•  uxbridge, canada
• Thursday, February 24, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Growth-obsessed markets and governments are pillaging the planet and it must stop, a new U.N. report warns.

The present 'brown' economic system driven by fossil fuel energy and the serial depletion and degradation of natural resources and ecosystems has no future and must be replaced by a green economy, says the Green Economy report launched in Nairobi, Kenya this week by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Investing just two percent of the global economy into a few key sectors will kick-start a transition towards a low- carbon, resource-efficient economy, the report says. With that relatively small investment, many of the world's biggest challenges - climate change, poverty, hunger, jobs, sanitation, energy, food - could be successfully met within two generations.

'The Green Economy provides a vital part of the answer of how to keep humanity's ecological footprint within planetary boundaries,' said Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director. 'It aims to link the environmental imperatives for changing course to economic and social outcomes,' Steiner said.

The report documents that a green, low-carbon, resource- efficient economy will be at least as prosperous as the old brown economy. Better still, a green economy will not have the inherent risks, shocks, scarcities and crises of the resource-depleting, high carbon 'brown' economy, it says.

'A green economy is not about stifling growth and prosperity, it is about reconnecting with what is real wealth; re-investing in rather than just mining natural capital; and favouring the many over the few,' says Pavan Sukhdev, an economist on secondment from Deutsche Bank and head of UNEP's Green Economy Initiative.

The first step on the road to a green economy is to phase out the over 600 billion dollars in global fossil fuel subsidies and 're-direct the more than 20-billion-dollar subsidies [that] perversely reward those involved in unsustainable fisheries', said Sukhdev.

'Misallocation of capital is at the centre of the world's current dilemmas and there are fast actions that can be taken starting literally today,' he said in a statement. The fact that the world spends between one and two percent of global GDP subsidising unsustainable resource use puts a lie to the oft-cited claim that environmental investments come at a cost to economic growth. Industrial agriculture is another example of a heavily subsidised sector that contributes up to one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions and has other massive environmental side effects.

Moreover, industrial agriculture has failed to properly feed up to a billion people a year for decades, says the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). That clear failure and the environmental destruction it has caused is a clarion call for a shift to agro-ecological practices as recommended by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). Those practices have been endorsed by UNEP, the FAO, World Bank and over 50 countries, according to an IFOAM statement made on behalf of farmer organisations.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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