Green growth, or environmentally sustainable economic growth, is imperative in light of current environmental crises and resource depletion. Green indicators and statistics can measure environmentally sustainable development; they thus enable evaluating green growth and support its integration into policy. As such, this study uses an OECD framework to select a set of 12 indicators, designed for cross-country comparisons of green growth strategies. These indicators are assessed for 30 countries, including South Korea. Current data for each international indicator is compared to the 10th percentile of OECD countries and evaluated on a scale of 1-10. South Korea ranked 17th among the 30: its natural capital and quality of life indexes are relatively high, but its economic activity scores (production, consumption, and trade) are relatively low. These findings suggest that production and consumption processes must be made more environmentally and economically sustainable. Given that South Korea's green growth strategy currently emphasizes economic value, the country is moving in the right direction and our analysis projects that economic activity scores will rise in the future.
A multitude of initiatives, networks and organisations have adopted the concept of ‘green growth’ in recent years, in particular following the 2012 Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. New and innovative concepts and approaches to green growth have been designed and tested in the field. In this context, the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED), through its Green Growth Working Group (GGWG) decided to contract an external organisation to take stock of different members’ environmentally sound and climate friendly private sector development initiatives over the past three years. The objective of this stocktaking report is to provide insight into the main trends related to green private sector development, identify different approaches to green growth in PSD initiatives, and point out emerging lessons.
This Working Paper was commissioned by the UNEP Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Finance System (“the Inquiry”) to feed into its process of analysis and knowledge dissemination. This Working Paper has attempted to do three things:
1- summarise the underlying logic for why the financial sector should care about the state of the environment and environment-related risks;
2- review the main structural barriers that could prevent the financial system from managing such issues;
3- identify the main researchers and organisations undertaking work on these topics internationally.
The aspiration being that this document should be a useful initial reference guide to those concerned with both how environment-related risks could affect the financial sector and what financial institutions can do to manage such risks.
This book explores the environmental competitiveness of 133 countries around the world, presenting an index evaluation system to facilitate a comparative analysis of environmental competitiveness on a global scale. This is a new way to measure competitiveness in the light of the contradiction between world economic development and environmental protection. Global environmental competitiveness covers five aspects: the ecological environment, resources environment, environmental management, environmental impacts and environmental coordination. The authors use longitudinal study and horizontal analysis, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis methods so as to conduct an in-depth study of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues of global environmental competitiveness.This book will appeal to scholars and professionals with an interest in environmental issues and environmental competitiveness at a global level, as well as those with an interest in each of the 133 countries analyzed in this text, including environmental policy makers in those countries.
Indonesia’s desire to drive economic growth and reduce climate risk is reflected in the sweeping policy reforms it has introduced in recent years to meet targets announced in 2009 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this report, CPI identifies which public actors are investing in Indonesia, through which instruments, and what they are investing in to provide a baseline against which to measure progress and plan scale up. The landscape reveals investment patterns that allow decision makers to pinpoint where the biggest barriers and opportunities are.
California is both one of the largest economies and one of the largest emitters globally, making its climate change policies some of the most important in the world. They are also some of the most ambitious. In particular, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) set a series of policies and programs across all major business sectors to return California emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. A key component of this set of policies is the Cap and Trade Program, which caps greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from key business sectors in California. With the Cap and Trade Program in its second year of full operation, CPI studies how firms make business decisions in the presence of a carbon price — whether abatement options that have been identified as technically feasible prove to be attractive in practice, or whether barriers prevent firms from pursuing otherwise cost-effective abatement options.