GLOBAL PANDEMIC NETWORK. CITIES, ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of the deep connections between health and the environment. In its strive to deliver a comprehensive and holistic response to both major global threats, the WHO has emphasized the importance of pursuing a One Health approach. The One Health approach assumes multiple sectors working together to achieve better public health outcomes. It is rooted in the recognition that human health and animal health are interdependent and bound to the health of the ecosystems in which they exist. The deep connections between ecosystem health and human health were also on the agenda of the second segment of the fifth UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5.2), held in February 2022 in Nairobi. The proposed contribution will analyze the key elements of the One Health approach to appraise its concrete implications and potential drawbacks, with a specific focus on its relevance and implementation in the EU.

Based on the link between environmental and human health, this paper focuses on ecological human rights. It aims to assess the negative effects of Covid-19 on the enjoyment and realization of particular rights, including the right to a healthy environment, the right to food, the right to water, the right to life and the right to health. It discusses how the pandemic interplays with the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. It also highlights how the pandemic in and of itself, as well as governmental response measures to it, have played a role in exacerbating pre-existing social and economic inequalities. The paper places a special focus on the impact of response measures on marginalized groups, namely Indigenous communities, Afro-descendant communities and environmental defenders. The world is now facing the challenge of building back better.

Apart from being merely a global public healthcare system failure, Covid-19 has highlighted, at all institutional levels, deficiency in terms of economic, social and institutional resiliency and environmental and human rights protection. As the recent experience demonstrates, unsustainable cities, urban lifestyles, polluted and degraded environment as well as rising inequalities and compression of human rights represent the context for the spread of the pandemic and the aggravation of its impact on health and quality of life for people. The paper examines possible strategies and administrative measures to push towards a systemic rethinking of urban policies around some essential and indisputable lines of change in order to orient them towards more effective sustainability and resiliency based on the linkages between health emergency, environmental issues and human rights and on the use of artificial intelligence.

Resilience became for policy makers a new mantra. A word which projected the recognition of a one health approach and faced smart cities with new challenges adapted to all kind of emergencies. Within the context of a syndemic world, the tools proposed by urban planning exposed a lack of coordination among environmental and urban law issues, in many countries. Not to mention the lack of integration of healthy parameters in the shape of urban development. Smartness, when understood in terms of technology singularity and integration in the urban landscape, evolved in an insufficient tool, when digitalization doesn´t integrate a fully developments of digital rights, a fully understanding of smart communities' needs and a proper regulation of e-administrative procedure which automatizes the decision process. This paper reflects on the administrative rules connected with urban law, the impact of digital transformation on them and its projection in shaping digital rights in a resilient city.