The report was launched at the beginning of China’s Twelfth Five-year Period (2011-2015). After revising the measurement system of the Green Development Index 2010, the report measures the green development level of 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions as well as 34 large and medium-sized cities in China. The city-based measurement is first introduced into the report. Both the province and the city Green Development Index systems consist of three parts: i) the green degree of economic growth, ii) the carrying potential of natural resources and environment, and iii) the support degree of government policies. The three parts reflect the production and resource usage efficiency, the situation of environment and resources protection and pollutants emission, and government’s related investment and management respectively.
The report also summarizes the achievements in China’s green development during the Eleventh Five-year Period (2006-2010). The China Green Development Index Report 2011 provides a comprehensive evaluation of green economy developments in China and its importance to China’s switch in economic development model.
The Global Green Economy Index (GGEI) provides a ranking of how 60 countries and 70 cities perform in the global green economy and how expert practitioners perceive this performance. The GGEI performance index uses quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure how well each country performs on four key dimensions: leadership & climate change, efficiency sectors, markets & investment and environment & natural capital. Then, the GGEI perception survey collects assessments from expert practitioners on these same four dimensions.
This report presents an effort by Statistics Netherlands, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Sustainability Consortium to collaborate and examine alignment of their respective national, company, and product level sustainable development metrics. The report argues that continued alignment is undoubtedly desirable and makes several suggestions for achieving it. It predicts that general movement towards alignment will accelerate in the short term, in line with the new post-2015 sustainable development process, but recognises that completion of a truly shared sustainable development metric must be viewed as a long term goal.
The authors highlight the huge enthusiasm for measuring, while emphasizing the importance of recognising the direct trade-off between ‘materiality’ and ‘comparability’ in a given measurement framework. They also find that products and companies are much more heterogeneous than nations. The report concludes that alignment and harmonisation between framework levels is crucial, but there is a limit.
- The relevance and effectiveness of green growth initiatives in South Asia;
- The current status of regional and national green growth strategies;
- Compatibility with traditional and emerging country growth models;
- Evidence on what works and what does not, and the knowledge gap;
- The challenges and opportunities that green growth poses for poverty reduction in the region; and
- The key institutions carrying out research on green growth in the region.