In its new report ‘A Greener Budget: Sustaining our Prosperity in a Changing World’, WWF-UK sets out a suite of practical policy recommendations that would help to shift the UK to a sustainable, resource efficient, low-carbon economy.
Drawing on the latest evidence, the report shows how these policy measures are win-wins for the environment and the economy - cutting public sector costs, generating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, creating new market opportunities, improving UK competitiveness, and insulating the economy and businesses from growing risks of resource scarcity and climate change.
Some of these measures will pay off even in the short-term – such as cutting energy and resource use. UK businesses could save £23billion in the space of one year through no-cost or low-cost resource efficiency measures, based on Defra’s own estimates. Other evidence suggests that, over longer time frames, improving the UK’s resource efficiency could generate half a million new jobs by 2030.
This report sets out WWF's perspectives on green economies – why they are needed, what they are, and how to get there – and shows how WWF is working around the world to make the shift to green economies happen.
This Working Paper was commissioned by the UNEP Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Finance System (“the Inquiry”) to feed into its process of analysis and knowledge dissemination. This Working Paper has attempted to do three things: