Gambling with Our Lives: Confronting Global Health and Climate Emergencies in the Age of Financialisation
A new report from Citizens for Financial Justices exposes the impact of our over-reliance on the private financial sector to solve two of the most urgent emergencies of our time – the health and climate crises. Gambling with Our Lives looks at the root cause of these emergencies – which, the report argues, is an unsustainable development model driven by skewed policy choices and unfair rules of the game, often dictated by private financial interests before those of people and the planet.
The current global health and climate emergencies expose the results of decades of hyper-globalisation and neoliberal policy choices that have eroded peoples’ social and economic rights[1].
These policies have also progressively weakened public preparedness and social safety nets that have proven so essential to cope with crises. Now, market-led policy approaches increasingly used to deal with both climate and health emergencies are failing to protect those most vulnerable, gambling with our lives and deepening pre-existing inequalities.
Citizens for Financial Justice’s new report, Gambling with Our Lives: Confronting Global Health and Climate Emergencies in the Age of Financialisation, seeks to provide a political economy perspective on the converging climate and health emergencies (from their root causes to their preparedness systems), introducing some of the key issues and trends that both have in common.
The report looks at how rising inequalities, economic instability and vulnerabilities to climate and health shocks have been driven and reproduced by skewed policy choices and unfair rules of the game, often dictated by private financial interests instead of guided towards the wellbeing of the general population.
This systemic perspective demonstrates that climate and health emergencies cannot be addressed separately, as they are inherent to a failed global development model that has placed us in the precarious situation that we are in today.
With this in mind, the report aims to reinforce the need for worldwide recovery efforts to move away from the pre-pandemic environmentally unsustainable development path, building towards socially and environmentally healthy and just economies.
Through this report, CFFJ hopes to contribute to the construction of a coherent and intersectional analysis which connects some of the dots between movements working on climate and economic justice and struggling to reclaim our economies, advance public goods and services, and protect our global commons.
Click here to read the report in English.
Click here to read the report in Spanish.
[1] What Are Economic, Social and Cultural Rights? (Center for Economic and Social Rights, January 8, 2018), https://cesr.org/what-are-economic-social-and-cultural-rights
