Human development and the planet at a crossroad: Op-ed

Viruses can jump from animal to human and around the world in a heartbeat. Factory emissions can contribute to wildfires a hemisphere away. Plastic dropped on a city street can clog waterways and threaten sea life on a distant shore. A flood in one rural region of Anatolia can affect the food supplies or prices in the megacity of Istanbul the other day. In this interconnected and interdependent world, humans act as nodes of a wide network, affecting and interacting with each other. The right and wrong choices we make can affect the life of another living far away from us.

These are snapshots of the new geological age we are living in, the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans, whereby humans for the first time in history are fundamentally changing the planetary systems needed for the survival of life on Earth.

The devastation caused by COVID-19 is the latest warning that humanity has reached a critical juncture, where financial crisis, climate crisis and inequality crisis are overlapping and causing profound suffering. The crisis has impacted all aspects of our lives and for the first time since human development measurement started thirty years ago, we will have a sharp decline in 2020. Nevertheless, the pandemic can also be an opportunity for reflection to choose a different route, one where we can unite to build back better. Going back to pre-COVID-19 is clearly not enough, because we were already going in the wrong direction.

The latest Human Development Report argues that we need nothing short of a fundamental shift in the next frontier of human progress. This starts by rejecting the idea that we must choose between people and trees. It is neither or both, because human development at the expense of the planet is not development at all. The...