This report documents the scale and structure of fossil fuel exploration subsidies in the G20 countries. The evidence points to a publicly financed bailout for carbon-intensive companies, and support for uneconomic investments that could drive the planet far beyond the internationally agreed target of limiting global temperature increases to no more than 2ºC. It finds that, by providing subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, the G20 countries are creating a ‘triple-lose’ scenario. They are directing large volumes of finance into high-carbon assets that cannot be exploited without catastrophic climate effects. They are diverting investment from economic low-carbon alternatives such as solar, wind and hydro-power. And they are undermining the prospects for an ambitious climate deal in 2015.
The analysis in this report focuses on selected production-consumption systems, which link environmental, social and economic systems across the world - generating earnings, supporting ways of living, and meeting consumer demands - and also account for much of humanity's burden on the environment. production and consumption are addressed together because they are highly interdependent. Only by adopting an integrated perspective is it possible to get a full understanding of these systems: the incentives that structure them, the functions they perform, the ways system elements interact, the impacts they generate, and the opportunities to reconfigure them.
The New Zealand Green Growth Research Trust (NZGGRT) commissioned this report to support its thinking on how to grasp important opportunities that would improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders. These are opportunities to enhance New Zealand’s economic prosperity while raising environmental quality that might otherwise be missed through lack of action, leadership or understanding. The report investigates the possible opportunities for New Zealand that could arise from a global shift to green growth, and identifies 21 valuable, feasible actions that New Zealand could take to help realise these opportunities. The report focuses on six important sectors across the trade-focused and the domestic economy. The analysis reveals green growth opportunities in each sector that have both direct environmental benefits as well as important co-benefits such as higher productivity, lower energy bills and fewer health risks.
Green economy has become one of the most fashionable terms in global environmental public policy discussions and forums. Despite this popularity, and its being selected as one of the organizing themes of the United Nations Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, June 2012, its prospects as an effective mobilization tool for global environmental sustainability scholarship and practice remain unclear. A major reason for this is that much like its precursor concepts such as environmental sustainability and sustainable development, green economy is a woolly concept, which lends itself to many interpretations. Hence, rather than resolve long-standing controversies, green economy merely reinvigorates existing debates over the visions, actors and policies best suited to secure a more sustainable future for all. In this review article, the authors aim to fill an important gap in scholarship by suggesting various ways in which green economy may be organized and synthesized as a concept, and especially in terms of its relationship with the idea of social and environmental justice.