Introduction 

Over the last decade, the G20 agenda has consistently included the price of oil, climate change and nuclear weapons. So towards the end of the year China reported a pneumonia outbreak in its Wuhan Province to the World Health Organisation, it was clear that G20 plans for 2020 would change. Within days, COVID-19 became the most searched word on Google, dominating global news headlines. The disruption to the G20 agenda caused by the virus may yet have an unexpected consequence: positive multilateral action on climate change as COVID-19 lockdowns clear pollution in China, India, Europe and the United States. Yet while the earths climate heals this cannot eclipse the daily rise in global human fatalities.

While visibility of the earth from the International Space Station may be improving dramatically, the pandemic is still overwhelming the mitigation measures enacted by many G20 nations. On 11 March 2020, the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a ‘Pandemic’, allowing the international community to finally take action to close borders and limit international travel with a view to slowing the spread of the contagion. A mere two weeks after the announcement, most the G20 nations admitted they were not properly prepared for a pandemic due to lack of equipment, appropriate procedures, medications and hospital facilities.

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G20 nations have since utilised their relationships to share data and information concerning the spread, allowing their neighbours to better prepare themselves. The relative transparency in sharing data to model the spread of the virus has allowed private sector scientists as well as national and international disease control agencies to examine trends and simulate outcomes, but this international cooperation has certainly not been without its challenges.

China has been accused of not reporting numbers for untested home deaths which, in turn, has been blamed in large part for the huge rise in COVID-19 home deaths in both Italy and Spain. China has certainly also been given a hard time by nations such as France, the United Kingdom and the United States for both its initial recalcitrance in reporting the outbreak and its lack of transparency in the data it shared with the WHO. Yet these criticisms also sought to shift the scrutiny away from these countries’ less than stellar performance in combatting the pandemic.

G20 nations were faced the highest risk of economic collapse, as such the soveriegns have worked together to synchronize their monetary policy. The Chinese Government lowered their interest rates and also allowed businesses interest-free loans for the next quarter to help the country absorb the shock of the economic lockdown.

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The United States reduced their Federal Reserve rates to near zero, followed by the United Kingdom and EU nations. The next phase was a deluge of quantitative easing on monetary policy, printing money and putting it into the economies to cushion the inevitable global decline. This was a vital step in synchronizing currencies’ devaluation so that the prices of key commodities such as oil, corn, raw material and rice were stable, ensuring the ability of the international community to procure key survival goods during the lockdown. This was the first time the G20 nations utilized their central banking systems to work hand-in-hand to avoid the short-term shocks which might otherwise ripple across other non-G20 nations’ economies.

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