Insights Blog

On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, UNIDO spoke to Professor Linda Godfrey, a principal scientist at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

Godfrey manages the Waste Research, Development and Innovation Implementation Unit at the CSIR and is supporting the Department of Science and Innovation in its development of a circular economy roadmap for South Africa.

She also serves on the National Steering Committee of the UNIDO programme, “Economic Empowerment of Women in Green Industry”, which is making a significant push to improve leadership and participation of women as entrepreneurs and industry professionals, while also advancing green industrialization. The programme, underway in Cambodia, Peru, Senegal and South Africa, is assisting policymakers and practitioners with the establishment and implementation of a policy framework to integrate gender and green industrial policies.

 

Interview:

Who has influenced your career? Who has supported you?

In many areas in China, urban centres are swallowing up the thousands-year-old Linpan – a unique rural agricultural landscape, consisting of small villages surrounded by forests, rivers and farmland. In an attempt to boost local rural economies and pay homage to the social and environmental values of a traditional way of life, Song Jianming returned to his hometown in Liujie, near the Sichuan city of Dujiangyan, to open the Pigpen Café.

This blog explains how integrated, systems-level approaches can help increase the resource efficiency of infrastructure as a key driver of sustainable development.

The 2019 Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific by UNESCAP: Ambitions beyond growth reveals that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 requires an additional annual investment of $1.5 trillion for Asia-Pacific developing countries—equivalent to 5 percent of their combined GDP in 2018. While this seems unfathomable, it means we need a concerted effort driven by an assessment of fiscal space and leveraging the private sector. I want to emphasize this point: the journey towards sustainable development is affordable, if countries work together. 

In fact, raising financing for infrastructure should not be complicated. I encourage you to ask yourself four questions and I offer some of my reflections:

Recent research by CDSB and WBCSD has found 40 ESG issues key to corporate sustainability, including 10 emergent issues. Here we present the findings of the research and offer helpful tips to companies on how they can better report against them.

Recent research has found that natural capital makes up approximately 47 percent of wealth in low-income countries, and that achieving the SDGs could unlock at least US$12 trillion in opportunities for business by 2030. To unlock these opportunities, public and private sector actors are increasingly finding that it is more effective and efficient to collaborate. In this blog, we feature some of our latest resources on how multi-stakeholder collaboration can help to enable the sustainable management of natural capital.

The projected quadrupling of global GDP by 2060 presents both tremendous risks and opportunities for the sustainable management of natural capital. Embracing a circular economy model presents great potential for economic growth, with an estimated US$4.5 trillion business opportunity. However, the degradation of natural capital threatens the ecosystem services on which more than 40 percent of total world employment, or 1.2 billion jobs, depend directly, along with billions more jobs with indirect linkages to natural capital. In this blog, we feature some of our latest resources that illustrate the role green industry can play in strengthening the sustainable management of natural capital.

The majority of the financing required to achieve the SDGs is anticipated to come from the private sector, with an estimated US$12 trillion in opportunities for business by 2030. To ensure that these investments yield both a financial return and a return for nature, collaboration is needed across the insurance, investment, and banking sectors. Already, thousands of financial institutions are starting to align their portfolios with the SDGs, including the more than 2,000 signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) that represent more than US$80 trillion in assets in more than 50 countries. In this blog, we feature some of our latest resources that illustrate how the insurance, investment, and banking industries are engaging in multi-stakeholder collaboration to sustainably manage natural capital.

For the past 40 years the Chinese city of Shenzhen has been working to find the balance between economic growth and environmental protection. Through a number of green initiatives, the city has leapfrogged from the bottom of the "Made in Shenzhen" manufacturing value chain to a more innovation-driven "Created in Shenzhen" model.