test-isolate-treat regime is essential for containment. But this becomes almost impossible in densely populated urban slums of developing countries where communities are active drivers of surveillance rather than subjects of the system. Technologies, therefore, must facilitate greater community involvement and enable the government to keep an ear-to-the-ground, anticipating unintended consequences of government action, and taking corrective steps. Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, once a coronavirus cluster has become successful in containing the COVID-19, provides a unique example how community action empowered through technologies can make a difference (Box 19.1). The WHO applauds the Dharavi model of “chasing the virus” (Fig. 19.1) which has been so successful in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in a risk hotspot of Mumbai’s slum. Dharavi has shown how irrespective of critical vulnerabilities, the virus transmission can be suppressed by literally chasing the virus down, with micro-mapping, robust surveillance, public–private partnership, community engagement, and proactive leadership (Golechha 2020).

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Dharavi "Chase the virus" model Robost survellence, contact tracing and screening

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Fig. 19.1 Dharavi “chase the virus” model—community driven approach. (Source: COVID-19 Containment in Asia’s Largest Urban Slum Dharavi-Mumbai, India: Lessons for Policymakers Globally) (Golechha 2020)

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Risk communication is critical for responding to public health and also to engage at-risk community. For preventive actions to be successful, there must be effective risk communication between health experts, governments and at-risk communities; should be real time and ‘actionable’. The World Health Organization’s Situation Dashboard is an example of risk communication at the global scale. Using an ArcGIS platform, the dashboard provides the latest location-specific updates on the outbreak, including numbers of infected people, deaths, affected countries, and other related data. Several academic institutions, companies and countries are using data analytics, integrated geospatial data, machine learning and AI tools to provide a comprehensive and dynamic response to the rapidly changing situation. Local technological innovations are also being utilized by SMEs to support effective risk communication (Srivastava 2020a). For example, in Thailand the covidtracker is one of the most popular online, dynamic and interactive web portals providing information on the spread of COVID-19. Such innovations communicate better risk information among the key stakeholders. The recent rapid evolution of frontier technologies has been changing behaviors and expectations of the community in countries, which have substantial impacts on the way citizens engage and the ways through which power is sought, used, or contested. Box 19.1. How Dharavi Contained COVID-19 In July 2020, the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised the efforts taken to control the spread of coronavirus in the densely packed slums of Dharavi in Mumbai. While quoting some of the examples from Italy, Spain, and the Republic of Korea, he referred Dharavi for its strong focus on community engagement and the basics of testing, tracing, isolating, and treating the sick is key to breaking the chains of transmission and suppressing the virus. The Dharavi sector of Mumbai, India is constituted as one of the biggest slums of Asia and the world’s most populated areas. The COVID-19 outburst was at its peak in May and curve got flattened within the next 2 months. The Dharavi people served as an important role in controlling the pandemic by adopting 4-T model tracing, tracking, testing, and treating strategy with active participation of the all stakeholders and at-risk communities (Kaushal and Mahajan 2021). Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s most congested areas was once a COVID-19 hotspot but did not report any new cases recently. Controlling the spread of the coronavirus in a 2.5 km2 area which is a cluster of 10
10 square meter hutments cushioned next to each other with over 8–10 people residing in each of these hutments sets a unique example of a successful battle against the pandemic in a context of a critical vulnerability.

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Risk Is Global, Resilience Is Local

The COVID-19 pandemic has offered a stark reminder of the cascading nature of systemic risks. What started as a health crisis, rapidly reverberated through all sectors of society? Traditionally, the risk gets considered as the compounded result of natural and human-caused hazards, vulnerability, exposure, and adaptive capacity. However, this does not consider how all these hazards and impacts interconnect and overlap, with multiple cascading effects. The risks do not remain local or unique to the exposed elements but can rapidly be transmitted to other parts of the system— across social, economic, and environmental domains—with potentially catastrophic outcomes (UNDRR 2019). Instead, we need to consider all these elements as part of a total system. Currently, however, the notion of systemic risk is poorly understood. The risk is global, but resilience is local. While responding to the COVID-19 actions taken (or not taken) at one location affect its spread elsewhere. It is clear how global interconnectedness drives the spread of this virus. The virus impacts different locations differently depending on the resilient of the communities are and robustness of the local-level public health systems. For the scale of the disaster that is COVID-19, global cooperation is a must. One of the key lessons from this pandemic is that governments need to strengthen their knowledge and capacities to deal with the complexities of cascading risks (Mishra 2020). Global frameworks are committed to addressing pandemics and health risks, but progress has been slow. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 is devoted to “good health and well-being,” with an emphasis on “early warning, risk reduction, and management of national and global health risks.” The Paris Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports highlight how climate change exacerbates health risks including pandemics. The Sendai Framework of Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) envisages a paradigm shift from managing the disasters to managing risk and broadens the scope to focus on both natural and man-made hazards and related environmental, technological, and biological hazards and risks (Fig. 19.2). The Framework introduces system approaches involving human (health), economic (development), and ecological (functioning) dimensions for addressing root causes of the risks (Fig. 19.3). The Sendai Framework reflects the certainty that in an ever more populous, networked, and globalizing society, the very nature and scale of risk has changed, and surpasses established risk management institutions and approaches. The framework presents a system approach with global to national and local scale for addressing root causes of the risks. The UN General Assembly in September 2020 recommended the Member States to apply the Sendai Framework for ensuring a prevention-oriented and risk-informed approach to COVID-19 response and socio-economic recovery (UNDRR 2020a). Managing risk is, therefore, a key strategy to act on resilience agenda across the themes/sectors and for the future preparedness to the crises, and enables putting people at risk first in the recovery.

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Fig. 19.2 Global risk, local resilience: Sendai Framework of Disaster Risk Reduction for managing systemic risks

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Managing Risk to Managing Uncertainty Is a New Normal

Uncertainty is inevitable in a pandemic like COVID-19 that has not been seen in a century, and much remains unknown and evolving about the situation and the virus (WHO 2020b). For example, policymakers and response authorities have been confronting with deep uncertainties about how COVID-19 progresses; the interlinkages of virus transmission due to policy actions at one location to elsewhere, etc. There are many uncertainties about its effects on different age groups, the effectiveness of different treatment protocols and the likelihood of a population achieving herd immunity. There are even greater uncertainties about local drivers of risk. Policymakers are making decisions under deep uncertainty. Each country has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic differently due to such uncertainties, variations in governance mechanisms and health response capacities. Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region responded in an ad hoc manner, due to lack of experience in pandemic preparedness and recovery at scale (UNDP 2020). Uncertainty leads to fear, panic, and loss of trust among people. Risk communication and community engagement play a key role to communicate and manage uncertainty effectively by building public trust in authorities and gaining adherence to policy recommendations. The traditional disaster risk management paradigm is attuned to using the analyses of past events—their frequency, intensity, and impact—to quantify risk and devise risk management strategies for the future. Based on the time series analysis of the past events, probability is assigned for each hazard events separately. But when

Fig. 19.3 Scenario-based approaches to address the uncertainties in managing risks. (Source: Modified from UNDRR GRAF Report 2020)

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Fig. 19.4 Risk-analytics solutions for managing risks under uncertainties. (Source: Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2019) (UN ESCAP 2019b)

events collide, analysis goes beyond the theory of probability to capture the trend and thus leads to increasing uncertainty. Similar is the cased of a black swan event with its inherent uncertainty (Mishra 2020). It is, therefore, important to bridge the gap between traditional disaster risk management and risk management in an uncertain environment. A shift from managing “conventional” hazards to the systemic risks with deep uncertainties requires an understanding of a “new system of relations” that allows future theories and solutions to emerge which are “wider in scope, more accurate in prediction, and solve more problems.” Understanding the dynamic and systemic nature of risks, and the opportunities afforded by new approaches and new concepts of risk, will be the central challenge for managing risks with uncertainties including the future pandemic (Box 19.2). While Global Risk Assessment Framework (GRAF) aims to improve the understanding and management of current and future risks, at all spatial and temporal scales (UNDRR 2020b), its operationalization requires a range of prototypes under diverse settings of the risks. In uncertain situations, scenario-based approaches reveal the interlinkages, relationships, correlations, and dependencies of multiple risks and actors across systems to build a shared understanding and enable decision makers to act. Through risk analytics approaches such as probabilistic, deterministic, ensemble modeling, etc., scenario-based approaches can improve understanding of the multidimensional nature and dynamic interactions of risks in critical systems (including human health, ecosystem functioning, and economic development) and address the uncertainties (Fig. 19.4).

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Box 19.2. Understanding Systemic Risks: Key to COVID-19 Response and Recovery Especially, systemic risks are hardly predictable due to their complexity and heterogeneity. Yet some generic properties of systemic risks can be identified that set them apart from other kinds of risks. Systemic risks can be characterized by five major properties. First, systemic risks are characterized by high complexity. On the one hand, complexity stems from influencing factors that determine the emergence of systemic risks and their trajectories of development. On the other hand, systemic risks are tightly coupled with each other and traditional risks. Established methods of science cannot identify the probability of occurrence or the extent of damage in any accurate fashion. Instead, science utilizes models of scenario building to sketch out the stochastic nature of systemic risks. Second, systemic risks are transboundary and global in nature. Although systemic risks originate in one subsystem of society or the environment, the ripple effects of these risks affect all social subsystems, such as the economy, politics, and civil society. Third, systemic risks are characterized by stochastic relationships between trigger and effects. Systemic risks are highly interconnected and complex, stochastic and non-linear in their cause–effect relationships. Deterministic relationships between cause and effect are non-existent. This poses major challenges to risk governance, especially risk communication, because identical causes can lead to diverging results. Fourth, systemic developments are non-linear and include tipping points. Science struggles to identify these tipping points in advance. A complex system can remain stable for an indefinite length of time. Once the system reaches a tipping point, the system drastically changes its conditions of existence in a very short period of time. These changes in condition may include a complete collapse of the system. Systems often, but not always, depart from one steady-state condition to the next after going through a phase of collapse and re-organization. Fifth, systemic risks are often underestimated in public policy arenas and public perception due to uncertainties of point of occurrence and extent of damage. Many systemic risks are public knowledge and perceived as highly relevant by the public. Yet very little action is taken to get to the root of the problem. Sixth, established methods of science cannot identify the probability of occurrence. Instead, science utilizes models of scenario building to sketch out the stochastic nature of systemic risks. Source: Renn et al. (2020).

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Bridging the Gap in Knowledge and Understanding of Systemic Risks

The Asia-Pacific region is no stranger to disasters. Yet 2020 has ushered in a previously unseen scenario—where climate extremes have collided with the COVID-19 pandemic to create cascading disasters with wide-ranging impacts on sectors, economies, and populations. A new landscape of cascading risks is now emerging with deep uncertainties for the decision makers to take well-informed policy decisions (Srivastava 2021). The ESCAP’s Asia-Pacific Disaster Resilience Network (APDRN) (UN ESCAP 2019a) has been providing risk analytics solutions for managing the cascading risks—intersection of COVID-19 with extreme climate events. Derived from predictive (forecasting, early warning), descriptive (situation analysis/disaster impacts), prescriptive (policy options under different risk scenarios), and discursive analytics (risk communication, engaging community interactive response), these solutions do help to support a range of risk-informed decisions under the uncertainties (Fig. 19.5). Predictive risk analytics: In South Asia, the most immediate concern was the monsoon season of June to September 2020 when spread of the COVID-19 was rapidly growing. The APDRN translated seasonal outlook of South Asia monsoon to impact forecasting to visualize the potential impacts of cascading risks (UN ESCAP 2020g). The cascading risk hotspots were indicated for taking preparedness measures and policy interventions to reduce the impacts of floods and drought while managing the risks of COVID-19 transmission simultaneously (Fig. 19.6). The climate-related disasters have different risk pathways from COVID-19, but they can intersect and converge with the pandemic in complex and destructive ways. Many communities are exposed to both, and the long-term consequences can be similar—damage to people’s health and livelihoods and their prospects of escaping poverty. The predictive analytics helps to manage the cascading risks scenarios. Descriptive risk analytics: The new demands for responding to the cascading risks of COVID-19 and cyclone/floods were evident in May 2020 when cyclone Amphan hit densely populated low-lying coastal areas of Odisha, West Bengal in India, and adjoining Bangladesh. The large-scale evacuations in the path of the cyclone were relied on precise early warning systems that saved thousands of lives (UN ESCAP 2020c). Unavoidably, these measures also increased the risk of infection. India reported 59 members of the National Disaster Response Force and 170 personnel who fought against cyclone Amphan have tested COVID-19-positive. There were similar issues in June when cyclone Nisarga struck densely populated areas on the west coast of India—where COVID-19 was already spreading fast. Here again, precise early warning followed by large-scale evacuations undoubtedly saved lives. However, COVID-19 infections accelerated: between May and June 2020 the number of confirmed cases in India rose from 100,000 to 440,000 (Fig. 19.7). While no no scientific evidence says disaster-related disruptions in social distancing increased the number of infections, but they will certainly have played a part. For

Fig. 19.5 Predictive-risk analytics solutions for managing cascading risks during the 2020 monsoon season. (Source: Protecting the most vulnerable to cascading risks from climate extremes and the COVID-19 in South Asia, Policy study series—Asia-Pacific Disaster Resilience Network (APDRN)) (UN ESCAP 2020b)

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Fig. 19.6 Cascading-risk scenario of COVID-19 and cyclone Amphan (20 May 2020). (Source: Protecting the most vulnerable to cascading risks from climate extremes and the COVID-19 in South Asia, Policy study series—APDRN) (UN ESCAP 2020b)

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Fig. 19.7 Cascading disaster-risk zones in Bangladesh (current scenario with floods and COVID19|Scenario A-B-D). (Source: Scenario-based risk analytics for managing cascading risks, APDRN Manuals and Training Materials) (UN ESCAP 2020f)

such complexities, scenario based and data intensive risk analytics that enable impact-based and risk-informed early warning systems can play an important role in saving lives and reducing transmission of the diseases (UN ESCAP 2020f).

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Prescriptive risk analytics model: A prototype of cascading-risk scenarios of Bangladesh that includes risk driver (poverty, inequality, etc), hazard zones (disaster risk), biological hazard (health risk), and pandemic (COVID-19 incidence) can help risk informed policy decisions to manage cascading risks despite uncertainty. The prescriptive analytics of a cascading risk model of Bangladesh presents the following scenarios: • Scenario A: Bangladesh’s overall country HDI value for 2018 is 0.614—which puts the country in the medium human development category. • Scenario B: To understand the most current risks, the prototype used the most recent flood inundation maps (from 20 June to 19 July 2020), which show the current flood extent in the country. • Scenario C: Bangladesh has a recurrence of biological hazards. The provinces with the highest population exposure levels to dengue. • Scenario D: The COVID-19 cases have been rising slowly in Bangladesh. The current cascading-risk scenario in Bangladesh stem from the current COVID19 pandemic, along with the recent monsoon floods, as well as the endemic risk drivers of poverty, inequality, and population density. The integrated matrix shows that 15 districts in the red zones with almost 12 million people are at the highest risk from cascading disasters and need immediate policy actions and measures to mitigate disaster impacts on the populations at risk. In particular, the matrix shows that Cox’s Bazaar needs immediate intervention due to the impacts of cascading risks on one the most vulnerable populations in the subregion. Figure 19.8 locates the exact zones that are at the highest risk of cascading disasters and presents a scenario on ground to reduce the existing uncertainties. Discursive analytics: While responding to the COVID-19, democratization of technology using open science policy and forums forms an emerging trend of discursive analytics to interact and engage with at risk communities. The leveraging mobile applications “apps” for crowdsourcing disaster-related information could potentially be an important example of the discursive analytics. However, a study on the status of operationalizing app-based crowdsourcing finds that majority of these apps are primarily educational, and their overall outreach is highly limited (Sukhwani and Shaw 2020). Efforts need to be made for enhancing community outreach, ensuring user-friendly interface and promoting Global Positioning System “GPS”-based apps. Given that knowledge is universal, part of the democratizing technology should also embrace the exchange of knowledge and information through empowering local people and building on aspects of “citizen science.” Data gathered from citizen science should be used to develop future risk scenarios. Social innovations, both digital and non-digital, can be scale up by establishing a regional social innovation ecosystem. This ecosystem can harnesses the potential of and deepen ties among diverse stakeholders, include regional and subregional organizations, academia, private sector, SMEs, communities, and local governments, can exponentially augment the benefits of technological and social innovations. Using open source, open data, citizen science, and crowd funding, a regional innovations ecosystem

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Fig. 19.8 Frontier technologies addresses systemic risk. (Source: Pathways to manage cascading risks and protect people in South Asia—Key takeaways for stakeholders, APDRN Policy Brief) (UN ESCAP 2020e)

Early detection,

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framework can bring new technologies to at-risk communities and peoples who can use the technology in unique and customized ways (UN ESCAP 2020d). Pandemic early warning system: The key lesson emerging from these countries is to develop “epidemic early warning systems” with real-time surveillance of diseases with projected potential exposure and vulnerability to determine at-risk communities. Such systems can capitalize on innovations in computational epidemiology which uses big data, artificial intelligence, and algorithms, to detect unusual patterns or clusters of illness. These patterns help to forecast the disease trajectory and provide inputs for issuing warnings with reasonable lead-times of possible outbreaks. This requires highly granular or personal data for public-health purposes, which raises security and privacy concerns. Fortunately, several emerging international frameworks address the issue of privacy in contact tracing during pandemics. These include Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative and the joint Google– Apple framework, which have all shown substantial progress in record time. Combined, the innovations in computational epidemiology and international privacy provisions hold the key to a robust surveillance system, with effective early warning protocols that support a vigilant health emergency response. Ultimately, this will ensure better preparedness to any future pandemic (Srivastava et al. 2021). Three key enablers for managing risk to building resilience:

19.6.1 Frontier Technologies Frontier technologies play a key role in addressing the systemic risk. For example, risk analytics, Big Data ecosystems, and digital identity enable inter-connectedness through early warning to early action, rapid diagnostics of the fast spreading diseases, risk communication, telehealth, and on-line delivery of services in the crisis (Fig. 19.8) (UN ESCAP 2019b). The countries succeeded in early detection, rapid diagnostics, and implementing timely containment could able to reduce the transmission of the virus quickly, thus minimizing the health impacts. Containment measures are costly and require difficult trade-offs between protecting health and the economy. However, some of the countries that acted early were able to minimize the need for long-term containment measures. As a result, they also succeeded in protecting their economy. The recent UNCTAD Technology and Innovation report 2021 (UNCTAD 2021) highlights that frontier technologies namely artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things, big data, blockchain, 5G, 3D printing, robotics, drones, gene editing, nanotechnology, and solar photovoltaics represent a $350 billion market, which by 2025 could grow to over $3.2 trillion. Frontier technologies are redefining the world, especially the post-pandemic future. The Report spotlights developing countries that perform better on frontier technologies than their per capita GDPs. The four out of ten overperforming countries such as India, Philippines, Vietnam, and China from

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Asia and the Pacific are among the most disaster-prone and bound to capitalize on advances in frontier technologies. The key transformations in managing disaster risk and building resilience are likely to be accelerated by following emerging trends of frontier technologies (ADB and OECD 2020): • The increasing amounts of data accessible through the internet (including social networks) and because of the proliferation of devices and sensors (Internet of Things)—commonly referred to as big data. • The increasing ability to interpret, manipulate, and transform (or process) data, including very large and diverse datasets, through data mining, predictive analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning (and other types of artificial intelligence). • The availability of software, platforms, and infrastructure services increasingly available through cloud computing to support a range of risk analytics. • The increasing ability to communicate (transmit) the outcomes of data analytics because of the proliferation of internet and mobile phone users (particularly smartphones). • Digital transformation creates opportunities to improve the management of disaster and climate risks, as do the availability and affordability of financial protection tools. • Increasing access to data can provide more comprehensive, accurate, and timely information on hazards, exposure, and vulnerability—and more timely and detailed information on impacts during and after a disaster—including in economies or regions that have traditionally faced limitations in data availability. • Big data analytical techniques, increasingly available through software, platforms, and infrastructure that can be accessed in the cloud, can provide new capacity for processing the greater volume of data and identifying correlations and trends, allowing an improved understanding of risks and impacts that can support more effective decision-making. • The proliferation of internet and mobile phone (particularly smartphone) users, combined with increasing broadband and cellular data speeds, can support faster, broader, and more effective transmission of risk and risk management information. The healthcare landscape is expected to completely shift in the next 10 years, driven by AI and machine learning. As technology becomes more integrated in health services, there is and will continue to be, a huge increase in both the generation and usage of health data. Telemedicine, health chatbots/apps, and smart watches coupled with monitoring of social media and web data are bringing an opportunity to leverage this generated data to better understand and yield insights about health. 5G technologies, the next generation of mobile internet connectivity that offer higher speed, lower latency, and higher capacity for communication, could support many of these applications of digital technologies to healthcare through quickly transmitting a large amount of data, expanding telemedicine and reliable, real-time remote monitoring (UNCTAD 2021; AT&T 2020); Nevertheless, it is

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important to mindful certain pitfalls of frontier technologies, must recognize privacy and data protection issues and more importantly that these technologies are not a substitute for a deeper understanding of social and economic vulnerabilities. These are also not a substitute for the fundamental principles of good risk governance characterized by a responsive government and a risk-aware community. The new methods and tools should supplement and not supplant the time-tested practices of good disaster risk management (Mishra 2020).

19.6.2 Data Science The UN is conducting impact assessments and supporting COVID-19 response plans globally. Among the key trends, the need to build in “accelerators” through digital transformation is extensively prioritized in most of the affected countries under “the health first” framework of the UN COVID-19 response (WHO 2020a). The pandemic has pushed healthcare into adopting new and innovative technologies to better combat the crisis with data science and big data analytics. The use of cutting-edge technology has opened new possibilities and enabled health professionals to explore and implement advanced and efficient healthcare practices (Fig. 19.9). There are indeed more than 120 countries that have national policies for digital health, recognizing the fact that digital health provides opportunities to accelerate the progress toward SDG 3 (WHO 2021). For example, the strategy for the development of healthcare in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025 includes the tasks of creating a single digital circuit in healthcare based on a single state information system in the healthcare sector (UNCTAD 2021). Another example of this is the National Digital Health Blueprint of India (Fig. 19.10), which is built on robust data infrastructure and supports: • Creating and managing of digital health data. • Promoting the adoption of open standards by all the actors in the national digital health ecosystem, for developing several digital health systems that span across the sector from wellness to disease management. • Creating a system of individual patient digital health records which can be easily accessed by health professionals through patient consent. • Promoting medical research along with health-data analytics. • Promoting and making use of the already existing health information systems. Additionally, for leveraging the opportunities offered by such technologies, governments should bridge the digital divide by ensuring access to universal, affordable, and reliable broadband (UN ESCAP 2020h). Last, upscaling of digitized and disaggregated databases will support the translation of hazard science to real life policy applications with major implications for better planning and coordination of disaster and health systems.

Fig. 19.9 Digital solutions for transforming healthcare services in crisis. (Source: Pathways to manage cascading risks and protect people in South Asia—Key takeaways for stakeholders, APDRN Policy Brief) (UN ESCAP 2020e)

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Fig. 19.10 India’s Digital Health Framework. (Source: The National Digital Health Blueprint, India in Pathways to manage cascading risks and protect people in South Asia—Key takeaways for stakeholders, APDRN Policy Brief) (UN ESCAP 2020e)

The pandemic has clearly demonstrated the paramount importance of such systems, however, the legal and privacy issues emerging from these linked systems need to be carefully addressed.

19.6.3 National Innovations System Frontier technologies cannot prevent the onset of the pandemics but potentially prevent the spread, educate, warn, and empower at-risk communities and front-line health workers. Frontier technologies also brought new opportunities by accelerating the process of digital transformation in all sectors. The digital economy backed by national innovation systems is likely to play an increasingly important role in rebuilding the world economy after the COVID-19 pandemic. It has got the potential of achieving economic growth, increasing the competitiveness of economies, and improving the quality of lives, thus contributing to 2030 agenda for sustainable development. The effective application of frontier technologies requires national capacities for healthcare innovation. Key areas of policy consideration include investments in research, human capital, and infrastructure, support for R&D commercialization. National innovation ecosystems are helping countries to mobilize domestic productive and technological capabilities to repurpose its products and services to address the shortages of COVID-19-related supplies. A successful example is the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the strong basic innovation capacity in the health and biotech sectors has supported effective pandemic response. In many other countries of the region, capacities for innovation have been strengthened through coordination among multiple sectors, disciplines, and government institutions. Thailand’s Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) included

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the National Research Council of Thailand and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation is an excellent example. In Vietnam, the close collaboration between the Government, universities, and the private sector enabled the country to rapidly develop its own testing kits. These emerging national innovation ecosystems are helping countries to mobilize domestic capacities to repurpose their products and services to address the shortages of COVID-19-related supplies and critical medical equipment.

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The Roots of Resilience Lie in Managing Systemic Risks

The COVID-19 pandemic, a stark reminder of the systemic and cascading nature of risk, highlights the need for a whole-of-government and an all-of-society approach. The key challenge is building back better with resilience at the core of recovery. ESCAP’s high-level panel meeting on disaster and climate resilience in South Asia, on 4December 2020, presented pathways based on the scientific understanding of disaster-pandemic and health nexus that harness frontier technology-based solutions for comprehensive preparedness systems for cascading disasters. These pathways must be supported by an innovation framework of diverse stakeholders, including regional and subregional organizations (UN ESCAP 2021). Ultimately, this aims to strengthen the capacity of all countries in the region to address systemic risks for a more resilient future and to ensure human security in the crises.

References ADB and OECD (2020) Leveraging technology and innovations for disaster risk reduction and financing. https://www.adb.org/publications/technology-innovation-disaster-risk-mgt-financing AT&T (2020) 5 ways 5G will transform healthcare. https://www.business.att.com/learn/updates/ how-5g-will-transform-the-healthcare-industry.html#:~:text¼With%205G%20technology%2C %20which%20has,their%20patients%20need%20and%20expect. Accessed Feb 2021 Golechha M (2020) COVID-19 containment in Asia’s largest urban slum Dharavi-Mumbai, India: lessons for policymakers globally. J Urban Health 97(6):796–801. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11524-020-00474-2 Human Security Handbook (2016) United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security. https://www.un. org/humansecurity/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/h2.pdf Kaushal J, Mahajan P (2021) Asia’s largest urban slum-Dharavi: a global model for management of COVID-19. Cities 111:103097. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.103097 Mishra P (2020) COVID-19, black swan events and the future of disaster risk management in India. Prog Disaster Sci 8:100137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2020.100137 Renn O, Laubichler M, Lucas K, Kröger W, Schanze J, Scholz RW, Schweizer P-J (2020) Systemic risks from different perspectives. Risk Anal. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13657. https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.13657 Srivastava S (2020a) Flattening the curve COVID-19. ESCAP expert opinion and stories, 13 April 2020. https://www.unescap.org/blog/flattening-curve-covid-19

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Srivastava S (2020b) Outpacing COVID-19: key innovations prompt early warning for early action. ESCAP expert opinion and stories, 21 April 2020. https://www.unescap.org/blog/outpacingcovid-19-key-innovations-prompt-early-warning-early-actions Srivastava S (2020c). Indexing risk to recover from COVID-19. ESCAP expert opinion and stories, 15 May 2020. https://www.unescap.org/blog/indexing-risk-recover-covid-19 Srivastava S (2021) STI solutions for a resilient future. ESCAP expert opinions and stories, 6 Jan 2021. https://www.unescap.org/blog/sti-based-solutions-resilient-future Srivastava S, Sarkar-Swaisgood M, Kim S, Dewi MBK, Hendy L (2021) 2020 the year when crises converged. ESCAP expert opinions and stories. https://www.unescap.org/blog/2020-yearwhen-crises-converged Sukhwani V, Shaw R (2020) Operationalizing crowdsourcing through mobile applications for disaster management in India. Prog Disaster Sci 5:100052. https://rajibshaw.org/wpRS/wpcontent/uploads/2019/11/Sukhwani-Shaw-PDSIS-.pdf UN ESCAP (2019a) Operationalizing Asia-Pacific Disaster Resilience Network (APDRN), ESCAP Committee on Disaster Risk Reduction, 6th session, Aug 2019. https://www.unescap.org/sites/ default/files/Operationalizing%20the%20Asia-Pacific%20Disaster%20Resilience%20Net work_En UN ESCAP (2019b) Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2019 - The Disaster Riskscape across AsiaPacific: pathways for resilience, inclusion and empowerment UN ESCAP (2020a) Collaborative actions to harness technologies during Pandemics. Agenda Paper, Committee on Information and Communications Technology, Science, Technology and Innovation, Third Session, Bangkok, 19 and 20 Aug 2020 UN ESCAP (2020b) Protecting the most vulnerable to cascading risks from climate extremes and the COVID-19 in South Asia, APDRN Policy Brief, 14 Aug 2020. https://www.unescap.org/ resources/protecting-most-vulnerable-cascading-risks-climate-extremes-and-covid-19-southasia UN ESCAP (2020c) When crises converge: responding to natural disasters in South Asia during the COVID-19, APDRN Policy Brief, 14 Aug 2020. https://www.unescap.org/resources/whencrises-converge-responding-natural-disasters-south-asia-during-covid-19-0 UN ESCAP (2020d) Investing in innovative solutions to manage cascading disaster risks in South Asia, APDRN Policy Brief, 20 Aug 2020. https://www.unescap.org/resources/investinginnovative-solutions-manage-cascading-disaster-risks-south-asia-key-takeaways UN ESCAP (2020e) Pathways to manage cascading risks and protect people in South Asia - key takeaways for stakeholders, APDRN Policy Brief, 25 Sept 2020. https://www.unescap.org/sites/ default/files/FINAL__2%20Pathways%20of%20cascading%20risks-%20fomatted%20in% 20ESCAP%20template%2009252020.pdf UN ESCAP (2020f) Scenario-based risk analytics for managing cascading risks, APDRN manuals and training materials, Nov 2020. https://www.unescap.org/resources/scenario-based-riskanalytics-managing-cascading-disasters UN ESCAP (2020g). Seasonal outlook to socio-economic impact forecasting, APDRN manual and training guidebook, Dec 2020. https://www.unescap.org/kp/2020/seasonal-outlook-socioeconomic-impact-based-forecasting UN ESCAP (2020h) Collaborative actions to harness technologies during pandemics, Note by the secretariat, Committee on Information and Communications Technology, Science, Technology and Innovation, Third session, Bangkok, 19 and 20 Aug 2020 UN ESCAP (2021) Weaving a stronger fabric: managing cascading risks for climate resilience, APDRN policy review, 26 Jan 2021. https://www.unescap.org/kp/2021/weaving-strongerfabric-managing-cascading-risks-climate-resilience UNCTAD (2021) Technology and innovation report 2021. https://unctad.org/webflyer/technologyand-innovation-report-2021 UNDP (2020) Retrieved from recovering from COVID-19: lessons from past disasters in Asia and the Pacific, 21 Oct 2020. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/ crisis-prevention-and-recovery/recovering-from-COVID-19-lessons-from-past-disasters-inasia-pacific.html

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Chapter 20

Emerging Technologies and Global Pandemic Arunabh Mitra and Rohit Chaurasia

Abstract Emerging technologies, often defined as Industry 4.0, have been increasingly altering the development paths of businesses and individuals. As the pandemic continues to remain a part of our reality, we continue to improvise, innovate, and overcome. Technologies we have adapted today, are going to be an integral part of the post-pandemic world as well, this expedited technological adaption beckons the question—when we accepted the thrust of technology to the center of our lives, what the coming years bring forth remains to be seen, now that we as a species we have accepted our technologically interwoven existence. Disruptive technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, 3D printing, augmented reality, etc. While the speed and breadth of the fourth industrial revolution have been and will continue to be remarkable, the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate innovation and catalyze technological changes already underway paving the way to Society 5.0. Society 5.0 aims to integrate human concerns back into the details of how we think about technologically advanced environments and promote user-friendly technologies for daily living; the initiative has also tried to address the challenges of productivity in an ageing society. This chapter presents examples of how emerging technologies have been employed during the COVID-19 crisis; discusses trends that may heighten the role of emerging technologies in a post-COVID-19 world; and reviews risks to and opportunities of faster adoption of emerging technologies and their implications to human security. Keywords Human security · Society 5.0 · Emerging technologies · COVID-19

A. Mitra (*) HCL Technologies Ltd., Hyderabad, India R. Chaurasia Independent Researcher, Mumbai, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_20

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Human Security in a Nutshell

The concept of human security departs the concept of security of the state to that of the individuals, and its end goal being protection of humans from traditional (i.e., military) and non-traditional threats such as poverty and disease. Further articulated by the United Nations Development Program as safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease, repression, and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life.

20.1.1 Impact of COVID-19 on Human Security The pandemic has presented an unprecedented challenge to public health, food systems, and the world of work. Tens of millions of people are at very real risk of falling into extreme poverty exists, while the number of undernourished people, currently estimated at nearly 690 million, could increase by up to 132 million by the end of the year according to a WHO joint statement. Informal economy workers are far more vulnerable because of the lack social protection and access to quality healthcare. Without the means to earn an income during lockdowns, many are unable to feed themselves and their families, and their socio-economic background meant little to no food in the absence of a steady income stream. The fragility of the global food supply lays exposed from border closures, trade restrictions, and confinement measures which prevented farmers from accessing markets, including for buying inputs and selling their produce, and agricultural workers from harvesting crops, thus disrupting domestic and international food supply chains. Low and irregular incomes coupled with a lack of social support, cause workers to often continue working in unsafe conditions, thus exposing themselves and their families to additional risks. Guaranteeing the safety and health of workers as well as better incomes and protection will be critical to saving lives and protecting public health, people’s livelihoods and food security. To stay both relevant and competitive in the post-COVID-19 economic environment will need new strategies and practices. (Laura LaBerge 2020) suggests most executives recognize technology’s strategic importance as a critical component of the business, not just a source of cost efficiencies. The transition of customers toward digital channels has also promoted rapid digital adoption by organizations. The report also shines light on how COVID-19 has accelerated digitization of customer interactions by an average of 3 years across the world, and consequently, a 7 year increase in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. This chapter highlights how companies have probably refocused their offerings rather than made huge leaps in product development in the span of a few months. This trend exists not only within businesses, but also with countries where, science, technology, and innovation have already become a mainstream political

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agenda. Japan while pioneering the Society 5.0 transition has aligned their Science, Innovation and Technology policy to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

20.1.2 Impact of COVID-19 on Industry 4.0 and Abrupt Advent of Technology While COVID-19 has changed the world as we have known it, it has also ushered in the advent and rapid adaption of technologies. The pandemic through the months compelled us to make our worlds digital—everything from work, education, entertainment, shopping, interacting with friends and family transformed from a physical experience to one behind the computer screen. COVID-19 proved the catalyst to innovation and digital adaption to Industry 4.0, organizations where the 5 year technology roadmaps aimed to achieve remote working across the workforce were forced to expedite the transition time from years to mere months and in some cases weeks. This transition to working remotely and servicing clients was not a choice but an existential requirement for the survival of organizations. As the pandemic continues to remain a part of our reality, we continue to improvise, innovate, and overcome. Technologies adapted today are going to be an integral part of the post-pandemic world as well, this expedited technological adaption beckons the question—when we accepted the thrust of technology to the center of our lives, it remains to be seen what the coming years bring with them in terms of technological advancement now that we as a species have accepted our technologically interwoven existence. We need to accept the importance of learning which technologies to execute, and how to manage change at a pace far exceeding prior experiences. Both of which will be critical going forward since the pace of change is not likely to slow down. The further sections will continue to discuss the impact of a few technologies that proved transformational in our journey toward collective resilience against the pandemic.

20.2

Introduction to Society 5.0

Through time humans have existed in four types of societies: Hunting, Agrarian, Industrial, and Information. Digital transformation heralds the fifth stage of society—Society 5.0. 2011 got the world into the fourth Industrial Revolution aka Industry 4.0 that brought upon digitalization of full supply chain and system interconnectivity. Translating to reduced costs, energy consumption and improving production

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efficiency, increased responsiveness to customer needs and better product quality are all attributed to the revolution of production systems in Industry 4.0. A concept pioneered by Japan, possessing the capability to lead the world and is the result of the need to create a system to improve the quality life of society with technological advancements that has given way for a new industrial revolution called Society 5.0. Placing the human world at the center of technologic advancements what will lead to a truly prosperous global society. Society 5.0 focuses on application of technology in constant development and innovation stimulated for Industry 4.0 to solve mankind problems such as population ageing, natural disasters, social inequality, security, and improving people’s quality of life. Society 5.0 aims to integrate human concerns back into the details of how we think about technologically advanced environments and promote user-friendly technologies for the daily living; the initiative has also tried to address the challenges of productivity in an ageing society. The better we get at the seamless integration of human and machine, the better we would be able to augment productivity in an ageing workforce. Figure 20.1 illustrates the evolution of societies across the ages. Figure 20.2 illustrates the differentiators between society 5.0 and industry 4.0. The tremendous potential of the Industry 4.0 Revolution is already paving the way for nations to embrace Society 5.0 as a stepping-stone to a prosperous datasynchronized human-centered society. Social Innovation can combine new technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, Big data with Advanced Analytics capable of achieving a forward-looking prosperous society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems and provides Human Security. Achieving such a society will not be without its challenges, and Japan intends to face them head-on with the aim of being the first in the world as a country to present a model future society.

20.2.1 Society 5.0: A Liberator Society 5.0 has a focus on using digital transformation to bring about problem solving and value creation for sustainable development in form of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations. Figure 20.3 is inspired from the one created by the World Economic Forum which lists the tenets of Society 5.0 (Nakanishi, 2019).

Fig. 20.1 Society 5.0 Evolution

Birth of humans and Coexistence with nature

HUNTING SOCIETY

INFORMATION SOCIETY Invented computers and developed automation techniques

AGRARIAN SOCIETY

Developed Farming and irrigation techniques

Developed mass production techniques and advent of engines

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

Society with strong cyberphysical intergration

SOCIETY 5.0

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Fig. 20.2 Society 5.0 and Industry 4.0

INDUSTRY 4.0

Informaon collected via the network and analyzed by humans

Informaon Processing

Cloud services accessed via the Internet and used for searching, retrieving, and Analyzing informaon or data.

Cloud Centric

Copious amounts of informaon from sensors in physical space in collected and analyzed by Al and fed back to physical space.

Informaon Processing

A high degree of convergence between cyberspace (virtual space) and physical space (real space)

Cyberphysical Centric

SOCIETY 5.0

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Fig. 20.3 Tenets of Society 4.0 vs. Society 5.0

20.3

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

As of 10 January 2021, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 virus has infected 86 million people with more than 1.9 million confirmed deaths, and with nearly every citizen of the planet at risk. With the need to interrupt the pandemic, humanity must turn to digital technologies are relevant to support the fight against the virus. Among these technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) wield great potential and developing solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic will need coordination and prioritization at a scale never seen before global.

20.3.1 How Will AI Help? Today, AI is used for drug research by analyzing the available data on COVID-19 aiding drug delivery design and development, thus speeding up drug testing in realtime, where standard testing takes plenty of time and hence helps to accelerate this process significantly. AI is also leveraged in the diagnosis of the infected cases with the help of medical imaging technologies like Computed tomography (CT), Magnetic resonance imaging scan of human body parts. Deep learning (DL) can aid in flagging processes that are good candidates for automation. Including repetitive or time-consuming tasks that involve finding patterns in rich image, video, audio, or biomedical data—for example, CT scans—or tasks that involve synthesizing massive datasets from sources such as symptom tracking systems. However, if we intend to rely on automated systems to assist in making critical decisions, such as deciding diagnosing patients that require critical care, the underlying decision-making algorithm must be understandable by both physicians and patients. In practice, this requires including their perspectives in the planning, design, and development of such an app so as to enable them to be part of the decision-making process. Like its parent, Artificial Intelligence, data are central to the deep learning process. Its knowledge is primarily drawn from the patterns identified from the set of labeled data used for training the algorithm. These datasets include genetic sequences, genome analysis, protein structures, patient clinical data, medical imagery, case statistics, epidemiological data, news articles, and scientific literature which consequently create privacy challenges: as acquisition of labeled clinical data is quite difficult.

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Beyond data sharing, Artificial Intelligence solutions should be based on adapting already validated systems and should avoid taxing an already stretched healthcare workforce with new tools that may tentatively help to improve outcomes. A few initiatives currently share trained AI models. Sharing pre-trained and validated AI models accelerates the adaptation of solutions to local contexts. While implementing AI solutions at scale, we need to ensure they do not breach global commitments to protect rights and freedoms, including commitments to non-discrimination, preventing mass surveillance, and protecting confidentiality. To do so, stakeholders should ensure that principles of openness and accessibility are at the heart of AI-enabled solution.

20.3.2 Challenges with Artificial Intelligence As Artificial Intelligence is heavily reliant on its input data, to enable a global impact, we would need to foster cooperation and solidarity across borders. Deep learning (DL), a subset of Machine Learning (ML) is a statistical technique for classifying patterns—is based on sample data—using neural networks with multiple layers. Deep learning systems are also opaque by design, and their logic is not easily interpreted using plain language.

20.3.3 Discussion The rapid technological advancement through the past year affects every area of society and global economy. Advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, 3D Printing, and virtual/augmented reality shall accelerate achievement of Society 5.0. A statement by H.E. Mrs. María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, President of the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly went on to say—“Despite its quick expansion, only 48% of the world’s population can have access to the Internet. The digital gap that continues to exist among countries is in fact an obstacle for sustainable development” (Garcés 2018). While the role of AI in providing meaningful solutions to the pandemic has yet to be clearly defined, a clear need exists for a globally inclusive research agenda to direct action against this pandemic and those that may crawl out of the woodwork. “How do we trust Artificial Intelligence?”

For a leader to answer this question is a feat of exemplary diplomacy. As opposed to their Software Development Cousin that has established frameworks and standardized processes for development enabling transparency and accountability, Artificial Intelligence development has no standardized process or framework associated with its development. While Artificial Intelligence is excelling at managing tasks that humans do far more efficiently, however, the two major factors affecting how

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well an Artificial Intelligence algorithm performs is associated to the ready availability of historical and real-time data combined with the availability of exponential and on-demand computational power. Together we must build an AI for COVID-19 patients that is transparent, accessible, open source, and auditable and help the world withstand and recover from this pandemic.

20.4

Digital Healthcare

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause a sizeable set of the population to operate remotely, the usage of intuitive and robust collaboration tools have shifted from “nice to have” to a necessity. A lot of organizations were coerced to convert personnel into remote workers and find new innovative ways to maintain the level of teamwork, productivity, connection, and morale they were used to when everyone was on site. Teleconferencing tools allow for a high degree of real-time collaboration between individuals. These tools have assumed immense popularity in the light of the pandemic, given their ability to replicate in-person interaction in close proximity. This is easily verifiable by the graph below denoting the customer metrics for Video Conferencing Moghul Zoom. A robust communications strategy ensures care teams make better-informed decisions at the right time, contributing to improved patient outcomes, safety, and quality of care.

20.4.1 How Will Digital Healthcare Help? The global healthcare industry is structured on the historically necessary model of in-person interactions between patients and their doctors. The analogous healthcare system was largely developed to support and reinforce a face-to-face model of care. Electronic meetings, online discussions, and webinars help doctors understand the course of a disease, and devise management strategies. For example, chest physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and counseling have acquired a new potency because of digital advances. The best possible clinical digital solution is healthcare services delivered home to stable patients; the advantage being continuous monitoring of patients at home to detect any impending complication. This not only provides ease of treatment, but also helps release hospital beds for those in need. Teleradiology has become a key enabler for radiologists to function using homeworkstations with remote access. Making it possible for them to view and report scans from their homes and provide immediate guidance for patient care and management. The digital evolution of healthcare will contribute in mitigating the problems due to skewed doctor–patient ratio, where the benefits of a medical opinion of a single specialist can reach to the multiple places.

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Recently, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has asked Indian insurance companies to allow telemedicine consultations altogether with the terms and conditions of medical insurance policies as a part of the claim settlement of their policies (Dubey 2020). The only motive is to promote the adoption of telemedicine across the country. It will also encourage doctors to diagnose patients remotely, thereby maintaining social distance. Virtual consultations will provide a better way for people who live in rural areas to get specialized care from top notch medical professionals even in the remote locations.

20.4.2 Challenges Although some digital technologies, such as those used for telemedicine, have existed for decades, they have had poor penetration into the market because of heavy regulation and sparse supportive payment structures. A 2019 Price Waterhouse Cooper survey summarized: That 38% of chief executive officers of US healthcare systems reported having no digital component in their overall strategic plan; and 94% of respondents pointed to data protection and privacy regulations, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), and the expansion of HIPAA rules and penalties under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act (2009), as factors-limiting implementation of digital strategies (PwC’s Health Research Institute 2019).

Frontline healthcare workers need to be upskilled with knowledge and digital literacy to aid their digital health adoption journey, and upskilling trained healthcare workers overnight, especially when they are already stretched to their limit, remains difficult. Further, three critical factors can be considered for India to enjoy the benefits of digital health and health technologies. Harmonization is required across various government policies to support the growth of digital health, including availability of necessary digital infrastructure or adequate incentives, strong enforcement of intellectual property, trade secrets, copyrights, and other similar safeguards for confidential information and proprietorial technologies which are critical to any tech company.

20.4.3 Discussion While the premise of digitized healthcare is very promising, a myriad of challenges from upskilling medical professionals with digital skills to having robust data security and sharing policies exists. The necessity of having a future-ready telecom infrastructure is also crucial to the digital transformation of healthcare globally.

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Once adapted widely, digital healthcare will revolutionize the way doctor–patient interactions happen and make quality healthcare accessible even in the most remote areas.

20.5

Internet of Things (IoT)

The IoT is the system of internet-connected devices with the ability to collect and transfer data through a wireless network without the need for human involvement. Essentially, IoT is a common platform for devices to drop their data and communicate through a common language. Collected data can be analyzed, resulting in shared valuable information for enhanced user experience. IoT during COVID-19 has played a great part in aiding the healthcare system to properly monitor virus-infected patients through intertwined networks and devices.

20.5.1 How Will IoT Help? The role of IoT-based technologies in COVID-19 can be divided in three main phases: early diagnosis, quarantine, and recovery.

20.5.1.1

Phase I: Early Diagnosis

The key to combating COVID-19 is to diagnose it early to prevent spreading the virus widely. This will substantially help healthcare providers to arrange better treatment plans, save more lives, and reduce contamination and infections.

Wearables Using wearable devices is considered an efficient way to respond to the need for early diagnosis during this pandemic. Developing these devices has had a remarkable impact on the early detection of diseases, one of the most novel applications of IoT technologies in the medical and healthcare field was a smart helmet-mounted with thermal imaging systems for identifying the infected among the crowd with facial recognition. Countries such as China, UAE, and Italy have implemented this wearable device to monitor crowds within 2 m from passers-by which has interestingly, shown good results.

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Smart Thermometers A wide range of IoT smart thermometers has been developed to record constant measurements of body temperatures. These can be worn or stick to the skin under clothing. Also, since the use of infrared thermometers for capturing body temperature can possibly spread the virus more due to the closeness of patients and healthcare providers. Using smart thermometers like Kinsa (the smart thermometer) which created a map to display the spikes of fevers across the USA as the virus spread. The collected data were being utilized by health providers and keep track of trends across a region to better protect communities.

20.5.1.2

Phase II: Quarantine

Usage of IoT devices in this phase could help mitigate serious challenges such as spreading the virus by monitoring patients efficiently and controlling their respiratory signs, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.

Wearables IoT wearable bands have shown promising results to prevent patients from leaving quarantine areas. Using wearable bands is also a cost-effective solution for tracking cases. This device is connected to a patient’s, smartphone application through Bluetooth during the quarantine period, and healthcare authorities can usually monitor cases using a web interface. This approach has been deployed in Hong Kong, where authorities use an electronic wristband linked with a smartphone application in order to track new arrivals at the airports for 14 days similar to the United States that implemented the usage of electronic ankle bracelets to isolate people who refuse to stay in quarantine.

Disinfectant Drone These drones were used for sanitation and disinfection of areas in Spain; some of the leading drones have a capacity to disinfect 100 m in 1 h.

Medical/Delivery Drone Medical drones were leveraged to transfer the COVID-19 test kits, samples, or medical supplies between labs and medical centers to eliminate human interactions. In China, Ghanaa, and Canada, these drones moved COVID-19-related goods, including test kits and swab tests aside from usage for other purposes such as postal

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and grocery services to COVID-19 patients that are isolated in their homes during quarantine.

20.5.1.3

Phase III: Recovery

As the pandemic enters the Recovery phase, after months of locked down societies and harsh restrictions, nations are gradually and carefully opening again and usage of IoT can promote a return to normalcy sooner.

Return to Work As countries gradually reopen workplaces and marketplaces after the lockdown usage of wearable technology such as bands and tags will be important as the transition back to work and school happens. As industrial workers are also returning to work after the lockdown, there is an essential need for practicing social distancing between them while they work together. Proximity sensors can be leveraged to alert workers when they are too close to each other.

Mobile Applications The usage of mobile applications in this phase will enable rapid and widespread adaption at a very low upfront cost for governments, given the near universality of smart phones even in rural areas of developing economies. Aarogya Setu the Indian Government’s brainchild is a contact tracing application for people to use on their smartphones. The application asks the user will be asked if he or she has any symptoms of COVID-19 or has recently travelled internationally. Analyzing the input data from the users along with their tracking information, Aarogya Setu can notify the user if they have had contact with someone who is already or later becomes a confirmed case. Singaporean TraceTogether captures data using an encrypted ID from people who were in close contact with each other. To foster a sense of trust and privacy the captured data is not used until a close contact identification is established. These data include the duration of the visit, and the social distance is stored for 21 days for contact tracing purposes in the future.

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20.5.2 Challenges Privacy will continue to be the primary concern about using IoT devices by patients, especially where there is no transparency about how the information is going to be used and how long it will be retained.

20.5.3 Discussion While the world is struggling with the pandemic, an increase in the use of mobile technology and smart devices in the healthcare sector results in a significant impact on the world. IoT allows integrating physical devices capable of connecting to the Internet and provides real-time health status of the patients to healthcare professionals. While the health, social, and economic consequences of this pandemic and its restrictions will take time to be fully recognized and quantified. The ongoing effort in the usage of IoT to detect, treat, and trace the virus to mitigate its impact will be something to watch for in the distant future.

20.6

Blockchain

Blockchain has to have been the biggest buzzword of the late 2000s, and aptly described by the industry as a “Solution looking for a problem” linked to the disillusionment it caused in the industry—financial to be specific; where organizations selected Blockchain as the solution to a problem was not yet found. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that enables users to share trusted and verified information in a decentralized manner. Combined with security and cryptography technology, Blockchain can protect the privacy of users who contribute data while also sharing the provenance of the data, enhancing trust. The best known—use of Blockchain technology is seen with cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, that allows you to transfer money from A to B without the involvement of a bank.

20.6.1 How Will Blockchain Help? Alongside various uses in healthcare such as patient record management, Blockchain technology can be leveraged against the challenges of traditional supply chain management, especially in a world working to make the COVID-19 vaccine available. Blockchain will address participants’ accountability, accuracy in tracking

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items, fighting counterfeits, stock management, etc. The immutability of Blockchain can be used for monitoring storage conditions of the vaccine in transit, given the vital importance of the storage temperature, vaccine distributors would be required to make sure all storage conditions are met by ensuring storage temperature data is recorded on an immutable database. With each link along the chain could keep track of the entire lifecycle of each vaccine batch, and health departments could monitor the chain as a whole and intervene if required. Some common use cases across the lifecycle could be: Shipment tracking, where manufacturers could track whether shipments are delivered on time to their destinations. Storage Requirement Verification by Distributors would use the Blockchain to record proof of the storage conditions of the vaccine. Guaranteeing vaccine authenticity and storage conditions. Stock Management by Hospitals and clinics could mitigate supply and demand constraints. While having complete verification of the vaccine’s transit from factory to hospital. Individuals would have an insight to the lifecycle of the vaccine down to the batch, thus creating a common platform of trust between end user and manufacturer. Several Blockchain companies already have experience implementing Blockchain for supply chain use cases. A supply chain solution can enable visibility in tracking counterfeit vaccines and more broadly products, a use case that can potentially save companies many millions of dollars. Another valuable use case for Blockchain is the aggregation of patient records to create a health records system, which disparate groups of providers can use to share patient records while treating patients during the pandemic or other crises and natural disasters. Such a platform will allow providers to work with patients who may not have access to their usual provider, but still receive the full range of needed services and prescriptions. The main concept of the solution includes the patients’ electronic health records following them wherever they go.

20.6.2 Challenges The most fundamental challenge with Blockchain technology comes from the incompatibility with privacy regulations by design, the European GDPR being the most well-known one on the list. The technology infringes on the “Right to be Forgotten” from the GDPR. Data on the Blockchain will be there forever, and in an irreversible, immutable manner. The other challenge is not technical but more human—ensuring participation by all parties on the platform.

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20.6.3 Discussion While Blockchain will promotes transparency, trust, and traceability among stakeholders in the network adaption will remain greatly dependent upon the willingness of all parties buying into the idea of the platform and then providing accurate data. Verifying authenticity of the data updated will be critical to maintenance of the integrity of the Blockchain model and striking a balance with existing privacy regulations will determine the future of this technology in privacy centric markets.

20.7

3D Printing

3D Printing, the consumer-friendly name of additive manufacturing, which as the name suggests is the process of creating an object by laying down successive layers of material until the object gets created. Where almost a decade back 3D printing was leveraged only toward prototyping, rapid advancement in the technology has promoted it into a mainstream production technology that has multiple medical, engineering applications such as dental implants, prosthetics, functional industrial components, architectural modeling, reconstruction of fossils, and ancient artefacts.

20.7.1 How Can 3D Printing Help? Medical equipment has relied on overseas production in developing countries and manufacturing hubs like China to minimize costs leading to shortages in the supply of much-needed medical and non-medical products required to fight the pandemic. With the global supply chain greatly restricted an inroad for 3D printing adoption was paved. Currently, 3D printed PPEs include splash-proof face shields, surgical masks, N95 masks, N90 masks, powered air-purifying respirator hoods, and Controlled Air Purifying Respirator hoods intended to be reusable. A fragmented supply chain in the distant future will further promote 3D Printing adaption, accelerated by decentralized manufacturing requirements by the countries.

20.7.2 Challenges The process of additive manufacturing is long drawn and requires highly specialized equipment, unlike the now mainstream CNC machines or injection moulding equipment. 3D Printing technology delivers limited throughput. The lack of universal availability of manufacturing material, attributed to certain devices having a limitation on input material. Another challenge being the intellectual property

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infringement through reverse engineering. The clinical effectiveness of many of the devices manufactured according to the CAD files (used to design 3D Models) has not been tested and many of these devices have not been approved for frontline clinical use by relevant regulatory bodies.

20.7.3 Discussion To fully realize the potential of 3D printing as a technology requires a technical know-how and understanding of technologies and materials that will maintain to the quality and functional integrity of the intended products. In the ongoing scenario, the fragmentation and restricted operation of the global supply chain may lead to the development of an unregulated shadow supply chain supplying components or 3D models that do not conform to regulatory standards.

20.8

Cloud Computing

2020 AD will be remembered as the year that ushered in an unprecedented global digital transformation, driven by the necessity to keep societies and economies operational through a pandemic of a magnitude unknown to humanity before now. According to a research by Gartner, the proportion of IT spending moving to the cloud will increase in the aftermath of the pandemic. Specifically, cloud spending is projected to makeup 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024. With 70% of organizations now using cloud services plan to increase cloud spending after the COVID-19 disruption.

20.8.1 How Can Cloud Computing Help? The primary business allure of Cloud Computing lies in its ability to shift IT Costs from capital expenditure to operational expenditure—something that can be managed and controlled far more simply. The technological allure lies in its ability to provide seamless business continuity with minimal to no disruption and a true “work from anywhere” experience for employees. This aspect of Cloud Computing has been heavily leveraged throughout the pandemic, by enabling individuals to easily transition into working from home and being able to access organizational data, business apps, email, and file sharing. The education sector has also leveraged the cloud by transitioning students to studying over video calls and pre-recorded lessons. The ability of the retail sector has introduced an e-commerce model within a matter of weeks during the pandemic was also made possible through cloud computing. Its universal appeal can be seen when

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a conservative sector like Banking decided to take the plunge toward pivoting toward the cloud to offer or ramp up their current electronic and app-based banking services. A common theme noted has been the necessity for robust IT and Telecommunication Infrastructure in both rural and urban areas. While Tier-1 metropolitan cities did enjoy having good telecom infrastructure, it was not built to handle what has been possibly the greatest Stress Test of the Internet in history.

20.8.2 Challenges Many companies that rushed to embrace the cloud during the pandemic have failed to adjust their business practices in ways that align with regulatory requirements. A rapid expansion of cloud-based services in response to the pandemic was to be expected at a time when companies were more concerned with maintaining business continuity in the face of unprecedented challenges than they were with the nuances of regulatory compliance. Security threats for cloud environments, too, are shifting as a result of the pandemic. The fact that remote workers are easier targets because when employees are using personal computers and their home networks to do their jobs, they lose the assurance and security brought by corporate firewalls, web proxies, and so on. The fact that hybrid deployments of cloud solutions add to the overall complexity of IT environment, making secure configuration, visibility, and integration a challenge. While this has always been the case, but the pandemic led to organizations rushing to implement cloud-based solutions during the past few months without the foresight for security risks or consideration for security controls that would normally go into a new service deployment.

20.8.3 Discussion A crisis similar to COVID-19 does not seem farfetched in the distant future, enterprises, governments, policymakers, and telecom providers need to look at future proofing and building the right infrastructure to enable a digital economy. And while for most enterprises a change in trajectory away from the cloud is unlikely, a possibility for cloud repatriation remains a reality for organizations that adapted to the cloud only as a measure during the pandemic.

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385

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) were first conceptualized in science fiction tales. But the onset of COVID-19 promoted adaption of all things virtual, including businesses that were once upon a time exclusively brick and mortar locations like retail and fashion. The conversation of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) has been long on but it is only now after the pandemic that people and organizations are leveraging these technologies across industries as diverse as healthcare, education, and media enabling us to break the confines of social distancing and connecting us to our co-workers, family, and friends. A key differentiator between AR and VR being AR digital elements appear over real-world views, sometimes with limited interactivity between them, often via smartphones. And with VR, the immersive digital experience isolates users from the real world, typically via headset devices.

20.9.1 How Can Virtual/Augmented Reality Help? Mainstream uses of AR and VR have always been associated with media, entertainment, and recreational activities. However, the technology is being utilized among medical professionals for training and education. The ability to train medical professionals on critical tasks from almost anywhere as long as they have access to a VR headset is one of the most revolutionary steps in the direction of medical training. Acting as an enabler, AR also has provided medical professionals, the ability to learn medical procedures remotely, enabling doctors to impart medical training to students. Retail shopping experiences have taken a digitized turn by bringing AR to the forefront, like Kendra Scott’s jewelry brand that turned to an AR to drive sales in a world where retail storefronts were closed. The potential is not just restricted to medicine or retail, it can also be extended in the form of Customer Support. A technician can request customers to use their smartphone camera or tablet camera to show the technician the issue, and then the technician can diagnose the issue and utilize augmented reality-based visualizations to guide the customer to a resolution.

20.9.2 Challenges The primary barrier to implementation and entry to the space has been cost coupled with the lack of a reasonable form factor for equipment delivering the content. Bulky virtual reality headsets are not the most practical choice for a world that is looking at foldable screens and wearable electronics. Consumer devices, specifically phones in

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the market today with AR/VR features are riddled with display and power consumption issues and are merely an entry point to introduce the technology to the world without realizing its full potential.

20.9.3 Discussion As these diverse examples demonstrate, the ways both AR/VR have deepened our experiences and established just how valuable virtual technologies are the extent to which we utilize certain technologies shall have changed in the post-COVID-19 world. While the augmented and virtual reality technologies are still in their infancy, they have had a material impact in the light of the pandemic. Will these technologies be harnessed to their full potential remains to be seen, and something we hope shall happen in the distant future.

20.10

Gazing into the Crystal Ball

While the previous sections shone light on some of the most game-changing technologies in today’s day and age, what comes across is a stark separation of both physical and cyberspace—something that Society 5.0 seeks to bridge. Turning to the next question, what does “bridging physical and cyberspace” mean? Society 5.0 aims to merge cyberspace with the physical space in a cycle in which data smoothly flows from the physical space (real world) into cyberspace and then flow back from cyberspace into the physical space (real world) in the form of meaningful information. Meeting the ultimate objective of Society 5.0 means to leverage technological solutions for real world problems. Society 5.0 is slated to be a data-driven society where data (gathered by IoT networks) are converted into information and knowledge, which then interacts with the real world indirectly via humans. By influencing human decision-making, which then effects change in the world. When automated processes are achieved data interacts with the world directly (without human intervention) through automated processes. The tremendous potential of the Industry 4.0 Revolution is already paving the way for nations to embrace Society 5.0 as a stepping-stone to a prosperous datasynchronized human-centered society. Social Innovation can combine new technologies such as IoT, AI, Robotics, Big data with Advanced Analytics capable of achieving a forward-looking prosperous society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems and provides Human Security, which as described by the United Nations Development Program is “safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease, and repression and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life” thus moving the concept of security away from the state and to individualistic components such as: economic security, food

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security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. The ability of a nation to leverage technology to address Human Security and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will enable a nation to evaluate its alignment with the Society 5.0 concept. At the heel of every innovation come challenges and barriers to adaption, there are five “walls” identified with Society 5.0 by Hitachi’s “Society 5.0: Aiming for a New Human-centered Society” paper: • • • • •

Wall of Technologies. Wall of Human Resources. Wall of Social Acceptance. Wall of Legal System. Wall of Ministries and Agencies.

20.11

The Traversing Arrow Model of Adaption to Society 5.0

To address the 5 wall barriers for achievement of Society 5.0, we propose a fivepoint traversing path be adapted. The model visualized in Fig. 20.4, provides five sequential, interconnected arrowheads each of which corresponds to and aims to breach one barrier to society 5.0. The five arrows of the model are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Foundational Knowledge. Skilled Human Resources. Technology Integration. Legal Reform. National Strategy. These arrows each corresponds to a wall and are defined further below:

Fig. 20.4 Traversing arrow model for adaption to Society 5.0

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1. Foundational Knowledge Corresponds to The Wall of Technologies Inculcating next-generation technologies and sustainable development models to our educational model and systems shall enable us to overcome the Wall of Technologies by providing a solid foundational knowledge for students. We need to enable students to learn subjects of their choice, at their pace and interest than build rigid structures of learning. The focus needs to shift from rote learning to experiential learning this foundational knowledge when ingrained into the curriculum at schools and colleges shall enable the next generation of leaders not only be technology savvy, but also conscientious toward their society, community, and world at large. 2. Skilled Human Resources. Corresponds to The Wall of Human Resources. As we enhance our educational systems to include sustainable development and next-generation technologies, it will create a far more market ready and skilled resources. A generation of human resources who will be inclined discover is the ones that will be catalysts of technological innovation and value creation. 3. Technology Integration Corresponds to The Wall of Social Acceptance. Social acceptance will continue to be a challenge as the batons are passed between the outgoing generation and the one incoming. Seamless and successful technology integration will be one that is transparent and gets adapted as a second nature; this is something that would have to be driven by highly skilled resources. True social acceptance will only come when people are using technology as a part of their daily live, have access to technological solutions that match the task at hand with the potential to automate it. 4. Legal Reform Corresponds to The Wall of Legal Systems. The existing privacy laws, international relations, and regulations are building a hyper-fragmented digital world, which is detrimental to sharing knowledge and resources across countries and fostering the sense of a global village. Large-scale legal reforms will need to be undertaken to revisit existing laws, regulations on data privacy, and build new laws to promote unified digitization, information democratization without compromising on national security or sovereignty of data to further the usage of technology to break barriers and build a new world. 5. National Strategy Corresponds to The Wall of Ministries and Agencies. Society 5.0 is an agenda which needs buy in from the government, for its realization. It becomes imperative that nations across the world engage in productive dialogue about the way forward. Fostering and promoting collaboration through cross-border global Think Tanks will prove an excellent ice breaker and enable us to explore cross-cultural perspectives and generate a truly global view of technology adaption. While conversations can be led by Think Tanks, chalking

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a country wise strategy for Science, Technology, and Innovation is what will convert armchair reading to tangible benefits.

20.12

Conclusion

Concludingly, let us take the opportunity, this current global health crisis has provided us to recommit to accelerate the usage of exponential technologies to achieve both economic development and solutions to social problems in parallel in various fields such as mobility, healthcare, agriculture, food, manufacturing, disaster control, energy, and many more and ensure a more equitable future for everyone.

References Dubey N (2020) IRDAI, Telemedicine to be covered under health insurance policy amid coronavirus outbreak. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/insure/health-insurance/telemedi cine-to-be-covered-under-health-policy-amid-coronavirus-outbreak-irdai/articleshow/ 76318940.cms?from¼mdr Garcés MFE (2018) Impact of the rapid technological change in the achievement of the SDGs. https://www.un.org/pga/73/2018/10/19/impact-of-the-rapid-technological-change-in-theachievement-of-the-sdgs/ Laura LaBerge COSS (2020) How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/ strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-thetechnology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever Nakanishi H (2019) Modern society has reached its limits. Society 5.0 will liberate us. https://www. weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/modern-society-has-reached-its-limits-society-5-0-will-liberateus/ PwC’s Health Research Institute (2019) Top health industry issues of 2020:Will digital start to show an ROI?

Additional Reading Analytics Insight (2020) The trend of cloud computing amidst COVID-19. https://www. analyticsinsight.net/the-trend-of-cloud-computing-amidst-covid-19/ Bayern M (2020) How AR is helping keep ventilators running during the coronavirus pandemic. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-ar-is-helping-keep-ventilators-running-during-thecoronavirus-pandemic/ Bernardini LD (2020) How COVID-19 generated a new need of collaboration tools in manufacturing. https://www.automationworld.com/covid-19/article/21172619/how-covid19-generated-anew-need-of-collaboration-tools-in-manufacturing Deoras S (n.d.) How ML is assisting in development of Covid-19 vaccines. https:// analyticsindiamag.com/how-ml-is-assisting-in-development-of-covid-19-vaccines/ Dubey N (2020) IRDAI, telemedicine to be covered under health insurance policy amid coronavirus outbreak. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/insure/health-insurance/telemedicine-

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to-be-covered-under-health-policy-amid-coronavirus-outbreak-irdai/articleshow/76318940. cms?from¼mdr Editor (2020) Post COVID-19, healthcare systems should look to implement a knowledge-driven care model. https://www.biospectrumasia.com/opinion/49/17068/post-covid-19-healthcare-sys tems-should-look-to-implement-a-knowledge-driven-care-model.html Editor (2020). Augmented reality. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/augmentedreality Editor (2020) COVID-19 conversations: cloud computing. https://www.capgemini.com/gb-en/ 2020/11/covid-19-conversations-cloud-computing/ Editor (2020) VR and AR are seeing resurgent interest under COVID-19. Veterans of the Field Think It’s About Time. https://www.signiant.com/resources/tech-articles/vr-ar-covid-19experts/ Editor (2020) What is 3D priting. https://3dprinting.com/what-is-3d-printing/ Express Computer (2020) In the post-covid-19 world, digital healthcare will be the new normal. https://www.expresscomputer.in/industries/healthcare/in-the-post-covid-19-world-digitalhealthcare-will-be-the-new-normal/62596/ Furst B (2020) How COVID-19 has revealed healthcare’s blockchain use cases. https:// hitconsultant.net/2020/11/17/covid-19-healthcare-blockchain-use-cases/#.YLeWgPkzaMo ITU News (2020) How cloud computing has supported the COVID-19 response. https://news.itu. int/how-cloud-computing-has-supported-the-covid-19-response/ Korin N (2020) Using blockchain to monitor the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain. https://www. weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/using-blockchain-to-monitor-covid-19-vaccine-supply-chain/ Krishna Kumar NKS (2020) Role of IoT to avoid spreading of COVID-19. https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7396324/#bib11 Linthicum D (2020) Cloud adoption in a post-COVID world. https://www.infoworld.com/article/ 3586597/cloud-adoption-in-a-post-covid-world.html Madaka Y (2020) How AI and ML are helping to combat COVID-19. https://towardsdatascience. com/how-ai-and-ml-are-helping-to-combat-covid-19-fe8ecbb88b7e Madzou L (2020) Is AI trustworthy enough to help us fight COVID-19? https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2020/05/covid19-coronavirus-artificial-intelligence-ai-response/ Luengo-Oroz M, Pham KH, Bullock J, Kirkpatrick R, Luccioni A, Rubel S, Wachholz C, Chakchouk M, Biggs P, Nguyen T, Purnat T, Mariano B (2020) Artificial intelligence cooperation to support the global response to COVID-19. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256020-0184-3 Papagiannis H (2020) How AR is redefining retail in the pandemic. https://hbr.org/2020/10/how-aris-redefining-retail-in-the-pandemic Peiffer-Smadja N, Maatoug R, Lescure F-X, D’Ortenzio E, Pineau J, King J-R (2020) Machine learning for COVID-19 needs global collaboration and data-sharing. https://www.nature.com/ articles/s42256-020-0181-6 Pinaki Chakraborty IC (2020) Use of information communication technology by medical educators amid COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/ 0047239520966996 Pittaway D (2020) The use of IoT during COVID-19. https://www.iotforall.com/use-of-iot-duringcovid-19 PwC’s Health Research Institute (2019) Top health industry issues of 2020: will digital start to show an ROI? Raju Vaishyaa MJIH (2020) Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871402120300771 Ramel D (2020) COVID-19 fuels cloud computing spending boom. https://virtualizationreview. com/articles/2020/11/17/cloud-spending.aspx Tino R, Moore R, Antoline S, Ravi P, Wake N, Ionita CN, Morris JM, Decker SJ, Sheikh A, Rybicki FJ, Chepelev LL (2020) COVID-19 and the role of 3D printing in medicine. https:// threedmedprint.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41205-020-00064-7

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Schwartz C (n.d.) Cloud computing is a lifeline for businesses during COVID-19. https://www. rackspace.com/en-in/blog/cloud-computing-lifeline-businesses-during-covid19 Siriwardhana Y, Gur G, Ylianttila M, Liyanage M (2020) The role of 5G for digital healthcare against COVID-19 pandemic: opportunities and challenges. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/344506271_The_Role_of_5G_for_Digital_Healthcare_against_COVID-19_Pan demic_Opportunities_and_Challenges Tozzi C (2020) Cloud computing trends during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.itprotoday. com/hybrid-cloud/cloud-computing-trends-during-covid-19-pandemic Valdor CM (2019) Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0 by Christian Manrique. https://christianmanrique. com/2019/02/14/industry-4-0-and-society-5-0-by-christian-manrique/

Chapter 21

The Importance of Data Sharing in Managing Public Health Crises Rahul Patil and Inder Gopal

Abstract The COVID-19 crisis has emphasized the importance of the free flow of information and data-driven applications in the management of public health crises. This chapter examines the potential benefits, concerns, and solutions related to sustainable and secure access to public health data. We study some of the datadriven solutions in action worldwide and present them as replicable use cases. We also examine why a large volume of data from public and private sources never reaches the desks of decision-makers and suggest technical and policy solutions to eliminate these sources of ‘data friction’. Keywords Data sharing · Personal data · Nonpersonal data · Public health crises · Human security

21.1

Introduction

The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis has taught us many lessons on improving the management of global public health. The outbreak disrupted many existing solution approaches and shook societal, technological, and regulatory norms. The critical resource underlying many proposed new solutions and approaches is data. We have seen the practical benefits of sharing accurate and trusted public health nonpersonal data, namely data that does not violate any individual’s privacy. To maximize global benefit, such data should be freely available for all, without unnecessary national or international legal restrictions on access or usage. The rapid availability of data enabled the global community to identify the spread of COVID19 in a matter of 2 weeks. In comparison, it took several weeks to months in the previous outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2002, Ebola in 2013, and Zika virus in 2014. Researchers were able to deposit the first novel coronavirus

R. Patil · I. Gopal (*) Centre for Society and Policy, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_21

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genome sequences in the GeneBank database at record speed, i.e., the sequence with accession number MN908947. The accelerated and open access to this sequence data aided countries in designing the diagnostic kits on a war footing at breakneck speed. Such cross-border flows of data are indeed praiseworthy. However, strengthening of the international frameworks and harmonizing the legal instruments facilitating the data flow becomes essential. To their credit, international bodies have recognized this requirement. In 2001, the World Health Organization (WHO) brought the attention of its member states to the flow of information and surveillance data of urgent international importance by passing a resolution called Global Health Security: Epidemic Alert and Response (WHA 2001). These efforts have tried to blunt major human insecurity caused through epidemics and bioterrorism with transnational approaches that are data-centric, people-centered, context-specific, and prevention-oriented (UNTFHS 2016). But, there remain many other ways in which the flow of data can be encouraged. This chapter highlights the potential benefits, issues, and solutions related to sustainable and secure access to public health data. We show how data from official and governmental sources can complement data from nongovernmental and private sources to enable a vast new set of public health applications. These new data-driven applications will correlate data, apply sophisticated analytics and inferencing, and will be able to proactively address public health problems and deliver new value to citizens. We examine a series of use cases (Sect. 21.2) where such applications were able to better manage pandemics and improve chances of avoiding one. While public agencies will create some applications for the public good, creation of a climate where private companies are also incentivized becomes crucial to create innovative new data-driven solutions for commercial benefit. We also explore the reasons (Sect. 21.3) why a large volume of data from public and private sources never reaches the desks of decision-makers. We suggest technical and policy solutions (Sect. 21.4) to eliminate the various inhibitors in sharing data and show how eliminating this data friction is a necessary (but not sufficient) step in taking full advantage of data. International agencies particularly advise governments globally to strengthen data governance for the effective application of open data and big data analytics in the COVID-19 crisis (Yao and Park 2020). We make some recommendations on the public IT infrastructure and public data policy frameworks that governments will need to put in place to ensure an appropriate level of public health data sharing.

21.2

Examples of Data-Driven Applications Contributing to Public Health

We examine a series of examples (or use-cases) where data-driven applications have shown the way to better manage disease outbreaks, improve chances of not catching a disease, or prevent outbreaks from turning into pandemics. We divided these

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examples into several categories based on the scope of application. For each category, we describe an example use-case typifying the benefits of data sharing within that category. We map a few similar use-cases in Fig. 21.1 to gather insights through comparative assessment. The details for each use-case are consolidated based on the publicly available data from literature, official press releases, and media reports. The use-cases are compiled for demonstration purposes only and are not intended to be exhaustive. More use-cases can also be proposed and considered to demonstrate the importance of data sharing, governance and application, and comparative analyses in a particular domain.

21.2.1 Use-Case Categories and Examples 21.2.1.1

Use-Case 1: Dashboard-Driven Decision-Making for Epidemic Surveillance and Management (Example Studied: BlueDot)

BlueDot provides a software-as-a-service platform predicting high-exposure epidemic areas worldwide. The platform analyses complex correlations of streaming datasets across demographic, migration, health, and weather dynamics sourced from government and international agencies, researchers, companies, and media. They can potentially detect severe outbreaks as much as 10 days in advance, as seen in the COVID-19 outbreak (Allam et al. 2020). BlueDot’s solutions require structured and nonpersonal datasets. The dynamicity and timeliness of the sourced data vary across datasets. Some of the datasets like anonymized geotagged locations of cell phones or airport ticket data might be dynamic with real-time or near-real-time streaming. They also feed in static datasets like census and demographic statistics or simulated data like environmental predictors facilitating disease transmissions. Obtaining a wider variety of data from diverse sources is difficult as the government and international agencies’ reporting is scarce, not readily available, non-real-time, or brings limitations. A lack of access to reliable local data and reporting delays pose major concerns during rapidly evolving disease outbreaks (Grubaugh et al. 2019). Though enhanced data sharing activities are crucial in such situations, efficient data privacy and security protocols must be enforced across data sharing networks and systems (Allam et al. 2020). Disease outbreak monitoring, mapping, and management are crucial to curtailing the disease spread from becoming an epidemic outbreak. Characteristics of other dashboards, that of Johns Hopkins University (Dong et al. 2020) and System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS) (Ballesteros et al. 2020) can be seen in Fig. 21.1.

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Use-Case 2: Phylodynamics Tool for Tracking Pathogen Evolution (Example Studied: Nextstrain)

Nextstrain is a platform for tracking pathogen transmission and evolutionary patterns to retrieve epidemic history from genomic data (Hadfield et al. 2018). The platform equips researchers to perform phylodynamic exercises using biosequences sourced from public repositories like NCBI, GISAID, ViPR, or GitHub. Nextstrain accelerated the process of sharing, mapping, and visualizing the genomic data midst coronavirus pandemic as close to 2 days to weeks. It took a year to complete these operations in Ebola or former outbreaks. Nextstrain’s phylogenetic charts and family trees helped epidemiologists, policymakers, and medical practitioners at the earliest. Nextstrain is open-sourced under the strongest copyleft GNU AGP license and hosted as a web application at nextstrain.org (Nextstrain: Copyright license 2016). Nextstrain respects researchers’ intent to publicly or privately share the data with the options to store it in client-side computers or their servers. Nextstrain aims to maintain ~1 h turnarounds to channelize publicly available data into the live transmission and evolution tracking (Bedford 2020). The platform’s functionality depends upon the genome sequence submissions by researchers globally. The Open Science Prize felicitated Nextstrain’s contributions with the grants of $230,000 for prototype development (OSP 2017). It can be inferred that micro-level assessments with bioinformatics tools can potentially fine-tune the decision-making in disease outbreaks management. Other tools such as Coronapp (Mercatelli et al. 2020) equip researchers to study the pathogen evolutions by monitoring nucleotide and polypeptide mutations (refer Fig. 21.1).

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Use-Case 3: Virtual Repositories of Biospecimens and Associated Metadata (Example Studied: UK Biobank)

UK Biobank is a resource center providing genotypic and phenotypic data from large population-scale studies. This data is sourced from the genetic and clinical analyses of the medical samples donated by ~500,000 participants recruited across the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2010 (Bycroft et al. 2018). These participants also provided consent to their electronic medical records, EMRs. Any bonafide researcher worldwide from the academic, charity, public, and commercial entity can use this openaccess resource for preapproved research purposes only (Sudlow et al. 2015). The Biobank shares the de-identified data on ratifying material transfer agreements and undertakings about keeping data secure without re-identification attempts. The users of these datasets have to mandatorily publish their results along with derived data and return them to the Biobank. UK Biobank hosts terms and conditions backed by robust data sharing policies and nondiscriminatory, transparent access protocols. UK Biobank is planning to avail the resource on its own cloud-based Data Analysis Platform since summer 2021 to facilitate access to the researchers without storage

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and processing capabilities (UK Biobank News 2020). The database is estimated to grow by 15 petabytes by 2025. Similarly, we also examined EuroBioBank’s role and data sharing characteristics and mapped in the matrix, Fig. 21.1 (Mora et al. 2014).

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Use-Case 4: Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCC) (Example Studied: Indian Smart Cities)

Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs) established in India’s smart cities are repurposed into COVID-19 War Rooms to tackle coronavirus outbreak. Total 47 such centers took the responsibility to provide city-level emergency responses around the clock and employed GIS-based COVID tracker dashboards (PIB Press Release 2020a). They source data from city hospitals and tools such as cellular or IoT devices, CCTV surveillance cameras, or interactive voice response system based toll-free helpdesks (Deloitte Report 2020). Access to these resources is restricted to the city administrators and authorized personnel. Some of the dashboard features are made available to the public on the respective municipality’s websites. ICCCs retrieve both personal and nonpersonal data. These datasets primarily include details of COVID-19 diagnostic tests, coronavirus hotspots, disease heat maps, geotags of home-quarantined people, lane closures and traffic data, audio files of helplines, surveillance camera footage, mobile questionnaires, etc. (PIB Press Release 2020b). Some of these dynamic datasets are either real time or updated daily. Functionalities of ICCCs are based on the heavy stakeholder coordination between several municipalities and services. Similar crisis command centers are found in other parts of the world including the one at the State of Utah, USA (Baird 2020).

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Use-Case 5: Smart Public Infrastructure (Example Studied: South Korean Smart Bus Shelter)

The smart bus shelter is a pilot initiative adopted as part of the policy initiative for enhanced convenience to Seoul’s travelers. Such shelters are well-equipped with IoT sensors and interconnected smart devices capable of collecting, transmitting, and delivering data remotely (Seoul Press Release 2020). COVID-19 oriented datadriven technologies auto-regulate their functionalities at the smart bus shelters, such as automated thermal-imaging cameras allowing persons with temperature below normal body temperatures, air-conditioning and sterilizing systems, sanitizer dispensers, bus arrival–departure schedules, automatic detection of crimes, and fires (Park 2020). The district administration restricts the data and shares with police or fire authorities in crimes or fires (France-Presse 2020). These sensors-based systems use de-identified dynamic data to enhance convenience for travelers. These systems also interact with the users in real time, e.g., aids

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voice assistance to those who require it, provides suggestions on wearing a mask in a disease outbreak. Such initiatives require extensive collaboration between administration and technology/solution providers (Park Han-na 2020). This use-case facilitates citizens’ comfort through IoT-enabled healthcare repones and explores opportunities of digital epidemiological surveillance using interconnected IoT devices. Similar, example (Fig. 21.1) can be seen in the case of IoT-based pedestrian monitoring project for residents at Liverpool’s City Centre, England (Verstaevel et al. 2020).

21.2.2 Summary The table shown in Fig. 21.1 provides a bird’s-eye-view of all the use-cases and maps the characteristics of the underlying data sharing approaches. We map approaches such as data sourcing (including data origin, size, format, nature), delivery (including data end-user, format of data delivery, type of beneficiary), and intellectual property aspects (including data ownership and data access). We also assess the type of data transacted, including—variety (nature of data, e.g., types of data being used or delivered); velocity (timeliness of data, e.g., real-time, near-realtime, non-real-time); variability (change in data, e.g., dynamic or static); veracity (robustness: completeness or accuracy of shared data); and volume (size of data transferred). We also consider stakeholder stewardship as an essential factor in the ease of data sharing. Comparative assessment of all the use-cases provides essential insights into the preferences of varied organizations. Organizations prefer utilizing nonpersonal data over personal data for both internal and external monetization of data assets. Many organizations face the issue of mixed data where personal and nonpersonal data are inextricably linked. All the organizations prefer multisourced, dynamic, structured, and semistructured datasets. Organizations use real-time, near real-time, non-realtime data, or their combinations depending upon the need of the desired results. Most of the time, organizations face limitations and inconsistencies in the datasets sourced from the government and international agencies. Organizations with public funding opt to develop open source applications and share raw data or derived insights with full public access considering the fact of the sensitivity of the data. Organizations adopt multiple data sharing approaches if data owners seek special provisions, as in Nextstrain. Almost all the organizations under study collected data by some sort of survey. Some adopted multiple strategies to procure the relevant data. These organizations preferably target a particular audience due to the specificity and granularity of datasets and insights achieved in their respective domains. We noticed that all the organizations emphasise multistakeholder engagement and collaborate with government entities or research institutions in particular.

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Inhibitors in Sharing Data

The previous section shows how much value can be created by sharing of data. Yet, the use-cases capture range of inhibitors. A plethora of data from public and private sources never reaches the desks of decision-makers. The public health data available for sharing remains restricted to government sources and is just a small fraction of the universe of public health data. The generic term, data friction, describes the various inhibitors that create barriers in sharing data. Eliminating data friction becomes a necessary (but not sufficient) step in taking full advantage of data. There are four major causes of data friction. • • • •

The data is not available or not of high enough quality. The data cannot be found by those who might need it. The data cannot be accessed and understood by those who try to use it. There are real or perceived security and privacy issues which inhibit sharing. We examine each cause in more detail.

21.3.1 High-Quality Data Is Not Available The biggest inhibitor in sharing data is that the data is simply not available or of poor quality. Several critical health metrics are simply not being measured, or the measurements are sporadic and often inaccurate. Some of the reasons are organizational, the cost of measurement, lack of appreciation of the value of data, and the lack of access due to large numbers and constant mobility. There are many strong organizational reasons why data is not shared. City administrators see no reason to share data and often view data sharing as an invitation to criticism. Why share data when the data can be used against me? Broader engagement in data sharing can be dampened by the concerns about competition and loss of market share in for-profit organizations compared to the non-profit organizations as seen in the reports by Adler-Milstein et al. (2011). The cost of data collection and storage is another significant inhibitor. For example, it is estimated that the overhead for data collection (West et al. 2012) in a popular diabetes quality improvement program the estimated per-practice cost of implementation and first-year maintenance for the data collection and reporting was approximately $26,000 per practice. This is a significant amount for something which is often perceived as peripheral to patient care. Poor and inefficient communication channels are also a frequent cause. The COVID-19 crisis has spawned many creative ways to communicate data ranging from WhatsApp texts, scanned scraps of paper, memes, and short videos to telephone calls. These methods, however, need to scale as well as be standardized. Yet another reason for poor data quality is that the data often remains unused and there is no feedback to the data provider. In the social sciences (and physics and

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experimental physics), the observer’s paradox is a situation in which the phenomenon being observed is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer/ investigator. In the case of data collection, the observer’s paradox manifests itself in a positive fashion, namely in improvements in data quality as data providers receive feedback if the data is not usable. As an example, the IUDX project (DE Framework 2020), reports installed Air Quality Data sensors often losing their calibration, and as a result the collected data was almost useless. The act of making data available through IUDX made the data providers cognizant of quality issues, and data quality improved rapidly even without any overt actions.

21.3.2 Finding Pertinent Data If the data universe expands to a multiplicity of sources, how does a prospective data consumer locate pertinent data? Currently, no catalog or directory of data exists for users to identify and describe data. Such a searchable catalog becomes essential to create a useful data ecosystem. For example, in many Indian cities, IUDX (2021) reports different city departments being unaware of data being collected by each other. Traffic police, fire department, and hospitals collect critical data that can be of help in responding to a natural disaster or terrorist attack. As a result, different departments are simply not aware of the data being collected by the others. In times of emergency, there is a lack of coordination in emergency response. A related issue is the lack of coherency in health data retention and archival policies. For health-related data, this implies that authorities should mandate longer minimum maintenance period for the clinical information (Corn 2009; Dong 2015). Recent guidelines issued by the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) of India assigned the responsibility of long-term storage of health records of hospitals, diagnostic centers, and clinics to Health Repository Providers (HRPs), who will also provide them NDHM compliant software. On the other hand, Health Lockers are particularly assigned to provide software and long-term health records storage to individuals (NDHM 2020).

21.3.3 Understanding the Data Even if the data source gets identified, the same type of data is often represented differently from different sources. This may be as simple as different measurement units (Celsius versus Fahrenheit, for temperature) or something more sophisticated as the object model for a data object. Standards such as ETSI’s NGSI-LD and the Smart Data Models from TM-Forum provide standardized ways of representing and accessing of public data. More specifically, the need for standard-oriented interoperability of health IT systems is

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well recognized in a variety of instances. For example, literature demonstrates portability of medical records across public–private entities and states will reduce costs and save time (Balsari 2014). Portability might necessarily arise due to the multiplicity of healthcare providers and healthcare facilities and for maintaining the patient care continuum (Radhakrishna et al. 2014). On average, 5% of healthcare service providers such as hospitals or healthcare professionals change their IT solutions provider. Recent final rules of the 21st Century Cures Act availing the electronic health information (EHI) export functionality might increase the portability of EHI and decelerate the rate of switching IT systems (ONC 2020). Even though Beacon Communities achieved higher than average in Electornic Health Records (EHRs) adoption, lack of interoperability led to complicated information exchange (UC-NORC 2014). Health data needs to be represented in a standard-based fashion, but standardized metadata is also essential. Metadata are the additional descriptors essential to describe the characteristics of data. Edwards et al. (2011) report metadata as a source of friction for impeding data sharing, particularly in scientific communications. Metadata is considered a fixed and highly structured information product, e.g., sets of descriptors, links, XML tags, catalogs, etc. Scientific communities need to consume additional resources to create, use, and manage such data leading to metadata friction (Edwards 2010). Various metadata databases, catalogs, or standards are being employed to reduce this friction and increase the replicability of scientific outcomes. These include the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) (EML 2011), Biological Data Profile (BDP) (FGDC 1999), Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) (FGDC 1998), Geographic Markup Language (GML) (GML 2011), ISO Geospatial Metadata (ISO 19115) (ISO 19115-1 2014), etc.

21.3.4 Privacy and Security Policies for Health Data Sharing Personal health data about an individual should never be shared without the consent of the individual. These considerations are of paramount importance and there must be clearly understood opt-in and/or opt-out consents of individuals regarding collection, sharing, and deletion of data. However, these concerns are often painted with too broad a brush and used as an excuse for a blanket ban on sharing data. Personal data can sometimes be shared in aggregate or with appropriate anonymization without violating privacy. Moreover, while nonpersonal data is usually not subject to privacy considerations, which are often invoked because of a lack of clarity in the interpretation. Government regulations often limit the ability to share data for reasons that arise from security concerns. An example of this are laws with localization provisions require domestic (within the national territory) installation of data servers storing personal or other data. Experts notice that localization requirements in regulations might potentially hinder the free flow of information, data sharing, and reuse (OECD 2018). The usefulness of these local laws is debatable and many suggest the laws

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being based more from xenophobia rather than genuine security considerations. Policies and regulations need to balance securing access to the citizens’ data and free flow of the data mindful of privacy and security concerns.

21.4

Enablers for Sharing Data

Lowering data friction facilitates data sharing. Reducing data friction in a multifaceted task requires a combination of technical and nontechnical approaches. We have organized these approaches into several broad categories as outlined below.

21.4.1 Data Sharing Platforms Data sharing platforms are a basic prerequisite for receiving data from many sources, consistently managing privacy and security, and normalizing all the data through a common set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Data Models. These platforms also ensure control by data providers on who gets access to their data and enable them to obtain monetary compensation if appropriate. The data shared through these platforms includes all types of data related to healthcare such as suitably anonymized patent and treatment outcome information, hospital statistics, aggregated health metrics, etc. In addition, many environmental and other factors that relate to health of citizens are shared such as air pollution, traffic density, flooding information, water quality, etc. There are three basic categories of data sharing platforms: 1. Open Data Platforms: The simplest are “Open Data Platforms” which aggregate data and allow access to all comers. Examples include national platforms such as Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India data.gov.in. The advantage of an open data platform is that anyone can get free access. The disadvantage of an open data platform can be loss of possible control of who gets access to data. This dramatically reduces the amount and type of data that will be shared as the data providers are concerned about losing control. Open data platforms are popular because they offer the opportunity to rapidly open up and share, but they are limited in their flexibility and attractiveness to data providers. 2. Data Warehouses or Lakes: An approach very common in corporate settings is a data warehouse (large warehouses are referred to as Data Lakes), which aggregates all data into a common place, using a common way of representing data, and under a common set of access control mechanisms. Mechanism such as Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) are used to extract data from their existing repositories to the common data warehouse. Data warehouses have support for a wide variety of data analytics. The approach is often used by hospital systems to share data among their different departments. As an example, Geisinger built the

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Keystone community data warehouse as a freestanding repository where data is pooled from Geisinger and non-Geisinger community hospitals. (UC-NORC 2014; Allen et al. 2014; McCarthy et al. 2014). Where personal data that is subject to governmental piracy mandates (such as HIPPA (HIPPA 1996) or Personal Data Protection Bill (PDP Bill 2019)), Data Warehouses are often the best approach as they offer tight and predictable protection since all the data is stored and managed in a single place. However, this approach does not scale to a broad deployment where health data is obtained from a wide variety of sources, public and private. 3. The third category of data sharing platform is termed ‘data exchanges’ Many cities such as Copenhagen (CDE 2018), Columbus (smartcolumbusos.com), and Manchester (https://urbandata.exchange) have taken ownership of their data assets by creating such data exchanges. The objective of a data exchange is to “interconnect data silos” and not to aggregate data as in a data warehouse. An important idea behind a data exchange is that data silos are actually not a bad thing, as each silo often represents a domain-optimized service that performs that function very well. Instead of breaking silos or moving data en masse into a central repository, this approach chooses to interconnect the disparate and distributed entities. This provides a way for accessing data in a unified, common format, allowing for sharing of data between different departments in a city, as well as opening up data for third party developers to create innovative new applications and citizen services. In addition, there is an opportunity for third party providers of data, or third-party providers of data analytics or data annotation, to participate in what becomes a data marketplace. An example of note which encompasses many cities, the India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX), is described in the IUDX Discussion Paper (DE Framework 2020). IUDX is completely open source, based on an underlying framework of open APIs, data models, and the security, privacy, and accounting mechanisms that will facilitate, easy and efficient exchange of data among disparate urban data silos. IUDX draws on ideas and, where feasible, code, from best-of-breed global projects such as CityVerve (cityverve.org.uk) and Fiware (fiware.org). IUDX is based on important emerging standards in the space including NGSI_LD from European Telecommunications Standards Institute—ETSI (ETSI Press Release 2019), and Smart Data Models created by the Telecom Management Forum (GitHub/Smart Data Models 2020). IUDX is an example of a system welltuned to the ecosystem of the country, including cultural norms, city nomenclature, payment and identification systems, etc.

21.4.2 Establishing the System of Data Providers The value of sharing data is only as useful as the availability of data. Thus, establishing an organized network of data providers is essential. An example is the US-based eHealth Exchange, which is a healthcare information exchange network

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for sharing clinical information nationwide, electronically; vendor-independent, largest query-based network; incorporating both federal and private institutions; 75% of all US hospitals, doctor offices, healthcare professionals; and facilitating more than 30 EHR technologies—Now: independent, non-profit health information network, supported by The Sequoia Project (formerly Healtheway)—Previously: began as the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN or NwHIN), the federal program under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) (eHealth Exchange 2018; FMPHPCE 2014).

21.4.3 Development of an Application Ecosystem The iPhone did not become a success until a critical mass of independent application developers built innovative applications and services for the platform. A similar application ecosystem will be required to make a data platform successful. The application developers will require nurturing and encouragement and will need clear business models for managing interactions and dependencies, establishing and operating infrastructure systems, monetizing data and associated services, and developing long-term expertise. Other significant factors for a cohesive, comprehensive ecosystem would include tools and support along with setting up the basic values cum philosophy of the ecosystem. In the healthcare space, the need for creating an application ecosystem is particularly pronounced. While applications in, say, gaming or social networking can be readily launched with limited initial investment, healthcare applications require significantly more domain knowledge and expertise. Often, they involve careful and painstaking compliance with legal mandates and other regulations. For certain categories of applications, they may require extensive testing and possibly human trials. Thus, the capabilities of application vendors and qualities providing expected sophistication and quicker solutions needs to be carefully curated. In the case of the State of Utah and Iowa, application vendors established digital infrastructure in a few days with necessary sophistication to manage COVID-19 pandemic versus EHR vendors for the Greater Tulsa Health Access Network Beacon Community took longer than anticipated, about 7–8 months, for setting information exchange platforms (Domo Press Release 2020; UC-NORC 2014).

21.4.4 Public Investments in Data Sharing Infrastructure or Platforms The capabilities of data sharing infrastructures and facilities available for secure and private data exchange may impact the overall success of large-scale healthcare digitization programs. Appropriate stimulus through public investments in data

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sharing infrastructure can potentially galvanize the transition to sustainable adoption of data sharing technologies. The HITECH Act of 2009 took forward steps to promote health information technologies and incentivizing their use. More particularly, HITECH Act provisions tried to overcome financial obstacles by availing extra payments to the eligible healthcare professionals with meaningful use of EHRs and bonuses or extra payments-per-discharge of Medicare patients to the hospital with meaningful use of EHRs (Blumenthal 2010). To address the lack of infrastructure to exchange health information among stakeholders, the US Federal government channeled over $560 million in funds to states being the custodians of Medicaid and public health data. The US government also accelerated the incubation of Nationwide Health Information Network, a health information exchange infrastructure that is now an independent eHealth Exchange. Through these investments nurtured heavier adoption of digital EHRs, various other multidimensional barriers need to be addressed at the same time apart from technical barriers such as business barriers, complex privacy laws, misaligned procedural and incentivizing mechanisms, etc. (HITPC 2015).

21.4.5 Strengthening a Culture of Data Sharing The most pernicious factor that inhibits data sharing is the view among officials that they are better off hoarding data. Building a culture of data sharing becomes imperative. Diverse data types, different subject domains, multiple locations, and host institutions highlight the broad range of existing agencies and capacities that require them to come together for effective use of public health data. The default behavior of parties that have public health data should be to share, unless there are privacy reasons not to do so. Research demonstrates a change in overall culture (versus agency behavior) has long term positive implications for policy design and implementation. Culture change would include an environment of trust, common data sharing values and norms, commonality in rules, and institutionalization of interest of all parties. This cultural shift must be strongly advocated by the administration and leadership. Simply writing down a set of rules in a personnel handbook will not suffice. In a recent study, we found program officers were convinced their data policy at the National Science Foundation, ensured publication of publicly funded data, even though the majority of NSF-funded Principal Investigators displayed near-complete ignorance of this policy and were reluctant to share data. The answer in these and other cases is not stricter standards, but a successful effort to integrate understandings of the working culture and practices of healthcare professionals into the design and implementation of those standards (Edwards et al. 2011). Building a broad-based data-driven health mission at a national or state level is essential to make this data cultural shift. As an example, the US HITECH Act as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 emphasized data-driven

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healthcare. The HITECH Act provided $35 billion in grants and incentive payments to adopt and use EHRs at hospitals by health professionals. This legislation backed electronic Health Information Exchange (HIE), pushed digitization of all patients’ health records, mandated data standards facilitating nationwide data reuse by service providers, and incentivized hospitals to adopt certified EHR technology (Reisman 2017; Henry et al. 2016; Mennemeyer et al. 2015). The HITECH Act of 2009 took several innovative steps to promote health information technologies and incentivise their use. The act’s provisions tried to overcome financial obstacles by availing extra payments to the eligible healthcare professionals with meaningful use of EHRs and bonuses or extra payments-per-discharge of Medicare patients to the hospital with meaningful use of EHRs (Blumenthal 2010).

21.4.6 Economic Models Incentivizing Data Sharing or Reward Systems Creating a broad-based data ecosystem is difficult if the impetus for sharing data is entirely top-down driven. Public and private parties will share data if needed in response to an emergency or based on government mandate. However, routine sharing in normal times becomes far more likely if there are economic benefits for all parties involved. Public–private partnerships and data management ecosystems need to be explored where government and private share for monitoring, supporting, and managing for the public good are more straightforward. There are many examples of such data monetization. These are broadly divided into three categories: 1. Direct monetization: This type of monetization primarily involves direct buying and selling of data assets considering economic and other benefits. Data providers and users adopt various modes of exchange of data assets, which include either direct peer-to-peer transactions; use of trusted and managed third party data exchange ecosystems (Gilad-Bachrach 2019) (examples, https://catalogue.iudx. org.in, https://www.quadrant.io, https://aws.amazon.com/data-exchange); or multiparty decentralized blockchain based data exchanges (ITU-T 2019; Sikeridis et al. 2020) (examples, https://datapace.io, https://www.dawex.com/ en/blockchain-data-exchange, or https://streamr.network). 2. Monetization of derived analytics: The power of data analytics is a breakthrough for variety of institutions. Data analytics services are being traded as a key commodity (Jiao et al. 2018). Derived data analytics potentially equips organizations to achieve higher rate of performance by delivering innovative insights for decision-making. As seen in the case of BlueDot, they keep their clients wellequipped for epidemic surveillance and management by sharing real-time insights on emergence of disease outbreak. 3. New business models: The data-driven digital space is witnessing disruption with the emerging business models. One of the prime examples include monetization

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of personal DNA data to assess genetic ancestry and personalized genetic histories. Companies such as ancestry.com are offering direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing and use consumer’s DNA data to compare with a vast library of DNA data (Royal et al. 2010). Results data further supplements historical documents for researching genealogy (Shriver and Kittles 2004). Nextstrain’s use case (Sect. 21.2.2) also captures an innovative model mapping pathogens’ evolution using biosequences sourced from huge public repositories.

21.5

Conclusion

This chapter shows the critical role of data and specifically data sharing in improving public health management. Global policymakers must understand how important the globalization of a data-driven public health system is to maintain human security, and strengthen and harmonize the legal and policy frameworks that facilitate the required transnational data. We have highlighted the practical benefits of sharing accurate and trusted public health nonpersonal data. A comparative assessment of use-cases of data-driven applications has provided some insights to better healthcare outcomes. We also emphasized the importance of breaking data silos and the need for decision-makers need to complement government data with nongovernment and private sources. Private companies also need to be included and incentivized to create novel and innovative data-driven solutions. We have suggested technical and policy solutions to overcome data friction and its impact and believe these approaches can be valuable in global management of disease outbreaks.

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Chapter 22

Governing Artificial Intelligence in Post-Pandemic Society Aravindhan Arunagiri and Avadhanam Udayaadithya

Abstract Pandemic escalated the need of adopting technology for human security and public service. Technological integration and digital transformation are of focus in the strategy to recover and reconstruct civic society post-pandemic across the globe, especially in the domains of healthcare, education, surveillance, and governance. Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen to benefit society through building and assisting critical socio-technical systems. Automated decision-making through algorithms is debated widely for its limitations in tackling biases and inability to discourage unintended. Moreover, AI learns patterns from the data, which by nature is biased due to existing socio-economic complexities. The pervasive application of AI when implemented and integrated with social systems is observed to pose socio-ethical challenges such as institutionalization of discrimination, biased decision-making, intrusiveness, low accountability, and mistrust. Various threats and vulnerabilities imposed to human communitylike natural disasters, health pandemics, and economic uncertainties necessitate inevitable adoption of AI applications that can mitigate socio-ethical challenges and adhere to human security principles. Current data protection laws seem to be insufficient to protect human rights in the given scenarios. Literature advocates for transparency, explainability, and auditability of AI models. However, it may not necessarily lead to accountability and fairness. Embedding these socio-technical systems in the broader institutional frameworks of regulation and governance can balance the risks without compromising on the benefits of technological innovations. The socio-economic context in which AI model is deployed necessitates the responses to be local and context specific. This also necessitates AI governance framework to be comprehensive, prevention-oriented, while protecting and empowering human value and dignity. This chapter provides commentary on the social, ethical, and technical issues that AI can impose along with various aspects that need to be considered while governing AI. Finally, an AI governance framework is proposed based on socio-administrative

A. Arunagiri · A. Udayaadithya (*) Mphasis NEXTLabs, Mphasis Ltd., Bangalore, India e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 R. Shaw, A. Gurtoo (eds.), Global Pandemic and Human Security, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5074-1_22

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principles to extend their credibility in mitigating, managing and governing the human threats and uphold human security. Keywords Artificial intelligence · Automated decision · Ethics · Governance · Participation · Institutions · Human security

22.1

Introduction

The Artificial intelligence (AI) methods deploy the data-driven decision-making without or less manual intervention. Artificial intelligence, being socio-technical system, replaces or facilitates a wide variety of transactions ranging from buying a merchandise to diagnose of the disease and prescribing medicines. Systems powered by AI technologies and methods evolved from performing the repetitive noncritical tasks to knowledge intensive crucial tasks (Milano et al. 2020; Perra and Rocha 2019; Taddeo and Floridi 2018). In post-pandemic scenario, most of the socioeconomic activities such as health-care diagnosis, recruitments, legal process are increasingly performed using AI systems. This has greatly helped in avoiding the physical proximities and maintaining social distancing while performing the activities. AI systems also resulted in enabling self-servicing paradigm in the postpandemic world, where public can meet their needs by interacting with IT systems that are driven by automated algorithms. AI also observed to lower costs and increase consistency in decision-making process (Taddeo and Floridi 2018). AI systems are highly scalable catering to the needs of many large social institutions. For instance, Health care systems are being designed to prescribe medication and health care assistance for a large population of public by looking at the historical health records (Sharma et al. 2020). If there is community affection for group of people in a region, the AI system can automatically qualify and quantity the affection, make necessary decision and recommend respective stake holders to take necessary action of collective treatment, recovery measures (Corvalán 2018). Automated systems are providing endless benefits for individual life as well as overall civic wellbeing (Perra and Rocha 2019). The threats faced by human society are not isolated but have collective effect over Human security. The Automated system while needs to scale with volume of beneficiaries, also needs to address variety of threats faced by the beneficiaries. Hence, the automated system requires to consider the synergy of challenges and devise collective solution that ensures the principle of human security and dignity (Flores 2018). Automated systems respond based on the knowledge gained through data patterns learned from facts and context. Data forms an important aspect of knowledge discovery for AI systems. The very process of knowledge discovery from data posed lot of socio-ethical questions on automated decision-making: Does AI respect human dignity? Does AI is human centric or oriented? Is data utilized for the intended objective, and not misused? Are processes and outcomes of automated decision-making fair and unbiased? Does AI system consider human challenges in a

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comprehensive way? Does AI system respect individual and group privacy? Are there legal frameworks to protect individuals against adverse decisions taken by automated systems? Does the AI system provide coherence in approaches to balance the efforts and effects of human intervention? Who would be accountable for the decision taken by automated systems? Therefore, managing and regulating AI systems need to consider a variety of socio-technical aspects to ensure the fairness, Inclusivity of the AI services. The technical aspects of AI system include data, machine-learning models, its deployment framework. The social aspects that are aligned with the technical aspects of AI system like privacy, explainability, transparency, responsibility, accountability, and auditability.

22.2

Issues of Automated Decision-Making Using AI

Historically, benefits of automated decision-making through algorithms come with ethical risks (Floridi and Taddeo 2016). Large-scale language models that are typically used in translations and search engines are observed to inherently gender biased (Larson 2017; Prates et al. 2020). AI-driven job recommendations are observed to suggest high paying science and technology jobs to men than women (Lambrecht and Tucker 2019). Even, health care systems are not observed to be unbiased (Obermeyer et al. 2019), therefore, proving beyond doubt that AI systems need to be managed and regulated to deliver the benefits with lesser negative consequences (Eubanks 2018). This becomes more critical given that the AI systems are being deployed in knowledge-intensive activities (Eubanks 2018; Kroll 2018; O’Neil 2016) and are often understood to be “black boxes” that are not explainable (Burrell 2016; Pasquale 2016). The certainty/credibility of the decision in social life requires both legal and social acceptance/adherence. AI systems are typically understood to be black boxes and opaque (Pasquale 2016), which makes it less transparent and understanding (Burrell 2016). The systems that do not allow adequate transparency and offers contradictory outcomes are perceived inadequate in credibility. This may make AI system less trustworthy and detrimental to implement social institutions (Eubanks 2018; Kroll 2018). Therefore, exhibiting “transparency” in the decision-making process, reasoning out the decisions through “explanations,” and “fair” decision outcomes are key to build AI systems (Burrell 2016; O’Neil 2016). Another serious concern of usage of AI is around privacy. As data and algorithm design are at the heart of developing AI systems, liabilities during the design and collection of data are of critical importance. Large-scale AI systems typically crunch enormous volumes of data to define decision-making logic, also known as models, using statistical methods, machine learning and other mathematical constructs. Globally, state authorities have deployed policies and guidelines regarding the planning, collection, sharing and management of data such as GDPR, The Personal Data Protection Bill (2009) India. These data management policies address the social

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and ethical aspects of users’ data like privacy and security (Barocas and Selbst 2016; Floridi 2018). While the government policy intervention assures the fairness of data usage, there are no institutions that govern the responsibilities of AI systems during knowledge discovery phase and before making decisions (Veale et al. 2018). Even though models are mathematical constructs of knowledge mined from data, they are observed to reveal data and patterns if reverse engineered carefully. Models are observed to be susceptible to inversion revealing underlying training data and patterns. AI-driven recommender systems are observed to reveal consumption patterns of individual users (Calandrino et al. 2011). Model inversion and black box attacks are some of the methods reported in turning trained machine-learning models into two-way (Fredrikson et al. 2015) resulting in estimation of raw data with varying degrees of accuracy. However, strategies/tools such as differential privacy and inducing noise to the signals are observed to be effective to protect individual privacy in these scenarios. Therefore, privacy need to be considered as a design choice at every stage of building AI system, not just at ingesting data for training.

22.3

Aspects of AI in Action: Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability

There has been a growing body of research on the ethical implications of algorithms, particularly in relation to fairness, transparency and accountability (Hoffmann et al. 2018; Lee 2018; Shin and Park 2019). AI systems learn relationship among data attributes to emulate the real-world phenomenon. For example, if the data shows that a job was applied mostly by gender, the recruitment and screening tend to be biased on specific gender (Lambrecht and Tucker 2019). Algorithms tend to reflect societal biases that are embed in data, which is ascertained through experience of expert opinions and empirical evidence (Datta et al. 2015). Therefore, automated decisionmaking is observed to learn social norms, unintended negligence, community specific behavior through continuous interaction with human systems (Shah 2018). Table 22.1 illustrates and summarizes socio-ethical considerations of AI systems.

22.3.1 Fairness There is a requirement to ensure the decisions taken by AI systems are fair and denial of benefit to the deserved beneficiary is avoided (Barocas and Selbst 2016; GrgicHlaca et al. 2018). The social, ethical, and economic biases observed in data tend to be reflected in the decision of the AI system, if not checked and corrected (Abebe et al. 2020; Richardson et al. 2019). Simpler way to mitigate biases is to avoid/ exclude using certain features that are assumed to induce social biases, viz., race, gender etc. In spite, there may be certain data patterns that can act as proxy to

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Table 22.1 AI aspects and socio-ethical considerations Fairness • Privacy issues due to proxy features (Grgic-Hlaca et al. 2018) • Indifferent evaluation criteria for fairness (Katell et al. 2020) • Context-sensitive definition of fairness (Binns et al. 2018; Lee et al. 2017; Saxena et al. 2018) • Comprehensive definition of Fairness (Burke 2017)

Transparency and explainablity • Technical illiteracy and information overload (Ananny and Crawford 2018) • Social prejudice based on skill (Bambauer and Zarsky 2018; Martin 2019) • Changing and adaptive decision paradigm (Buhmann et al. 2020) • Low interpretability (Poursabzi-Sangdeh et al. 2018) • Socially neural explanations (Edwards and Veale 2017; Miller 2019) • Algorithmic formalism (Green and Viljoen 2020)

Traceability, auditability and accountability • Recordkeeping and traceability (Kroll 2018) • Process reviewability (Cobbe et al. 2021) • Shrinking human accountability (Grote and Berens 2020) • Socially conscious model design (Lee et al. 2019a, b) • Society-in-loop (Rahwan 2018) • Social transparency and social learning (Dabbish et al. 2012; Nguyen et al. 2015)

discriminate (Gillis and Spiess 2019). Featured extracted from natural language and images are observed to capture ethnicity, gender, and race of the subjects. GrgicHlaca et al. (2018) highlights a case where using features that people believe to be fair could increase discrimination exhibited by algorithms while negatively impacting accuracy. Another main source of bias is the process of learning that AI adopts. Algorithms typically learn from data adhering to certain computational rules and norms. For instance, machine-learning models are built to maximize the fit to data and increase accuracy of model to predict. They tend to ignore social complexities involved in the real world (Katell et al. 2020), thereby not focusing on curtailing the social biases to creep in (Green and Viljoen 2020). There are some efforts to integrate formal fairness measures as part of developing the decision models (Whittaker et al. 2018). These measures along with suitable methods and techniques are used to identify and mitigate the bias that exist in the data and creep later into the models’ decisions. The major question for the experts in algorithm fairness is to mitigate the bias at the data level or while creating the models or taking corrective action post model development (Bellamy et al. 2019). Though the answer for bias mitigation is purely context based. Majority of methods using measures like difference of means, disparate impact and odd ratio mainly focus on bias detection rather than bias mitigation (Zehlike et al. 2017). Some prominent algorithms like relabeling, additive counterfactually fair estimator, and reject option classification are used to detect the bias and mitigate them in the models (Friedler et al. 2018; Kamiran and Calders 2012). Methods like disparate impact remover, prejudice remover are used to identify and mitigate the bias in the models (Feldman et al. 2015; Kamishima et al. 2012). As recent development of bias identification and mitigation at various

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stages of AI decision-making process, the researchers developed complete tool kit AI Fariness 360. The AI fairness 360 provides measures, algorithms, libraries to mitigate the biasness and ensure the model fairness (Bellamy et al. 2019). With wide variety of bias mitigation system available the right choice of decision of using them at various stages of AI decision-making process is purely contextual. Drawback of relying only on the adhering to the fairness measures while building algorithms is that the system tends to over emphasize on mitigating biases and tend to unduly benefit specific set of informed beneficiaries (Grgic-Hlaca et al. 2018; Hildebrandt 2015), which itself can be treated as bias. The notion of bias and fairness is context-specific and stakeholder dependent. Very few studies discuss on the public views on algorithm fairness (Binns 2017; Lee et al. 2017; Saxena et al. 2018). A multistakeholder and context-dependent approach of defining fairness is advocated by Burke (2017). The notion of individual fairness is observed to depend on three major categories (Saxena et al. 2018): treating similar individuals similar (Dwork et al. 2012), not favoring undeserved (Joseph et al. 2016), probability of getting positive outcome is proportional to the best choice opted by individual. The community-based approach of algorithmic fairness and multistakeholders view of fairness necessitates a generic framework that allows the participation of users in evaluating and correcting the model fairness (Katell et al. 2020). There are very a smaller number of studies that address the required framework to mitigate unfairness in AI decisions (Binns et al. 2018). Mainly, there are two types of approaches to ensure the fairness of the decision: First set of approaches advocate external agents’ intervention to control the biasness in the data and models. These approaches use the judgments and assumptions of external agents which cannot be captured through the contextual aspects in the data. The second set of approaches use the community-based data resources, patterns, models, and assumptions that portray the contexts of various historical and sociological aspects (Katell et al. 2020; Veale and Binns 2017). The requirement to maintain fairness in algorithmic decisions proposes the need for transparency in the models that substantiate the rationale of the decisions (Lee et al. 2017; Saxena et al. 2018).

22.3.2 Transparency and Explainablity Key challenge that large-scale AI systems face is to demonstrate the fact that they are appropriately built and trustworthy (Butterworth 2018). Individuals want to understand how the algorithms understand them and take decisions (Hildebrandt 2015). Transparency is a key requirement to enable trust among users and improve accountability. Transparency needs to be ensured in each stage of decision-making process thus making model more accountable and auditable (David 2015), starting from acquiring data, explaining production process, to interpreting operating rules that lead to decision (Butterworth 2018; Tutt 2017). In literature, the transparency of the AI system includes providing the documentation of the machine learning methods used, sample of data set considered, purpose of analysis, type of model

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validation, risk associated with the model inferences, and limitations of the model (Hoffmann et al. 2018; Lee 2018; Shin and Park 2019). The notion of transparency is not free of drawbacks. Transparency can overload the information, making system opaquer for end users (Ananny and Crawford 2018; Kizilcec 2016), as information about weights and internal modalities of model expects technical literacy. Transparency also gives critical information of the data aspects that influence the model decisions enabling the misuse of the models by the skilled users (Szegedy et al. 2014; Yampolskiy 2018). The system can be subjected to strategic game, as users try to trick the system to get desirable outcome. Therefore, the game of AI models by skilled user over unskilled counterparts can infuse a different form of social inequality (Bambauer and Zarsky 2018; Martin 2019). Self-learning and adaptive algorithms are two characteristics of AI, which help system to learn and update data patterns over time. Data-driven model tends to change parameters depending on observed data drift and model performance. The nature of AI systems to dynamically adapt to the data and context makes it difficult for user to keep pace with the changing decision paradigms (Buhmann et al. 2020; Burrell 2016). It would be difficult even for developer to explain the change in the model. Interpreting the automated decision through model understanding is one of the key constituents of transparency. The Explainable AI concerns the principles, procedures governing the machine-learning models that are deployed for embedded decision-making AI system (de Spiegeleire et al. 2017). GDPR provides right to seek explanation for decisions made by ML, which accelerate the field of Explainable AI (XAI). The Explainable AI has gained a great momentum from AI researchers who wanted to control the decision-making or enabling process, while the policy makers are interested in understanding the decision process. For example, the AI researchers concerns the methods, tools and techniques that capture the behavior of the Machine Learning models, try to tune the parameters, weightages of the models, validate the model with respect to statistical or mathematical concepts and externally validate with the results from real world simulations and pilot studies. The emphasis is on transparency of the model and thereby control its performance and relevance. Many explainability tools are developed to unpack the models to the outcomes of decisionmaking process: Explainable AI, AI Explainability 360, and the What-If Tools are publicly available. These tools help users and developers to explore results through case-based reasoning, interpret rules, and identify biases in datasets and models (Wexler 2018; Mojsilovic 2018). However, explainability may not necessarily lead to interpretability. People’s ability to understand explanations and act observed to be dependent on many factors such as number of features, complexity of model, and user interface (Poursabzi-Sangdeh et al. 2018). Explanations are understood to be constructs that are socially embed (Miller 2019; Wilkenfeld and Lombrozo 2015). According to Ehsan et al. (2021), bridging the gap between explainee and explainer makes sense. Therefore, explanation is audience dependent. Explanation is dependent on knowledge gap that is to be bridged and is, therefore, dynamic depending on beliefs and goals (Arya et al. 2019; Arrieta et al. 2020; Ehsan and Riedl 2020; Miller 2019;

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Mohseni et al. 2018). Therefore, explanations are multidimensional and need to be personalized for different users based on their requirements (Edwards and Veale 2017). XAI literature has mainly focused on explaining what model does, rather than what user needs. XAI also is less focused on social aspect of communicating explanation to the stakeholders (Suresh and Guttag 2019). Mittelstadt (2019) suggested to adopt interactive methods of communicating explanation and facilitate dialogue than mere technical interpretability. Explanations also could be drawn through community experiences when interacted through forums (Kou and Gui 2020). Those explanations could be more intuitive and there is no need to understand technical explanation of decision. Miller (2019) suggested four properties of explanation: contrastive, selected, social, and rely on probabilities the way AI does. “Algorithmic formalism” helps to understand how decision models abstract realworld phenomenon through certain predefined constructs, rules and forms (Green and Viljoen 2020). Given the complexities of social life, machine learning paradigm tends to simplify and ignore certain social considerations to accommodate formalism. The social aspect like fairness and inclusiveness are measured and interpreted using algorithms formalism (Lipton and Steinhardt 2019). This renders the transparency methods to be misled of machine learning capabilities to maintain these social fairness issues (Green and Hu 2018; Lipton and Steinhardt 2019). Providing right explanation alone may not lead to trust, but requires to be augmented by auditability and responsiveness (Gilpin et al. 2019). Impact assessment of AI-enabled decisions through real-world interactions highlights unintended behavior of AI systems (Katell et al. 2020). External audit processes and stakeholders’ participation in impact assessments are necessary to realize credibility of automated decision-making systems (Brundage et al. 2020; Henderson et al. 2018; Marcus and Davis 2019; Rahwan 2018). Contextualization and multiobjective focused AI systems could help realize the intended behavior.

22.3.2.1

Traceability, Auditability and Accountability

Transparency as such may not lead to accountability. AI systems to be trustworthy, system need to be “responsible and traceable” (Executive Office of the President of the United States 2020). Traceability can be understood as the idea of understanding the outputs through the process of system design, development, and operations (Kroll 2018). Traceability tries to observe if the system can be understood its output through the purpose of the system, design choices during development, data acquisition procedures, tools and methodologies adopted, assumptions, limitations, risks and along with operational use of AI (Doshi-Velez et al. 2017). Kroll (2021) substantiated the notion of traceability into design transparency, reproducibility, operational recordkeeping, and auditability. A detailed view of system design and development along with recordkeeping of system behavior would enable the AI system auditable (Kroll and Kroll 2020; Wieringa 2020). Reproducibility notion of traceability necessitates system to back track the system behavior during audit processes and stakeholder inquiries. Recordkeeping is observed to improve

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accountability given clearer view of auditable processes and corresponding stakeholders (Nissenbaum 1996; Wieringa 2020). Code and data versioning, model cards, model hubs, and structured logging are a few examples of tools that support traceability of AI systems. Understanding internals of machine-learning models expects certain technical literacy. More to that, models are just one aspect of the automated decision-making process, which by itself may not be proved to be effective in holding system accountable (Singh et al. 2019). Cobbe et al. (2021) introduced the concept of “reviewability,” which is primarily focused on process-oriented view of technical and human elements of accountability in the light of administrative principles and judicial oversight. Audit is a mechanism to check processes, procedures, and behavior for compliance/adherence to the principles, regulations and norms during development and deployment phases (Brundage et al. 2020). Audits help to anticipate negative consequences, identify vulnerable processes and subsystems, suggest design mitigations, and minimize system risks (Ensign et al. 2017). External/Third-party audits are conducted by experts to observe if the AI system outcomes are ethical as intended without incurring in financial loss or revealing intellectual property (Burrell 2016). Internal audits establish procedural justice to increase compliance and thus a motivating factor for establishing common and robust frameworks. Involving stakeholders as part of audit process could potentially induce trust among the beneficiaries (Brundage et al. 2020). Automated decision-making is perceived to be objective due to algorithm formalisms (Buhmann et al. 2020; Karppi 2018; Lee 2018). The objectivity that automated algorithms provide can make human decision makers shrink their accountability to the decision (Grote and Berens 2020). Human decision makers tend to attribute any adversities in outcome to automated logic by algorithm and reject to take responsibility. A part of such concerns can be mitigated by ensuring traceability and auditability. Accountability aspects of these would be discussed in more detail in forthcoming sections. Accountability and trustworthiness are two essential characteristics that AI systems are targeted to achieve. Participatory frameworks are proposed to involve stakeholders on the premise that people know about their problems and needs better (Fung 2003; Matias and Mou 2018). Participation of stakeholders at stages of AI could leverage knowledge pool during design, imbibe and operationalize moral values (Fung 2003), and increase trust and satisfaction, thereby increase in use (Bendapudi and Leone 2003). Incorporating users’ feedback and perceptions into AI systems primarily expects to operationalize moral values as “Objective functions” that must be defined at design stage (Lee et al. 2019a, b). Mathematically defining fairness measures seem to be far from reality due to algorithm formalism of algorithms and morals are understood to be perception driven (Bonnefon et al. 2016; Malle et al. 2015; Noothigattu et al. 2018) and context dependent. However, human judgements are inevitable so as the define and select appropriate fairness measure for a given context and trade-offs (Dwork et al. 2012; Kleinberg et al. 2017).

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Rahwan (2018) advocates involvement of society while creating and developing AI. Understanding public views is critical, but not sufficient, to translate into automated decision-making processes. Society-in-loop concept argues for co-evolution of human and AI systems. As mathematical manifestation of societal ethics is complex and difficult, a continuous feedback between expectation from AI system and evaluation of automated decision outcomes. Different stakeholders and actors perceive different outcomes as the effect of ethics. Social choice theory is profoundly adopted to aggregate individual preferences of stakeholders and present as feedback to AI systems (Rahwan 2018). These algorithms provide most preferable decision alternative among different stakeholders as possible solution (Lind and Tyler 1988; Mosteller 2006). Social transparency paradigm argues that making others’ decisions and their impact transparent through digital platforms could result in social learning (Dabbish et al. 2012; Nguyen et al. 2015), social facilitation (Huang and Fu 2013), and reputation management (Dabbish et al. 2012). Social transparency affects perceptions and induces trust through social endorsements (Metzger and Flanagin 2013), collective mind (Hutchins 1991; Weick and Roberts 1993) formed through storage and retrieval of others knowledge and experiences, validating cognitive heuristics (Kahneman et al. 1982) and inculcating transitive trust by disclosing outcomes and experiences of peers and “similar others.” Creating awareness of rights, information revelation of algorithmic incidences and frequent impact assessments tend to increase accountability and trustworthiness.

22.4

AI Governance Framework: Policy Considerations

The persistent issues of AI-based decision-making can be mitigated by managing the various aspects of AI systems, viz., fairness, Transparency and Accountability. A careful adoption and implementation of appropriate governance interventions such as de-biasing data for model fairness, community-driven approach for interpretation, and interactive interpretation of the AI decisions could potentially build trustworthy socio-technical systems. Large-scale AI systems represent interaction and co-evolution of human and algorithms. Participatory governance, multistakeholder interactions, continuously evolving perceptions and decisions make the real-world systems more complex.AI systems need to dynamically adapt to such dynamics through human-computer interactions and provide suitable and ethical decisions over a multitude of transactions and scenarios. Algorithms tend to create feedback loops that reinforce the behavior. The governance frameworks are aimed at encouraging fair interactions and trustworthy systems. In post-pandemic scenario, users rely on AI systems to meet their ends and hence the fairness of service is not a choice but a mandate. Various AI aspects are collectively managed through proactive and reactive learning mode for automated decisions. The governance of such system that heavily rely on human interaction require comprehensive guidelines and norms of interaction to ensure the adherence

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of user with the system. The advocacy of the AI governance framework apart from adherence, evolve guidelines, and educate the user for sustainable participation. To this objective, a governance framework is proposed to regulate automated decision-making systems. This framework provides a viewpoint to create and develop sustainable, ethical, and trustworthy socio-technical institution that delivers fairer, transparent, and accountable decisions. Governance interventions proposed as part of this framework are primarily relying on the principles derived from participatory governance, institutional advocacy, human-computer interaction, social transparency, and procedural justice. Figure 22.1 conceptualizes the governance framework. The components of Sustainable AI governance framework: 1. Sustainable assessment: The development of AI system primarily needs to emulate the existing social transaction with consistency and accuracy. Such development paradigm requires thorough understanding of the social entities (users and stakeholders), their relationships (beneficiary, AI development) and environment (health care, surveillance, etc.). Social assessment includes stakeholder identification, advocacies involved, decision-making process, socio-ethical prejudices and their impact and socio-administrative responses. The social assessment is the critical stage of AI decision-making process which raises the AI system from mere mimicking to augmentation of the social systems. Moreover, it helps to understand institutional design choices that AI system needs and assess potential impact. IEEE 7010 (Schiff et al. 2020) guidance document can provide direction to sustainable social assessment process. This process needs to be iterated as and when unintended behavior of human system and/or AI system are observed. 2. Data collection and control: The data is the main source of knowledge for the AI system. The data gathering process includes systematic planning, sampling, collection, and quality assessment. The set of information preservation schema are targeted to maintain privacy and security of the facts. Policy frameworks, like GDPR, The Personal Data Protection Bill (2009) India, provide norms, regulations and legalities that are to be adopted while collecting and managing the data. These policies concern more about the data management and privacy aspects of data, and less worried regarding the privacy during AI development lifecycle processes. To that extent, the privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) is considered as a paradigm to ensure privacy related to data usage. PPML-inspired by principles of cryptography—assures privacy during AI development lifecycle among stakeholders of data management, modeling and deployment considering the cost, benefit, and quality data usage (Chaudhuri and Monteleoni 2009). 3. Feature identification and selection: The inherent bias in data and its context are mitigated using a variety of methods, algorithms, and tools (Whittaker et al. 2018). The efficiency of AI fairness depends on the unbiased selection of features that are used to build the

GDPR guidelines Privacy preserving ML

Data collection & Control

Bias idenficaon & Fairness measures Parcipatory design

Feature identification & selection

Fig. 22.1 Sustainable AI governance framework

Stakeholder idenficaon IEEE 7010

Social assessment

Parcipatory development Federated learning Traceability & Reproducibility: MLOps Internal audits

Model development

Differenal privacy Algorithmic stress tesng Algorithmic audit and external audits Explainability tools

Model testing & verification

Algorithm development lifecycle

Interacve interpretability AI incidents and communicaon Situated explanaons through Social transparency

Automated decision and social interaction

Outcome control and evaluaon Algorithmic Impact assessments Stakeholder audits

Evaluation & assessments

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model. At every stage of decision-making process, the contextually selected fairness methods are developed to ensure unbiased models and decision. The community of stakeholders are deployed in the process of selecting the features of model, this addresses the real-world complexities of the transaction (Kou and Gui 2020). In addition, this participation controls oversimplification of the social systems due to the algorithmic formalism (Green and Viljoen 2020), thereby improving model fairness and repeatability too. The “participatory by design” intervention encourages stakeholder participation during feature selection and engineering stage and thus contribute the maintenance of fairness at early stages of model development (Lee et al. 2019b; Zhu et al. 2018). 4. Model development: The model development includes the usage of data in alignment with PPML strategies that ensures the privacy of data, models, and deployment. Federated learning is another paradigm of machine learning model training in a decentralized fashion (Kairouz et al. 2019). Even though privacy concerns are minimized due to avoidance of centralized data collection and transfer, federated learning may be susceptible to model inversions and attacks, if not designed carefully. The participatory model development mechanism tries to model the preferences of the users/stakeholders with through individual preferences of outcomes. Social choice mechanisms along with representative learning strategies aggregate the individual preferences while developing AI models. This inclusivity and computational preference modeling inherently mitigate and bias or ill effects of automated decision that cannot be modeled only with the underlying data (Lee et al. 2019b). It supports individual to select input, take part in model training and thereby gain control over the working internals of the model. The internal audits are used for a confirmatory assessment of the model that audits whether the process of model development and model itself comprise the stakeholder’s work definitions (Raji et al. 2020). MLOps can be a useful toolset that could ensure traceability and reproducibility of experiments during development lifecycle (Raj et al. 2021). 5. Model testing and verification: AI models tend to memorize training data and have propensity to reveal individual data when subjected to Blackbox attacks and model inversions. Differential privacy (Engstrom and Daniel 2020; Lecuyer et al. 2019) introduces random noise to the decision, without much compromising on performance, thereby reduce possibility to reverse engineer original data. Methods like adaptive stress testing (AST) are used to algorithmically test the model under multiple variants of scenarios of the systems. Mostly it uses a modelbased evaluation method which adapts the evaluating procedure of varying scenario and has high level of controllability (Koren et al. 2020; Lee et al. 2015). Algorithmic auditing and external audit procedures help to identify conformance issues with respect to product and process guidelines and norms through

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bus bounties and ethical hacking. Third party audits involving stakeholders can significantly improve bias mitigation and trust (Brundage et al. 2020). Explainability paradigm during model development lifecycle helps in testing the model against the feature selected and verify them over the facts and contexts of data. These explainability tools can help developer understand the way machine read the features and mitigate biases if necessary. 6. Automated decisions and social interaction: Decisions from the automated algorithms need explanation. Mere technical explanations can overburden users to understand and thereby reduce transparency. As a knowledge transferring process, explanations ought to be dynamic and sensitive to special context (Liao et al. 2020; Lim et al. 2019), rather than mere static technical explanation (Mohamed et al. 2020; Yang et al. 2019). Interactive modes of explanations are proved to be effective and bridge knowledge gap: Interactive visualizations (Showkat 2021), Chatbots and other knowledge-based dialogue systems. This guided interaction helps in control the quality of decision by design rather than post-quality controls (Cai et al. 2019). The Institutional mechanisms need to be carefully designed to incentivize stakeholders for validating the transparency of automated decisions and thereby increase the accountability of AI system behavior (Mittelstadt 2019). Social transparency literature proponents the fact that making decisions transparent and social can create situated technological context for the users. Sociotechnical context of AI can create awareness, implicitly understand decisions without technical explainability requirements, and build trust. Inculcating social and human context augmented with appropriate privacy norms can lead to meaningful dialogue, advocacies, and thereby institutional changes. Operationalizing online communities/forums, proactive information sharing, and interactive interpretability mechanisms can coevolve AI and human systems. The AI incident strategy necessities an independent framework that monitor, identify, collect, report and store AI incidents reported thereby they are readily used for automated decision quality control (Pasztor and Sider 2020). 7. Evaluations and assessments. Outcome control is the intervention to ensure procedural justice that allows user/community to appeal the decision made by AI systems (Hirsch et al. 2017). This enables accountability and improve trustworthiness of AI system over time. The evaluation of the AI decision process includes the investigation its various aspects like fairness, transparency, explainability, and accountability. Algorithm impact assessments and stakeholder audits can be helpful in this scenario. Socioethical outcomes of various automated decisions need to be verified and audited through stakeholder participation and representation. Downstream impact of decision outcomes on socio-ethical and mental aspects of the end users need to be assessed and quantified (Canada 2019; Reisman et al. 2018). Typically, impact assessment frameworks are iterative. Social learning due to online communities and social interactions can result in advocacy formation. The governance interventions such as stakeholder audits and algorithmic impact assessments capture social prejudice and changing needs of

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users and feeds back the information to AI development lifecycle through participatory interventions and adaptive learning frameworks. Evolution of social-technical institutions is inevitable, which might demand complete reassessment of human systems starting to identify stakeholders/advocate groups/interest groups and redefine socio-ethical measures.

22.5

Conclusion

Adopting automated decision-making through artificial intelligence is way forward in post-pandemic scenario. The pandemic impacts the human security and make the human communities vulnerable to various challenges and threats. The risks encountered during AI-driven decision-making could be due to inherent socio-ethical prejudice of the human systems, inappropriate design and development of algorithms and processes, algorithm formalisms leading to misrepresent real-world dynamics, and/or perceptional mistrust. To mitigate socio-ethical risks, there is a need to carefully augment AI capabilities and process controls with governance principles, such as participatory governance, procedural justice, social transparency and advocacy at every stage of AI design, development, and post-deployment phases. The AI-driven socio-technical systems, if carefully designed and governed, enable human community to rapidly progress toward accomplishing sustainable development goals while promising human dignity and security. This chapter exemplified governance interventions along with sustainable governance framework based on socio-administrative principles and developments of automated decisionmaking systems to address socio-ethical and human security issues. Institutions and norms evolve over time through interactions and experiences. Co-evolving nature of AI systems with humans necessitates continuous monitoring, learning, and regulation. A fair and trustworthy AI system is expected to co-evolve human dignity and security (Latonero 2018).

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