The COVID-19 pandemic has turned nearly every aspect of human life upside down in the last few months. That is true in environmental and energy policy, as well as innumerable other places. As we live through this disruptive time, we at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions thought we would create this forum to explore COVID’s impacts on the world we know best.
In particular, changes are coming fast and furious to environmental and energy policy. At the Institute, they are affecting our lives in many ways. Most obviously, the pandemic has shifted how we interact with policy makers and stakeholders. The need for social distancing has replaced face-to-face meetings and workshops with video conferencing and webinars.
The pandemic, however, is not just altering
how we work, but
what we work on. Our professionals are re-examining topics that they’ve long studied through the lens of coronavirus. For example, our research on environmental challenges for low-income communities now has added the lens of whether those factors have made the same communities more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. Our policy discussions have morphed to embrace questions such as whether green banks would be good vehicles to deploy stimulus funding or whether funding for forest and agricultural stewardship also could infuse rural America with needed investments. And new areas of study have leapt onto our radar screen, such as the inquiry of our water program, to be featured in this missive later this month, regarding how COVID-related lockdowns are affecting water use across the country, and, by extension, affecting potential revenues for utilities.
These rapid and dramatic developments have generated lively conversations among our team of professionals and raised critical questions, such as:
- Are the trends that we’re seeing new, or are they simply accelerating what was already happening?
- Are the policy responses directly related to COVID, or are they because there's a window of opportunity that wasn't there before?
Each week in this email, we want to bring that conversation to you. Our professionals will discuss the trends that they are seeing in their respective areas of expertise as a result of the pandemic.
In the coming weeks, here are some of the topics that you can expect to read about:
- Importance of reliable electricity access for monitoring and treatment of infectious diseases
- Water bills, COVID, and pension funds
- Conflicting signals for climate on China's COVID recovery
- Importance of local parks and open space during COVID, and a spatial analysis of areas of the Southeast with low access to local open space
- Review of 20 years of plastic policy, and how that might be changing during the pandemic
- Use of a National Climate Bank to invest in America
- Sustainable infrastructure and the global "green" versus "brown" stimulus recovery response
This email is intended to be a starting point for that conversation. We don’t have all the answers; we want to hear from you. As such, each week’s commentary, including this one, will be followed by a series of questions intended to spark dialogue about research into the topic and the direction that policy should take during and after the pandemic. We will also provide a list of things you should know from the policy world. These could be new policy approaches, research papers, news articles, or our own work.
We look forward to the conversation!
