Carlo Carraro, President of the University of Venice, and member of the GGKP Advisory Committee, discusses the importance of knowledge generation in the field of green growth and provides his reflections on the GGKP's second Annual Conference held earlier this year in Paris. A full summary of the Annual Conference, prepared by the organizers, can be downloaded here.
Green growth is more than an economic concept or a political project. It is also a framework that enables us to think about all the economic choices that we observe every day. It is a way of understanding economic development in accordance with new standards, which considers natural resources, the environment and issues such as poverty and social exclusion.
Knowledge is power, the tool for growth. It is the starting point on which we can build future economic development and future policy decisions through a long-term vision, which today is rarely applied.
The pursuit of growth seen through knowledge is the purpose of the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP), which aims to expand efforts to identify and address the main shortcomings of the theoretical and practical path to green growth. It also aims to help countries in the design and implementation of appropriate policies.
The second GGKP Annual Conference was held on the 4th and 5th of April, 2013 in Paris and brought together representatives of the private sector, the research community and policy makers from around the world. The purpose of the conference was to promote a dialogue on these issues in order to identify the measures and instruments that governments can take to ensure that the economic benefits of sustainable growth are distributed throughout the global economy as well as to contribute to the achievement of the developmental objectives of individual countries.
The two central themes of the Conference were identified on the basis of the research priorities that emerged during the inauguration of the GGKP conference (January 2012): Greening global value chains and Measuring and reporting for green growth.
Greening global value chains
The value chain is the interconnection of business activities that contribute to building competitive advantage. The concept of Global Value Chains refers to the entire process of the production of goods, from the extraction of raw materials to the finished product, which has been progressively subdivided into different phases that can be carried out anywhere in the world today, as long as necessary conditions exist, such as skills and resources at competitive costs.
Recently, the market has seen a growing presence of supply and demand for green products, defined by the European Commission as “those that use resources more efficiently and cause less environmental damage along their life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials, to their production, distribution, use, up to the end of life (including reuse, recycling and recovery) compared to other similar products of the same category”.
The attention to environmental sustainability is opening up opportunities to improve performance and integration among the global value chains. Greening the global value chains involves identifying the policy measures, which will provide appropriate incentives to make value chains more environmentally sustainable.
Measuring and reporting for green growth
A company can communicate its environmental performances to its stakeholders through measurement systems and reporting environmental impacts of production activities.
Article 47 of the outcome document of the Rio +20 conference states, “We acknowledge the importance of corporate sustainability reporting, and encourage companies, where appropriate, especially publicly listed and large companies, to consider integrating sustainability information into their reporting cycle. We encourage industry, interested governments and relevant stakeholders, with the support of the United Nations system, as appropriate, to develop models for best practice and facilitate action for the integration of sustainability reporting, taking into account experiences from already existing frameworks and paying particular attention to the needs of developing countries (…).”
Even in the context of reporting on sustainability, it is important that companies and policymakers work together closely to define the parameters of the development of appropriate policies to achieve the objectives set by green growth.
During the conference, GGGI (Global Green Growth Institute), OECD, UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) and the World Bank launched the joint report "Moving Towards a Common Approach on Green Growth Indicators". The document highlights the need for international cooperation in defining measuring instruments, offers a common basis for developing appropriate indicators, and highlights the progress achieved in the policies of both developed countries and developing countries.
More information
- Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council: Building the Single Market for Green Products - Facilitating better information on the environmental performance of products and organizations - COM(2013) 196 final - Brussels, 9 April 2013
- Article 47, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly 66/288, The Future we want, Rio+20September2012
- “Moving Towards a Common Approach on Green Growth Indicators”, Green Growth Knowledge Platform Scoping Paper, April 2013