I'm going to link my answer to in lesson 8, the lesson relating to longer-term planning and intergenerational equity.
These two crises have some similarities, but they have important differences. COVID-19 has shown that we can respond to immediate crises and marshal the resources necessary to do that. The longer-term crises are where society has more difficulty dealing with them.
The climate change crisis is both a long-term crisis and now a short-term one, as we're seeing with the increased frequency and magnitude of extreme weather. We need to address equally both short-term crises like COVID-19 and long-term crises. That would mean changing some of the approaches the government takes to long-term planning.
For now, at present, it's quite frequent for governments to focus on short-term deliverables like this year and, in the private sector, this quarter perhaps. The future may be discounted in those sorts of decision-making fora.
On decision-making structures—and we've heard some comment about that in terms of the chair representing future generations in the example Ms. Thorpe provided—we do need to change our decision-making structures so that the long-term future, our children and their grandchildren, are not discounted in present-day decision-making.