Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

The coronavirus outbreak is first and foremost a human tragedy, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, since the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December. SARS-CoV-2 is exactly the type of infectious disease for which federal public health powers and emergencies were conceived: it is highly transmissible, crosses borders efficiently, and threatens our national infrastructure and economy.

China’s extreme lockdowns were responsible for bringing the crisis under control. Other nations are now following China’s lead and limiting movement within their borders, while dozens of countries have restricted international visitors.

Since the outbreak began, we took all the measures to protect our people, meaning employees, customers and supply chains. Promoting health and safety is priority number one. To maintain a safe workplace we took many steps, educating management and employees on practices that can reduce their exposure to viruses, switching to home office options in order to protect our employees and customers, staying isolated as was suggested by the government to support the war against the virus.  We stayed in touch with our suppliers, always showing the ways we can support them.

Since China closed its borders temporarily, we did not stop our operations, always being there for our customers, acting as a door of China opening to the rest of the world. We kept rapidly evaluating commercial demands coming from all over the world, in this way ensuring that our customers reach the goods they want as fast as possible when this pandemic is over. We are at the service of our customers in this war with the virus, with the consultancy and commercial intermediation services that we provide.

Every aspect of our lives has been affected by the coronavirus. The global economy has slowed, people have retreated to their homes and thousands have died or become seriously ill. And yet there is hope. This is temporary. It will end. After the outbreak, change in the world is expected. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the outset of this year.

There are, to a certain degree, parallels that can be drawn between the current COVID-19 pandemic and some of the other contemporary crises our world is facing, like climate crisis. All require a global-to-local response and long-term thinking. Stopping the spread of coronavirus is paramount, but climate action must also continue. And we can draw many lessons and opportunities from the current health crisis when tackling planetary warming. In fact, we believe the last few weeks, as terrible as they have been for so many people, have taught us crucial lessons that we needed to learn in order to enter a new era of radical, collaborative action to cut emissions and slow climate change. The time scales are different, but the traits are similar.