Globalization is systemically unsustainable—absent a shift, the system will collapse into converging crisis of disease and climate change.

The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic which emerged in central China in late 2019 and at the time of writing continues to rage across the world highlights the Janus face of twenty-first-century globalization, underpinned by open international borders and deregulated global trade and finance. While globalization has substantially increased the wealth of nations and has facilitated unprecedented mobility and convergence across societies, it has also substantially increased vulnerability and sensitivity to systemic disruption, precisely because of hyperconnectivity. The contemporary integration of global relationships and systems in economics, finance, infrastructure, transport, ecology and health sets the twenty-first century apart from previous eras. Thus, pandemics can create global system shocks. When the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020, most national governments were underprepared, despite epidemiologists having warned for decades that epidemics will become more frequent because of the interconnected problems of globalization, population growth, inequalities and climate change.94

Applying the SD diagnostic framework, we first examine COVID-19 in its wider systemic context.

Mapping borders COVID-19 is a global systemic crisis. Pandemics, while primarily addressed within the political boundaries and jurisdiction of sovereign states, are in fact embedded in a global system and need to be fought as such. National responses to global pandemics can only be partial and are ineffective in the long term: COVID-19, like any other global pandemic, requires systemic responses, including scientific collaboration and joint global leadership. Most importantly, COVID-19 needs to be diagnosed in its broader socio-ecological context. Connectivity is the key variable that renders the eco- and social systems inseparable and drives socio-ecological feedback loops. The implications are profound. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, including the emergence of variants or mutations, will become increasingly likely because of anthropogenic climate change. While vaccinations limit adverse health impacts and reduce transmissions, they do not eradicate the virus. Future mutations of the virus that are less susceptible to antibody neutralization may require the development of new vaccines. As COVID-19 becomes endemic, this global systemic crisis requires a fundamental rethink of what is sustainable and what is responsible in twenty-first-century globalization.

Framing issues If the unmitigated global spread of deadly viruses is the tipping point to be avoided, sustainable globalization must be the strategic end-point. This end-point directly targets the goals and paradigms of our deeply interconnected socio-ecological system. Without adjusting goals and paradigms, the system may lose its capability to self-organize and may collapse. To pursue the end-point of sustainability, COVID-19 needs to be framed as a systemic crisis beyond a public health issue fought primarily at the national levels of 194 WHO member states. Eradicating the virus and achieving herd immunity—the condition in which someone infected, on statistical average, will not infect another person—are not suitable strategic entry-points, for two reasons.95 First, we are dealing with a truly global herd that is guarded by more than 194 shepherds. There is no synchronized effort to protect this herd through a global and simultaneous vaccine roll-out.96 Second, COVID-19 is not like the measles, which can be eradicated with global vaccinations. Considering the existing multiple variants of the virus and potential future mutations, this is a pandemic that can only be contained.

Connectivity and resilience constitute the most promising strategic entry-points to achieve sustainability. This is an opportunity to reset globalization by renegotiating the acceptable trade-off between connectivity and resilience in such a way as to recalibrate societal ways of life towards environmental and social responsibility and sustainability.97 Hyperconnectivity has significantly reduced the resilience of societies, and unconditional commitments to openness can be revoked. Governments everywhere have responded to COVID-19 by limiting connectivity through lockdowns, travel restrictions and border closures. In a systemic crisis, connectivity is a policy lever that needs to be recalibrated with the aim of recovering resilience to promote the health of societies.98 While countries cannot afford to close their borders perpetually, the key question is how to optimize the opportunities of system connectivity while minimizing its risks.