The COVID-19 crisis is causing massive suffering across the globe. In addition to the human consequences of the disease, containment measures to slow down and control the virus have deprived people of their livelihood and put many firms in a difficult financial situation. To help governments think through investments for a green recovery, we proposed a sustainability checklist to screen potential projects and policies. The checklist looks both at the short term (e.g. how many jobs will be created?) and the long term (e.g. does the intervention improve the population skillset? Does it facilitate the transition to a zero-carbon economy?). The key objective being to maximize short- and long-term gains through a careful selection of interventions.
To test how the sustainability checklist might work for a specific country, the checklist was applied to the Fiji Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA). The objective is to demonstrate how the checklist can be used as a screening, scoring, and prioritization tool to identify projects that create synergies between short-term needs and long-term objectives.
