What will be the big shapeshifters of our world in 2021?

A giant iceberg the size of Greater London has split in two apparently – but could still wreak terrible damage to life systems and habitats in and around the island of South Georgia. The iceberg, drifting under an anonymous code name, A68A, with its annex A68D, threatens to change the shape of the whole natural world around it, impacting penguins, seals, sea lions and the largest beasts of all, blue whales.

Perched on the edge of the Antarctic region, the impact of the change of shapes and patterns of this complete and unique ecosystem could reach much further than this section of the South Atlantic. Not for nothing is it known as the Antarctic zone’s “banana belt” for the richness of its flora fauna. Who knows what the melt of such a huge mass of frozen water could mean for thousands of miles of ocean beyond?

The great iceberg collision crisis in South Georgia seems a fitting metaphor for the way the shape of our world, our physical and mental horizons, have been bent by the Covid-19 crisis. By most calculations we are barely halfway through the run of this pathogen. It is the pandemic long feared, and equally long discounted, with preparations postponed. But like the marauding monster iceberg A68A, it is quickly changing the shape of the world. Already it is possible some major items are clear for crisis management in 2021 – be the agenda local, national or global.

The visionary physicist, Carlo Rovelli, told Reaction that he thought the Covid pandemic was as big a challenge and leap into the unknown for human social understanding as the challenge of Black Holes. He also compared the crisis, for human scientific knowledge, as vast as the inquiry into the origins of the cosmos, time, and life.

One of the few brave spirits to offer analysis of where Covid-19 is taking us is Ivan Krastev, the social commentator and political scientist. Talking about his essay, Is It Tomorrow Yet? he described to Reaction how the Coronavirus pandemic was a “Grey Swan” phenomenon. A grey swan is a mixture of the white swan and the black swan, the surprise disrupter in the flock. It’s grey because it has always been there but ignored. A pandemic crisis had been studied, predicted even, by various agencies in the US and the UK, including the National Intelligence Council and the NHS. But once the studies were made, they were duly filed and buried in some file or drawer, no doubt with the invisible label “too difficult” or “too inconvenient”.

It is rather like acknowledging the presence of the San Andreas Fault and the likelihood of another California earthquake, but hoping if we don’t mention it too often, it won’t happen too soon.

While the epidemic is in full flow across so many parts of the world, it is not clear how much contingency planning is in place for averting or mitigating any future outbreak. There are so many zoonotic animal species capable of transmitting the myriad new pathogens to humans, that future pandemics are as likely as the seismic movements of the San Andreas Fault or the Great Rift Valley. Only China seems prepared for action in a new pandemic, with characteristic ruthlessness towards its population – in the name of national security.

When Covid news first went global in February and March, most felt a spirit of unity, with a notion that we are all in this together. But then the pandemic increasingly became a great divider. Ivan Krastev quotes the opening passages of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the narrator reflects, “one of the first things the plague brought to our city was exile” – meaning exile and isolation within ourselves.

Covid has already accentuated the differences between rich and poor – whether in getting basic means of survival such as food, or access to medicine and the vaccine. It implies a fundamental shift in economics of globalization. No longer can most of the developed world’s cheap medical goods from PPE to basic medicines come from China and its neighbours. We will hear less of “just in time, just enough” supply chains, but more of “stockpile” economies and “near shoring” – getting what you most need from close to home, or at home.

Two victims of Covid governance, according to Krastev, are open free democracy – as governance has become more centralised and authoritarian, and a free media and press based on forensic investigation, empirical inquiry and factual reporting. Too much media output in news and commentary, he suggests aims at confirmation of tribal identity, and clique or clan loyalty.

As much as democracy, demography must be a priority as the shaping of our world by Covid. The plight of the old, infirm and isolated has defied the focus and concentration span of most governments, including those in the UK. “The television announcer has become a more familiar face than the neighbour,” writes Krastev. With the news that UNICEF is distributing food parcels in Plymouth, and churches in Blackburn are caring for starving families at foodbanks, there is little ground for complacency about community care in the UK.

There has to be a change of approach. A mnemonic of four “C” s might be useful: community, charities, communication and care. Much of emergency welfare and help is best directed at the community level. The use of community assemblies – as Ireland has showed – bring empowerment and consent. One of the first communities to shut down in the first wave of Covid in Italy was the tiny commune – or large village – of Vò in the Veneto. On 21 February this year two people tested positive, a day later one, a 78 year-old man died – the first victim of the new outbreak in Italy. On 24 February the mayor closed the little community, putting roadblocks on the access roads. Everybody out of a population of 3,416 was tested; about 3% showed positive results, many being asymptomatic. On 24 March  the lockdown ended, with no more deaths. Vò was taken as model for Covid management – but one hard to repeat in larger communities.

The mayor and council of Vò took responsibility into their own hands and did everything they could; they were pro-active. In the Dartmoor village of Buckfastleigh something similar has happened. Last year a row over the authorities’ closure of a much-needed public swimming pool led to the local council going independent, with no party-political allegiance. They, too, have been doing things their own way to help out with food and support for the elderly throughout the Covid restrictions. Buckfastleigh is classified as “a small market town” with a population of 3,326 in 2011 – just 90 fewer than the Commune di Vò last year.

Charities, their funding, use, and deployment have been a major but largely unmentioned issues in the year of Covid. They dovetail with the encouragement, training and deployment of volunteers. The huge swell of volunteers – more than a million in the first weeks – seems to have been asset at times needlessly squandered. “The training and deployment of volunteers is a highly professional discipline of human resource management and logistics,” says General Sir Nick Parker who has pioneered the expert use of veteran volunteers in disaster and humanitarian relief as founder and now senior trustee of the Team Rubicon charity, which during Covid changed its name to Reaction (a coincidence, Reaction readers).

Volunteers have filled the gaps across the piece from cleaning up and helping in distressed old people’s homes, to burying the dead, rushing out emergency PPE, driving patients to appointments and to attain emergency medicines. Local health authorities, district nurses and GPs have stepped up to fill the gaps. But this is taxing of good will and physical stamina. Local Resilience Forums, the lynchpins for local contingency arrangements in major emergencies, have also worked to the limit and beyond. But almost none of this was designed for the stresses they are now under. Charities have been restricted by the constraints of their own rules and trustees – and for that reason I cannot name some of the prime examples. If they are to be given large areas of responsibility in social care, which they have, they must be made more fit for purpose.

Just to give an example, one small street-level charity in the Midlands was helping people leaving on the streets in extremis – asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan who had fallen completely through the net and were starving, or worse. The street charity applied for a small grant from one of the large recognized brand charities, to buy food and medicines. They were turned down, according to my eyewitness – herself an experienced humanitarian rescuer – on the grounds, “you may be dealing with illegals – our trustees wouldn’t tolerate this.”

The whole matter of communication has been highlighted by the government, though not with conspicuous success. Communications are crucial to social trust and engagement in times of emergency – as Bill Clinton understood brilliantly in the crisis of the bombing in 1995 of the FBI building in Oklahoma, in which 168 people died. Clinton visited Oklahoma five times, insisting that a fire official called Jon Hansen was at his side when he spoke publicly. Hansen proved a natural born communicator of trust assurance, with the same natural skill as Ronald Reagan, and Clinton himself.

In credibility, trust and assurance, the Covid Downing Street briefings have proved a movable feast. The appointment of a new presentation team under Allegra Stratton seems hardly to have changed matters. Judging by the appearances of officials and spokespeople across BBC Radio 4 and the news broadcasters in general, they seem to be speaking in the wrong idiom. They are locked in internal dialogue, talking to their own – part of the battle of turf wars and territories between Whitehall departments and ministerial egos. The governments in the British Isles should strive to speak with one consistent, reassuring voice.

Care, care homes and the elderly point to a major topic which will increasingly dominate the shape of the world changed by Covid – the demography of ageing populations. Again, this is something of a grey swan item – something always there but something we would like to push into the “too difficult” box. Across the developed world, the care of the elderly is an ethical and economic priority. In some countries the matter is now becoming acute – in Germany and Japan, Russia and the Balkans, and Italy to take the most glaring examples.

The treatment of the elderly, from dumping Covid-vulnerable patients into care homes – untested – to contacting the isolated, infirm and depressed at home, has not been much or record to be proud of in 2020. Different cultures and nations do elderly care in their own way – take Sweden and Italy, for example, but it is now a major feature of our societies. As the global population heads beyond the eight billion mark, the trend is widespread. China faces the problems of a growing cohort of elderly retired to support. The main centres of youth population are Africa, parts of South Asia and Latin America. Japan has the largest number of over eighties per head of population. In Italy, nearly a third of all adult women will never have a child, intentionally or not.

With demography comes pressure on populations by climatic and environmental change. We are now witnessing the beginnings of significant migrations triggered by hostile or unliveable climate conditions. Climate along with the plight and demographics of the aged is sure to be one of the main topics of public disquisition and debate during 2021.

Already we have seen coffee farmers of Guatemala driven out by the failure of their crops in rising temperatures. In Mali, and parts of the sub-Saharan Sahel, migrants are being driven out by unbearable temperatures. The British battalion now heading to join the UN stabilisation force in Mali has been briefed that they are headed for one of the hottest points in Africa, round Gao, where heat is driving migration. This is an unusually frank and detailed reference to climate change in the mission statement for a British military operation.

Before the climate-deniers go on the offensive, I must enter the plea in mitigation that I have witnessed clear evidence of climate and environmental shift in my reporting, from Antarctica to Afghanistan, where I have encountered temperatures nudging 50 degrees Celsius. The big question, as Margaret Thatcher realised, is posed by the combination of climate and environmental shift and population shift and growth – climate change and demography.

An outstanding series of three articles of long form reporting in the New York Times with Pro Publica in the last few weeks suggests that the era of big migration driven by climate change is now upon us. By the end of the century, Pro Publica projects that three billion people could be on the move from unbearable climates. According to the analyst Sharon Burke, one billion climate migrants will shift by 2050.

In the last two or three years, a million and a half Chinese citizens have moved across the border to try their luck farming in Russia. Across the Russian Federation some two million square miles of tundra and wasteland could be cultivable in the by the next century. In two years, wheat exports have doubled due to rocketing yields from Russia. Canada is due to become three and a half times richer in the rest of the century – and the US correspondingly 30 to 40 per cent poorer in its farming states – as more of the north opens for cultivation.

Under Boris Johnson, the UK government, by all accounts, is determined to take the initiative in the Climate Conference COP-26 it is due to co-chair in November 2021. Their partners, the Italian government, are impressed by the approach of the UK government. “They have sent a very high-powered team to Italy to work with us on the agenda. We have been impressed, too, by the policy decision to stop overseas investment and aid in hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation,” and Italian diplomat told me last week. Whitehall sources suggest that Boris Johnson himself sees the COP-26 agenda an initiative as a real vote winner, especially with the young.

With the climate agenda, runs the management and future of the oceans. The New York Times Pro Publica studies project that the opening of the Arctic Ocean and passage is now a major geopolitical fact. Russia now has 34 icebreakers in its fleet, China four, and the US two: one nearly 50 years old. The sea passage for freight from China to the Europort at Rotterdam could take 40% less time via the Arctic than it currently does.

This takes us back to the two huge slabs of frozen water, A68A and A68D, floating somewhere in and around the shelf of South Georgia. They are a huge chunk that broke off the Larsen C South West shelf in Antarctica, in 2017. The melting of the ice in Antarctica is matched by the changes in the Arctic ice shelf off Greenland.

The management of the oceans will be a big feature in the changing shape of our world moving through 2021. There are other indicative changes, of huge consequence potentially I grant you, as witnessed in the last few weeks. The novel use of conventional arms and drones in Nagorno-Karabakh is one. The spate of cyber-attacks, from Russia and Iran, the malware assault on FireEye and SolarWinds mark another.

Demography, migrating and ageing peoples, the twists of the Climate debate, and the management of oceans are my tips for big shape shifters of our world in the year to come. They may look a bit like grey swans to some, but I will bet one, if not all three, will be up and flying by the end of 2021 or the year after.