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Europe is a patchwork of local labour markets with striking variations in sector mix, workforce skills, innovation capabilities, and business dynamism. McKinsey has used a mathematical clustering technique to group almost 1,100 local economies across Europe into 13 clusters. These clusters fall into three broad categories.

Forty-eight dynamic cities, including Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Munich, and Paris, are home to 20% of Europe’s population. They account for more than half of its high-tech patents, three-quarters of its startups, and 83% of its STEM graduates.

By contrast, 438 shrinking regions with 30% of the population, mostly in Eastern and Southern Europe, have declining workforces, older populations, and lower educational attainment. The remaining half of Europe’s population lives in a wide range of largely stable economies.

This is how to move from crisis to recovery. While many businesses continue to grapple with the first ‘response’ phase of the COVID-19 crisis, working through these five actions can provide a roadmap through the second ‘recovery’ stage, and onwards to the third ‘thrive’ phase, according to the professional services network, Deloitte.

In 2019 the Philips Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Manchester and Global Action Plan, launched the first of its kind ‘Clean Air for Schools Programme’. This programme will include more than 20 participating schools and 6,000 students. It aims to support schools to improve air quality as well as understand the impact of air pollution in schools by studying the varying levels of air quality in classrooms and how this affects school children.

In this partnership, The University of Manchester will provide air monitoring equipment and analysis to investigate the state of air pollution in schools. The analyses will include pollutants like PM 2.5, PM 10, CO2, NOx and Ozone.

Novo Nordisk has taken a bold and company-wide approach with a new environmental strategy with an ambition to have zero environmental impact. The nature of their business puts them at the frontline of some of the biggest environmental issues, including climate change and pollution.

In 2020, they achieved their goal of only sourcing 100% renewable electricity across their global productions, with a target to have zero CO2 from their operations and transport by 2030. Another shift they are taking is only to work with suppliers who share their mind-set of zero impact both up and down the supply chain.

Siemens Mobility has launched a new, real-time system that monitors air quality. This system can be used by local authorities as a way to intervene when it is necessary to improve air quality.

This tool is the result of a partnership between Siemens and the air quality experts of EarthSense and it is called ‘Zephyr’, a name exceptionally apt as Zephyr was the name of the Greek God of West Wind. The sensor ‘Zephyr’ can produce real-time measurements for various pollutants including ozone (O3) and particulate matter (PM2.5). The hope is that this system can be used in traffic management applications.

The sources of climate change and air pollution are closely aligned, and solutions can be taken to address them simultaneously. Danfoss has put sustainability at the core of their business with climate action as a top priority. They were the first global technology company to commit to three of the Climate Group’s initiatives of RE100, Energy Productivity 100 (EP100 businesses commit to doubling their energy productivity by 2030) and Electric Vehicles 100 (EV100 business commit to accelerating transition to EVs and making electric transport new normal by 2030).

Over recent years, Danfoss has considerably lowered its global energy intensity and will transition the remaining demand to renewables and change the car fleet to all electric by 2030 at the latest.

Johnson & Johnson aims to use its global reach and resources to encourage communities and policy-makers to take more action by using health as one of the catalysts for change.

For example, they were founding partners of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health, a group of top medical associations with more than 500k clinicians to help educate Americans about the health effects of climate change and actions they can take. They have also set targets to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations and transparently post the progress every year. They have joined the Climate Group’s Renewable Electricity 100 (RE100 businesses commit to source all their electricity from renewable sources) and support C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group to drive impact in cities.

IKEA, part of INGKA Group, creates the Better Air Now Initiative with an ambition to make a model to reduce air pollution by turning rice straws that would otherwise have been burnt in the Northern states of India into a product range.

Crop residue burning is one of the biggest causes of pollution in India even though laws prohibit the practice. The challenge is the machinery needed to clear the fields is expensive and for many farmers burning is the only affordable approach. With IKEA, the rice straws will become a renewable material source for their collection. IKEA have also put sustainability first in their strategy by aiming to use 100% renewables for their operations and supply chains and to have zero emissions from home deliveries by 2025.

Unilever has announced that it will source 100% of the carbon derived from fossil fuels in its cleaning and laundry product formulations with renewable or recycled carbon. This move is set to transform the sustainability of global cleaning and laundry brands including Omo (Persil), Sunlight, Cif and Domestos.

This new ambition is a core component of Unilever’s "Clean Future", a ground-breaking innovation programme designed by the company’s Home Care division to fundamentally change the way that some of the world’s best known cleaning and laundry products are created, manufactured and packaged. Clean Future's intent is to embed circular economy principles into both packaging and product formulations at the scale of global brands to reduce their carbon footprint.