In June 2009, the OECD Council Meeting at Ministerial Level (MCM) adopted a Declaration on Green Growth (OECD 2009a). The declaration invited the OECD to develop a Green Growth Strategy to achieve economic recovery and environmentally and socially sustainable economic growth. The MCM Declaration broadly defines “green growth policies” as policies encouraging green investment in order to simultaneously contribute to economic recovery in the short term and help to build the environmentally friendly infrastructure required for a green economy in the long term. In terms of resource economics, such policies firstly need to guide industry to delink environmental degradation from economic or sales growth by reducing resource use per unit of value added (relative decoupling). At the same time, it would be essential to aim at further efforts towards achieving absolute reductions in the use of energy and materials to a sustainable level (absolute decoupling).
