UNEP’s Green Economy initiative is about meeting the multiple challenges on a planet of six billion people rising to over nine billion by 2050, by maximising the impact and opportunities of different investment choices in order to globally propel low carbon, resource efficient growth.
Encouraging financial flows between rich and less well-off countries is key as is the involvement of the private finance sector and global investment community. UNEP has been actively engaged with financial institutions around the world for over 15 years to facilitate more sustainable investment patterns.
This report focuses on the kinds of public finance mechanisms needed to incentivise and scale-up private sector investment.
In response to the financial and economic crisis, UNEP has called for a “Global Green New Deal” for reviving the global economy and boosting employment while simultaneously accelerating the fight against climate change, environmental degradation and poverty. A Policy Brief outlining these recommendations was prepared in April 2009. This report is a follow-up to that brief that was launched during the G20 (Pittsburgh Summit) in September 2009.
The review of country experiences with green stimulus packages reveals that much more needs to be done if the G20 is to follow through on its commitment to accelerate the transition to the Green Economy. UNEP reiterates its Global Green New Deal call, and urges G20 governments to invest US$ 750 billion of the US$ 2.5 trillion stimulus package (about 1 per cent of global GDP) towards building a green economy – one that reduces carbon dependency, addresses poverty, generates good quality and decent jobs, maintains and restores our natural ecosystems, and moves towards sustainable consumption.
Green jobs represent a new kind of employment which is not yet caught in the history and inertia of social inequity. This could represent an opportunity for a more equitable sharing of revenue between capital and labour. This opportunity may also help women into career path’s that will allow them to become more financially secure and support themselves and their families.
The recent study undertaken falls into this type of combined exercise, demanding a change towards a sustainable production model, and at the same time shedding light on what kind of jobs should be defended and which should not, and which policies to promote or reject. The paper sets the challenge of analysing and putting forward proposals for discussion from working women, advancing towards a gender perspective, as other studies on green jobs have included little or no reference to women workers.
The Design for Sustainability (D4S) concept outlines methodologies for making sustainable improvements (social, economic and environmental) to products by applying elements of life cycle thinking. D4S builds on the work of ecodesign to include economic and social concerns, and its methodology includes both incremental and radical innovation. The United Nations Environment Programme and the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in concert with key partners, work to support, illustrate, and diffuse targeted D4S demonstration efforts, including the European Commission-funded Cleaner Production for Better Products project in Vietnam, that are needed to change unsustainable consumption and production patterns.
Against the background of a projected doubling of world greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, this book explores feasible ways to abate them at least cost. Through quantitative analysis, it addresses key climate policy issues:
• What would an ideal set of climate policy tools look like?
• How large are the economic and environmental costs of incomplete country or sector coverage of climate change mitigation policies? What are the pros and cons of policy tools to broaden that coverage, such as international sector-wide agreements or border-tax adjustments? What are the main challenges in incorporating a mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation?
• How can we concretely develop a global carbon market?
• What is the case for, and what can we reasonably expect from, R&D and technology support policies?
This working paper summarises output from Project Catalyst, an initiative of the ClimateWorks Foundation, aimed at providing analytical support for the UNFCCC negotiations on a post-Kyoto international climate agreement. It seeks to show how to spread best practice around the world effectively by learning from and building upon the experiences of first-generation low carbon growth plans (LCGPs). Key to each country’s LCGP is the balance between maximising mitigation and adaptation efforts whilst maintaining economic growth necessary to ensure that decades of developmental gains are not rolled back. A data-driven and country-specific LCGP is essential to guaranteeing success in finding this balance. The paper covers how the plans are developed and analysed, citing numerous examples of LCGPs from countries such as Mexico and South Africa.
The paper identifies some commonly shared factors determinant to success: