How should we think about the benefits of green growth?

Countries across the world are pursuing green growth pathways, but how do we begin to understand the benefits of green growth? As an author for the report Green Growth in Practice: Lessons from Country Experiences I was part of a team that explored this question on how to identify, analyze and communicate the benefits of green growth. Our work complements a recent report from the World Bank which identifies the benefits of green growth in relation to energy efficiency and clean transportation across countries. The conclusions we came to were: 

Green growth benefits can only be understood fully by defining the mechanisms of economic and social development and how “green” issues fit in. 

Building on the decades of research into sustainable development, green growth puts emphasis on economic growth as a driver of increased welfare and how environmental issues will influence core development outcomes. This ultimately considers how to measure and analyze human welfare (going beyond a narrow focus on GDP), stocks of wealth which underpin long-term wellbeing, and the dynamic drivers of growth. These drivers depend crucially on four things: (i) productivity and efficiency of resource use; (ii) the interaction of natural systems and ecosystem services with development outcomes; (iii) the role of technology and technological progress; (iv) the local context and related endowments (e.g. sector mix, available resources, stage in development).

Green growth involves maximizing synergies between environmental, social, and economic development outcomes and managing the costs, trade-offs and uncertainties.

In Ethiopia, one of the countries we analyzed, poverty eradication is the ultimate aim of development, through a focus on economic growth and structural transformation of the economy. Achieving this will require improving the productivity of agriculture, fostering new industry, enhancing exports, developing infrastructure (energy, roads, IT, transport), managing urbanization and developing private sector investment. This context provides the basis of the countries green growth strategy to achieve these multifaceted aims in a clean, climate resilient and resource efficient way.  The challenge is to identify win-win opportunities between objectives (such as an increase in agricultural productivity that also builds climate resilience), while managing trade-offs (such as agricultural expansion improving rural incomes that could simultaneously increase GHGs).

While integration of a full set of green growth outcomes and benefits is desirable, focusing on a key sub-set is more pragmatic.

Our work showed the sheer scope of different benefits that can be followed from a green growth pathway. Countries need to focus on the most relevant but need to be broad enough for robust policy assessment (e.g. a focus only those related to climate change is generally too narrow).  In Korea’s five year plan of 2009-2013 the country distilled the countries core ambition to achieve a “model green nation” into 10 key agenda points to achieve energy security, find new engines of [green] growth, and display international leadership related to environmental issues. This focus allowed Korea to identify the specific benefits related to its core aims and to track them through time (e.g. a reduction in the reliance in energy import or increased investment in green innovation).

To create a robust assessment of green growth benefits, the high-level vision on green growth must be translated into a set of targets, and subsequently a concrete set of analyzable variables.

Analysis and the related use of analytical tools provide insight into how to achieve the overall green growth vision. One concern is analysis of green growth that only partially reflects the overall vision (e.g. by only narrowly focusing on climate change mitigation) and not accounting for the broader interactions discussed above.

An effective analysis of benefits requires a broad, though not necessarily complex, analytic framework that integrates a number of complementary approaches.

“Bringing the analysis together” is often required to incorporate analysis from different sectors and different benefits. This will normally rely on a variety of tools in an integrated way (e.g. economic analysis linked to climate models) but specific benefits can also be analyzed in isolation. The UK has a multi-layered analytical framework to understand green growth with a strong emphasis on energy and climate change, driven by strong coordinating institutions, a legal basis for action and long history of investment in analysis. To guide policymakers the tools employed do not need to be complex – for example, Ethiopia’s analysis of building climate resilient agriculture relied on a qualitative multi-criteria analysis to prioritize response options.

Engage credible and trusted messengers in presenting tailored, robust, and balanced messages to offer evidence-based arguments for deviating from business as usual.

The challenge for practitioners goes beyond just identification and analysis, but communicating the implications for green growth transitions that involves communicating complexity, tailoring messages to the stakeholders with diverse interests and overcoming vested interests.