The world faces old and new security challenges that are more complex than our multilateral and national institutions are currently capable of managing. Publics around the world remain focused on material standards of living; leaders are reluctant to expend political capital on long-term, global risk issues; multilateral ‘bandwidth’ remains low; in many cases it is unclear what solutions would look like. This paper argues for the need to place unsustainability squarely at the center of larger debates about globalisation and the global economy – in particular by focusing on three key areas:
1. Greening growth;
2. Equity in a world of limits; and
3. Building resilience to shocks and stresses.
This publication, by UNEP, aims to identify the challenges faced in attempting to decouple human well‐being from resource consumption and exists as the first report amongst many investigations into decoupling which will be undertaken by the International Resource Panel and UNEP over the next few years. The report offers facts and statistics of natural resource flows and trade globally and notes that consumption of natural resources is still rapidly rising. A series of country wide case studies (Germany, South Africa, China and Japan) are presented that examine the decoupling potential of the countries in question. The report observes that developed countries appear to show stabilisation of resource and energy consumption however these economies appear to have exported the more energy and resource intensive elements elsewhere. There appears to be some success of relative decoupling (where resource intensity per unit growth falls) in developing countries but resource consumption in these economies is ‘steeply on the rise’.
Drawing on UNEP’s Green Economy Report, this UNEP brief provides an evidence‐based roadmap for policy makers, the private sector, forest sector and forest dwellers alike. The paper includes an overview of the role of forests in the green economy, policy recommendations for forests in a green economy, and a number of success stories.
The paper concludes that to fully realise the benefits of forests in a green economy, governments and the international community will need to take an active role, including through policy reforms to create incentives to maintain and invest in forests and introduce disincentives to modify market signals and associated rent‐seeking behavior. Examples of policies include national regulations, smart subsidies and incentives, information management, supportive international markets, legal infrastructure, and conducive trade and aid protocols.
This book explores the potential contribution of a particular public policy - variously called environmental tax reform (ETR), environmental fiscal reform (EFR) or green fiscal reform (GFR) - to reconciling economic growth and the environment.
This review asks two questions: first, how have the public and policy debates over green growth evolved; and second, does academic research on economic and climate policy support the claims and assumptions made in these debates, and with what consequences for the green growth hypothesis? As the authors make clear, careful scrutiny of the most popular proposals for “green growth” suggests that they may well succeed at reconciling economic growth and emissions reduction. But it’s by no means clear that they offer general proposals for using the transition to a low-carbon economy to generate growth directly.
Land degradation has not been comprehensively addressed at the global level or in developing countries. A suitable economic framework that could guide investments and institutional action is lacking. This study aims to overcome this deficiency and to provide a framework for a global assessment based on a consideration of the costs of action versus inaction regarding desertification, land degradation, and drought (DLDD). Most of the studies on the costs of land degradation (mainly limited to soil erosion) give cost estimates of less than 1 percent up to about 10 percent of the agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) for various countries worldwide. But the indirect costs of DLDD on the economy (national income), as well as their socioeconomic consequences (particularly poverty impacts), must be accounted for, too. Despite the numerous challenges, a global assessment of the costs of action and inaction against DLDD is possible, urgent, and necessary. This study provides a framework for such a global assessment and provides insights from some related country studies.