UNEP defines a Green Economy as “one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities”.
The United Nations has issued a blueprint for green investment over the next forty years. Calling for a complete change in direction for the market forces that affect the environment, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) suggests that 2 percent of global gross domestic product (about $1.3 trillion) be funneled towards low-carbon, resource-efficent investments.
Investing about one and a quarter per cent of global GDP each year in energy efficiency and renewable energies could cut global primary energy demand by nine per cent in 2020 and close to 40 per cent by 2050:
· Employment levels in the energy sector would be one-fifth higher than under a business as usual scenario as renewable energies take close to 30 per cent of the share of primary global energy demand by mid century.
· Savings on capital and fuel costs in power generation would under a Green Economy scenario, be on average $760 billion a year between 2010 and 2050. The report, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, also highlights enormous opportunities for decoupling waste generation from GDP growth, including in recovery and recycling.
· The Republic of Korea has, through a policy of Extended Producer Responsibility, enforced regulations on products such as batteries and tyres to packaging like glass and paper, triggering a 14 per cent increase in recycling rates and an economic benefit of $1.6 billion.
· Brazil’s recycling already generates returns of $2 billion a year, while avoiding 10 million tones of greenhouse gas emissions; a fully recycling economy there would be worth 0.3 per cent of GDP.
The report, compiled by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), in collaboration with economists and experts worldwide, takes meeting and sustaining the UN’s Millennium Development Goals - ranging from halving the proportion of people in hunger to halving the proportion without access to safe drinking water - as one aim. Bringing down emissions of greenhouse gases to the much safer levels of 450 parts per million by 2050 is another overarching target.
With 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day and with more than two billion people being added to the global population by 2050, it is clear that we must continue to develop and grow our economies. But this development cannot come at the expense of the very life support systems on land, in the oceans or in our atmosphere that sustain our economies, and thus, the lives of each and everyone of us.
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