The world today is facing the worst economic and environmental crises in generations. Hence, we need policies that can stimulate recovery and at the same time reach the sustainability. Many organisations and experts have advocated for a 'green recovery', where the economic crisis should be grasped by governments as an opportunity to reduce carbon dependency and put economies on a path of 'green growth' by using green stimulus packages. Many papers and international reports advocate that the renewable energy sector is an essential step in the path of green recovery. The main aim of this paper is to review a selection of responses to the double crisis by international institutions and to focus on the achievements made in the renewable energy sector.
Copenhagen is widely recognised as a leader in the global green economy. The Copenhagen region accounts for almost 40% of Denmark’s output and has enjoyed long-term stable growth. At a national level, Danish GDP per capita is ranked among the top 10 countries in the world. At the same time, the city’s growth has been delivered while improving environmental performance and transitioning to a low-carbon economy.
This report, which we have produced in partnership with the City of Copenhagen, shows that the city continues to build on its pioneering success. Copenhagen has set itself the ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2025, and the report looks at the challenges and opportunities involved in delivering this transformative agenda.
Featuring a wealth of new research findings, the report shows how Copenhagen’s success is underpinned by a strong combination of the city’s green growth drivers. A number of these drivers rank among the best in Europe and the world, including the city’s compact urban form, strong innovation, high skills and employment, low carbon emissions, and improved environmental quality.
As the world’s most populous region and the most vulnerable to climate risks, Asia is at the centre of a paradigm shift towards low carbon green growth. This shift must incorporate economic and social inclusion, and environmental sustainability in the strategic policy making and implementation. Many developing Asian economies have started this paradigm shift, bringing clean energy access to poor, stressing industrial competitiveness, developing green technology markets, and supporting decent job generation. What has been the initial experience with the paradigm shift? What can policy-makers learn from the experience and further advance the policy agenda? How can an action focussed approach be structured to support the continuing policy learning and advancement?
For policy makers in China, the development of a green economy presents opportunities and challenges not only for the central government, but also for provincial and city governments. This study measures clean energy economy at the city level in China, by counting green jobs and firms through an analytical approach. As shown in this study, green jobs and green firms are distributed unevenly across different regions in China. This study also quantifies provincial clean energy policies in China and finds significant variations in clean energy policy actions. Spatial error model (SEM) analyses indicate that local clean energy policies, along with socio-economic factors such as population, per capita gross domestic product, educational attainment, emissions of sulfur dioxide, and marketization of the regional economy, explain the variation in green economy across cities. Cities located in a province with clean energy policies have 54.3% more green jobs and 61.8% more green businesses, compared with cities located in a province without such policies.
The feasibility of green growth is studied in the context of climate change. As carbon emissions are easier to quantify than many other types of environmental pressure, it will be possible to reach a more definite conclusion about the likelihood of green growth than has been possible in the long-standing historical debate on growth versus the environment. This paper calculates the rate of decoupling between gross domestic product (GDP) and GHG emissions needed to achieve internationally agreed climate targets. Next, eight arguments are considered that together suggest that fast decoupling will be very difficult. Subsequently, this study examines the main lines of research used by proponents of green growth to support their viewpoint, including theoretical arguments, exercises with integrated assessment models, and studies of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. It will be concluded that decoupling as a main or single strategy to combine economic and environmental aims should be judged as taking a very large risk with our common future. To minimize this risk we need to seriously consider reducing our dependence on growth.