Green Economy:
★ A Green Economy can be thought of as an alternative vision for growth and development; one that can generate growth and improvements in people’s lives in ways consistent with sustainable development. A Green Economy promotes a triple bottom line: sustaining and advancing economic, environmental and social well-being.
★ The prevailing economic growth model is focused on increasing GDP above all other goals. While this system has improved incomes and reduced poverty for hundreds of millions, it comes with significant and potentially irreversible social, environmental and economic costs. Poverty persists for as many as two and a half billion people, and the natural wealth of the planet is rapidly being drawn down. In a recent global assessment, approximately 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services were found to be degraded or used unsustainably. The gap between the rich and poor is also increasing – between 1990 and 2005, income inequality (measured by the gap between the highest and lowest income earners) rose in more than two thirds of countries.
★ The persistence of poverty and degradation of the environment can be traced to a series of market and institutional failures that make the prevailing economic model far less effective than it otherwise would be in advancing sustainable development goals.
★ A Green Economy attempts to remedy these problems through a variety of institutional reforms and regulatory, tax, and expenditure-based economic policies and tools.
2. Take economic policy seriously:
3. Following Natural Flows:
The economy moves like a proverbial sailboat in the wind of natural processes by flowing not only with solar, renewable and "negawatt" energy, but also with natural hydrological cycles, with regional vegetation and food webs, and with local materials. As society becomes more ecological, political and economic boundaries tend to coincide with ecosystem boundaries. That is, it becomes bioregional.
4. Waste Equals Food:
In nature there is no waste, as every process output is an input for some other process means that outputs and by-products are nutritious and non-toxic enough to be food for something.else.
5. Reduce, reuse and recycle (R3):
The three essential components of environmentally-responsible consumer behavior. The concept behind the first R, reduce, is that you should limit the number of purchases, The concept behind the second R, reuse, is that you should reuse items as much as possible before replacing them, The concept behind the third R, recycle, is that you should ensure that items or their components are put to some new purpose as much as possible
6. Appropriate Scale:
This does not simply mean "small is beautiful", but that every regenerative activity has its most appropriate scale of operation. Even the smallest activities have larger impacts, however, and truly ecological activity "integrates design across multiple scales", reflecting influence of larger on smaller and smaller on larger (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 1996).
7. Diversity:
In a world of constant flux, health and stability seem to depend on diversity. This applies to all levels (diversity of species, of ecosystems, of regions), and to social as well as ecological organization.
8.Cyclic Use of Renewable Resources:
People should use renewable energy because non-renewable energy resources threaten the environment and cause pollution. Greenhouse gases, which are the production of burning fossil fuels, trap the sun’s heat and lead to global warming. Consequently, extreme weather conditions, such as floods, heat waves, and droughts, could arise out of this increasing global warming.
★ The prevailing economic growth model is focused on increasing GDP above all other goals. While this system has improved incomes and reduced poverty for hundreds of millions, it comes with significant and potentially irreversible social, environmental and economic costs. Poverty persists for as many as two and a half billion people, and the natural wealth of the planet is rapidly being drawn down. In a recent global assessment, approximately 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services were found to be degraded or used unsustainably. The gap between the rich and poor is also increasing – between 1990 and 2005, income inequality (measured by the gap between the highest and lowest income earners) rose in more than two thirds of countries.
★ The persistence of poverty and degradation of the environment can be traced to a series of market and institutional failures that make the prevailing economic model far less effective than it otherwise would be in advancing sustainable development goals.
★ A Green Economy attempts to remedy these problems through a variety of institutional reforms and regulatory, tax, and expenditure-based economic policies and tools.
Principles that cover key dimensions of a green economy:
1. The Primacy of Use-value, Intrinsic Value & Quality:
This is the fundamental principle of the green economy as a service economy, focused on end-use, or human and environment needs. Matter is a means to the end of satisfying real need, and can be radically conserved.
2. Take economic policy seriously:
A transition to a green economy needs to involve fundamental changes to both macro-economic and micro-economic conditions and institutions. Business as usual with respect to economic policy is not a viable alternative to achieve sustainable development. A central challenge is not only to think creatively about economic policy, but also to engage international economic institutions and make environmental considerations central to global economic decision-making.
3. Following Natural Flows:
The economy moves like a proverbial sailboat in the wind of natural processes by flowing not only with solar, renewable and "negawatt" energy, but also with natural hydrological cycles, with regional vegetation and food webs, and with local materials. As society becomes more ecological, political and economic boundaries tend to coincide with ecosystem boundaries. That is, it becomes bioregional.
4. Waste Equals Food:
In nature there is no waste, as every process output is an input for some other process means that outputs and by-products are nutritious and non-toxic enough to be food for something.else.
5. Reduce, reuse and recycle (R3):
The three essential components of environmentally-responsible consumer behavior. The concept behind the first R, reduce, is that you should limit the number of purchases, The concept behind the second R, reuse, is that you should reuse items as much as possible before replacing them, The concept behind the third R, recycle, is that you should ensure that items or their components are put to some new purpose as much as possible
6. Appropriate Scale:
This does not simply mean "small is beautiful", but that every regenerative activity has its most appropriate scale of operation. Even the smallest activities have larger impacts, however, and truly ecological activity "integrates design across multiple scales", reflecting influence of larger on smaller and smaller on larger (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 1996).
7. Diversity:
In a world of constant flux, health and stability seem to depend on diversity. This applies to all levels (diversity of species, of ecosystems, of regions), and to social as well as ecological organization.
8.Cyclic Use of Renewable Resources:
People should use renewable energy because non-renewable energy resources threaten the environment and cause pollution. Greenhouse gases, which are the production of burning fossil fuels, trap the sun’s heat and lead to global warming. Consequently, extreme weather conditions, such as floods, heat waves, and droughts, could arise out of this increasing global warming.
