The Senior Vice President and Global Head of Integrated Risk Management of Crisis24, Gregoire Pinton has revealed that, the coming year will inherit both the perils and opportunities of 2020.
He said this in his assessment of a joint report between Crisis24 and WorldAware, themed: “2021 Global Risk Forecast”.
2020 has been a difficult year for almost all countries across the globe: “A year rife with a pandemic that unleashed staggering global social, geopolitical, and economic disruptions.” But of course, the picture has not all been gloomy, there is a silver lining beneath all these- it has also brought out the best in humanity which holds many lessons for us in coming years.
According to him, if there be any hope that lies ahead in the coming year, then that may emanate from concerted efforts on the global front and the availability of a wide range of vaccines to cure the COVID-19 virus.
“While 2020 divulged the fragility of our global systems of trade, travel, hospitality, and medicine, among others, it also showed that they can be resilient; if we assign any specific hope to 2021, it is that with the advent of multiple vaccines and concerted global effort, we can and will be resilient. So, we need to deal with the constrained “now” but also must be ready to get back to work in earnest in both traditional and novel ways.”
According to the report, key areas of focus, naturally include the race for a vaccine; environmental changes will continue to manifest themselves in extreme weather events that, in turn, are compounded by COVID-19’s stress on the global health sector; smoldering tensions in Africa followed by a sudden war in Ethiopia have rattled sub-Saharan Africa.
For the Asia-Pacific region, hot domestic issues could prompt more demonstrations, and in some cases larger and more impactful movements are anticipated in 2021. In Europe, Brexit transition period exacerbated by the still profound effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will have dire consequences on business operations and security throughout 2021. Other areas of focus are the growing tensions between Turkey and Russia.
COVID-19 Vaccine: Race to the Finish Line
The report highlights that, for global situations- (business operations, international travels, trade in 2021) to plateau and assume normalcy, there is the need for the development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine along with their efficient rollout and distribution.
Accordingly, several factors influence the timing for the roll out or deployment of a vaccine across the globe including vaccine safety and effectiveness, approval by independent or government review boards, and an increased scaling of the industrial manufacturing of the vaccine, the report indicates.
As such, a return to normalcy will only be reached once a vaccine with at least 70% efficacy is distributed to a minimum of 80% of a country’s population. Quite recently, vaccine trials conducted were found to have as high as 95% and 70% of efficacy; Pfizer and BioNtech, Oxford Aztrazeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
However, it is going to be difficult to be able to roll out these vaccines to this much of a population (80%) within countries by the end of 2021. As it stands now, there are threats of the surge of a new coronavirus variant in the UK, which experts say is getting out of control. This new development has escalated the already damaging situation.
2021 would be fairly manageable, but not as soon as expected due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that some countries are still yet to bring under control.
