Editorial
by Achim Steiner and Pavan Sukhdev
©Project Syndicate, 2010. www.project-syndicate.org
Reprinting material
from this website without written consent
from Project Syndicate is a violation of
international copyright law. To secure permission,
please contact distribution@project-syndicate.org
The G20 summit in Canada
offers an opportunity for a hard, long look
at how green investments are assisting recovery
in many countries while generating employment
and environmental gains including on climate
change.
China, which put around
a third of its stimulus package into environmental
sectors, has not only seen its GDP rise
sharply. The number of people employed in
renewable energies such as solar has also
climbed to over 1.5 million with 300,000
new workers in 2009 alone.
Spain's unemployment
rates are high, but would undoubtedly be
higher without its policy to foster wind
power and other clean tech sectors where
half a million jobs have been created.
The Republic of Korea
has invested well over 80 per cent of its
stimulus in areas ranging from sustainable
transport and low emission vehicles to energy
efficient buildings.
This has now been backed
up with a five year green growth plan aimed
at cutting carbon dependency and producing
1.8 million jobs.
India's National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act is assisting to
repair and restore a range of rural infrastructure,
critical for livelihoods of the poor, including
water storage networks in some of the poorest
parts of the country such as Andra Pradesh.
It is delivering improved
water security; a 25 per cent increase in
wages for agricultural workers and more
than 3.5 billion days of work reaching on
average 30 million families per year for
the programme as a whole.
The State of Sao Paulo
is embarking on a Green Economy strategy
covering transport to greener buildings.
The city represents around a third of Brazil's
economy.
While a transition to
a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy
is gaining traction globally, some are claiming
it is just a developed or rapidly emerging
country agenda.
Poorer economies have
far more pressing matters to be diverted
by such a nouveau notion. Others skirt the
debate claiming it is either a glossy repackaging
of the sustainable development agenda or
worse, a plot to constrain rather than liberate
growth developing and least developed economies.
None of this could be
further from the truth. In advance of the
G20, we have assembled some key case studies
- part of a major Green Economy report to
be published later in the year.
Kenya - its new green
energy policy, including a Feed-In Tariff
and 15 year power purchase agreement, is
catalyzing an initial target of 500MW of
geothermal, wind and sugar wastes-into-energy
systems: a rise in the country's installed
capacity of over 40 per cent.
Uganda - policies to
promote organic agriculture have generated
200,000 certified farmers and exports growing
from close to $4 million in 2003 to nearly
$23 million now.
Over the past two years,
the Green Economy has gone from theory into
practice. It is now one of the two major
themes as governments prepare for the Rio+20
conference in Brazil in 2012.
The inherent logic offers,
perhaps for the first time, a sustainable
growth paradigm that is as much a developing
country agenda as it is a developed economy
one.
New directions, especially
ones challenging the status quo and past
ways of doing business will always have
their critics.
As multiple case studies
demonstrate, many developing economies are
making their own minds up.
The Green Economy is
not a luxury, but a 21st century imperative
on a planet of six billion, rising to nine
billion people in just 40 years.
The financial and economic
crisis has given it wings. How far it will
fly will depend on smart policies of national
governments - developed and developing alike.
But it will also rest
on forward-looking policies by regional
development banks; the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund and bilateral development
finance of OECD nations.
The G20 summit has the
opportunity, if not the responsibility,
to enable this transition by taking a leadership
role in Toronto, individually and in support
of developing economies' aspirations.
A leadership role that
re-affirms its commitment to embed sustainability
in the global economic recovery; One that
recognizes the power of a Green Economy
to deliver the opportunity of a fundamentally
different and decisive development path
across all nations.
Achim Steiner is a UN
Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive
Director
Pavan Sukhdev is head
of the UNEP Green Economy Initiative on
secondment from Deutsche Bank
