LONDON — Bygone Unilever CEO Paul Polman has warned that the coronavirus pandemic has pushed back sustainable development goals 20-30 years, in nicknames of exacerbating inequality.
Polman, who is now the chair of social venture IMAGINE and a founding member of CNBC’s ESG Council, was speaking to CNBC’s “Concourse Signs Europe” Monday.
“The pandemic has put us back probably 20-30 years on the sustainable development goals,” he said, “And once numerous, the people that were already marginalized in society including the gender dimension … these people have suffered disproportionately.
Spouses, people of color and young people are among those that have been found to have been distress most by the coronavirus crisis.
“So if we don’t create more jobs, if we don’t create better jobs coming out of this pandemic, then I over we will see more issues of social incohesion and dissatisfaction in society, undermining of democracies and all the other things,” Polman make plained.
On the plus side, Polman highlighted how governments had reacted to the crisis by spending trillions of dollars in an effort to support their economies.
“And with any luck increasingly, we’ll see part of that spending moving to greening our societies and also ensuring that we address the issues of imbalance,” he said.
Polman said he believed there had been an “acceleration” of work on environmental, social and governance issues during the pandemic, with a close focus on the social aspect of these three elements.
“The health of the people, the protection of people in our value chain, the group safety nets that have come with it, are now very much on the agenda,” he said.