


The GGKP Knowledge Partner, CDKN attended the Global Green Growth Week was held in Jeju, Republic of Korea, 5-9 September. The is the first of two blogs reporting from the event, by Ari Huhtala, CDKN’s Deputy CEO for Policy and Programmes.
The Global Green Growth Summit, held in Jeju on 8 September and organised by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) had chosen “Towards a green finance action agenda for 2017” as its topic. The leading question at the outset was “The world is awash with money, but where are the bankable projects for green investments?”



In December 2015, one of us was in Paris for the first working day after the historic climate change agreements. The Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurria, had called a group together to “begin the task of changing economies so that they deliver on our climate agreements.” We asked ourselves, “How can we shift economies off their heavy use of the fossil fuels that cause damaging climate change, and encourage economic activities that help us to be resilient to at least a 2-degree temperature rise?”
The last few years have given us some experience to build on. The financial crisis of 2008 saw many governments wondering how to boost faltering economic growth, and to create more jobs. Some countries such as Germany, Denmark, and Korea responded with “green stimulus” packages.
They had noted that there was good business to be done in clean technology production and in installing efficient transport and energy infrastructure. They chose to focus their fiscal stimulation on the new “green goods and services” sector of the economy.


With the endorsement of a resolution on Sustainable Management of Natural Capital for Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction during the recently held United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, a new era of correcting the compass to measure sustainable human well-being has begun.
Conventional income (the market value of output during a fixed period in a given region) has been treated as a proxy for human well-being for too long. The limitations of the system of national accounts – where pollution abatement activities show up as income and biodiversity loss goes unnoticed – are becoming better understood.
From an environmental sustainability perspective, traditional income measurement is defective because it only partially treats natural capital stock in its coverage. While wealth (and natural capital) is a stock, income is a flow (a return on wealth). Understanding this difference is critical. Conventional GDP is adept at measuring flow, but it can only partially measure wealth.

In September 2015, the UN Assembly unanimously approved its new Sustainable Development Goals. These goals replace the Millennium Development Goals and are supposed to drive policymaking on both the national and local scale towards sustainability. The definition of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 Targets has been followed by a long debate to establish the set of the best fitting Indicators. In March 2016, the United Nations Inter-Agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators (UN IAEG SDGs), at the 47th session of the UN Statistical Commission ‘Better Data Better Lives’, presented its report (UN IAEG SDGs, 2016) for a final agreement on the indicators selected after a multi-step consultation process. These indicators are the ones to be measured in the near future to assess progress towards sustainable development.

If urbanisation is one of the most important global trends of the 21st century, with some 70% of the world’s population forecasted to live in cities by 2050, then urbanisation in Africa – and the ways in which that growth occurs – marks one of the most significant opportunities for achieving global sustainable development.
By 2050, cities in the developing world will absorb more than two billion new urban residents, representing 95% of global urban growth. African cities will take the lion’s share, in some cases increasing twice as fast as any other urban population worldwide. By mid-century, the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to quadruple, ushering in 1.15 billion new urban residents. How Africa prepares for its urban future will have far-reaching social, economic and environmental impacts – not only for the continent, but also for the world.