Chris Jordan Photos. Water and Korea GG. Carbon War Room. RIO+20 Green Economy Debates. By Daniela Ramsauer, March 1, 2012 Discussions around the concept of Green Economy heighten as the 20th anniversary of the Rio Summit in June draws near. Rio+20 is coming at critical time when multiple crises confronting the world requires more urgent responses than ever before. Chances of stepping off the development path that celebrates competition, destructive extraction and unsustainably high consumption patterns continue to dim. It appears to some of us that the Green Economy concept is nothing more than a business concept where the Rio+20 conference will be more or less a Business Summit. We fear that discussions and resolutions will be about how to secure profit for corporations who will learn to speak the “green language” while commodifying nature and the natural services provided by the environment. It may indeed be said that the green economy will end up being nothing other than green capitalism and market environmentalism.
Source. UNEP meets civic groups. - A full and frank discussion between members of civil society attending the People’s Summit and Achim Steiner, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director took place in down-town Rio. The focus of the often heated and engaging debate centred around views by some of the speakers and members of the audience that a transition towards a Green Economy is a pro-capitalist and an anti-poor agenda that will lead to the ‘commodization’ of nature. Edwin Vasquez , President of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin, called on governments to finally and properly recognize the land and other rights of indigenous peoples.
“Every day and every year these have been infringed by states, governments and companies. Sustainable development has been disappointing and now it is called Green Economy,” he said. “This is not the change in the model we are looking for,” he said. “My first point is that the message maker (UNEP) cannot control how the message is read. People’s Summit at Rio+20. RIO debates.
Critique. Inclusive green growth or extractive greenwashed decay? Patrick Bond The debate over the Green Economy rages on next month in Rio de Janeiro, at the International Society for Ecological Economics meetings, the Cupulo dos Povos alternative people’s summit, and the UN’s Rio+20 Earth Summit. Proponents and critics of ‘green growth’ capitalism will butt heads using narratives about valuations of nature and the efficacy of markets. Boiling down a complex argument from her book Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice, University of Sydney-based political ecologist Ariel Salleh observes how a triple externalization of costs ‘takes the form of an extraction of surpluses, both economic and thermodynamic: 1) a social debt to inadequately paid workers; 2) an embodied debt to women family caregivers; and 3) an ecological debt drawn on nature at large.’
At minimum, addressing these problems requires full-fledged re-accounting to toss out the fatally-flawed GDP indicator, and to internalize environment and society in the ways we assess costs and benefits. CDM's Cannot Deliver in Africa. Schumpeter: Green growth. Sustainability Champions. The report Redefining the Future of Growth: The New Sustainability Champions, prepared with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), highlights innovative business practices from companies originating and operating in emerging markets. By focusing on a group of 16 exemplary companies called the New Sustainability Champions, the report shows how those businesses create unconventional and profitable solutions that positively impact economic growth and enhance overall sustainability in their regions. Taking into account criteria covering sustainability, innovation, scalability, geography and size, the World Economic Forum and BCG analysed over 1,000 businesses in the preparation of this report and identified 16 fast-growth companies that share a unique mindset and set of practices.
The report contains valuable insights that can help business leaders better balance economic growth with responsible stewardship of Earth’s resources. UMICORE Case Study. By Nick Meynen UMICORE is elected as the ‘most sustainable company in the world’. A Canadian magazine that claims to defend ‘clean capitalism’ has put the Belgian company at number 1 in its global top 100 of ‘sustainable’ businesses. But UMICORE has not fully come to terms with its past in Hoboken, a 30.000+ community that is part of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2004, Umicore signed an historic agreement with the Flemish government for 77 million euro, mainly to replace heavily contaminated soil, for example in gardens of hundreds of people around their factory in Hoboken. In the FP 7 project CEECEC (Civil Society Engagement with Ecological Economics) we worked with Lea Sebastien on a study to calculate the local ecological debt or environmental liability of a single industrial plant: Umicore in Hoboken.
UMICORE gave little credibility to the ‘post-normal science’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz) and the ‘popular epidemiology’ methods applied. EJOLT Glossary. RIO tcktck. Environmental Values Forthcoming. Green Economy, Red Herring. Green Growth Unravelled - Resource Governance - Heinrich Böll Foundation. See comments for denials. UNEP Critique. In all its hundreds of pages, the UNEP report "Towards a Green Economy" (2011) presents many possibilities for altering patterns of production, industry, agriculture, the organisation of cities, construction systems, transport. It also brings together a wide range of rich experiences in alternative technology, renewable energy and new regulatory regimes that exist in different parts of the world. This shows that there are many processes around the world today seeking alternatives to the destructive logic of the hegemonic models of production and consumption.
This should be recognised as an important contribution made by the report to debates on alternatives. Nevertheless, the gaps in the report are much more notable. Even more fundamental is the complete absence of any consideration of the significance of the extraordinarily unequal power relations that exist in today’s world, and the interests that are at play in the operation of this global system. UNCTAD. GreeD Economy & Control. Book Wals. We live in turbulent times, our world is changing at accelerating speed. Information is everywhere, but wisdom appears in short supply when trying to address key inter-related challenges of our time such as; runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the on-going homogenization of culture, and rising inequity. Living in such times has implications for education and learning. This book explores the possibilities of designing and facilitating learning-based change and transitions towards sustainability.
In 31 chapters contributors from across the world discuss (re)emerging forms of learning that not only assist in breaking down unsustainable routines, forms of governance, production and consumption, but also can help create ones that are more sustainable. The book has been divided into three parts: re-orienting science and society, re-connecting people and planet and re-imagining education and learning. Order by chapter Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. Talk Wals. No Green Economy | A bottom-up international campaign against the commodification and financialization of Nature. Green Growth or No Growth | Blogpost. Daniel Ben Amo on growth scepticism. PLynch: In praise of reason.