• Thursday, June 09, 2011
• Inter Press Service

As G20 ministers met here Tuesday to discuss nuclear safety, another meeting has been taking place 6,000km away - to examine green business growth.

In Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, environmentalists, policy-makers and businesspeople kicked off the second international Green Business Forum in Africa, a four-day conference that looks at opportunities for sustainable economic development.

Both meetings come at a crucial time. The industrialised world is rethinking its policies on nuclear energy, following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, while many African leaders have realised that the future of their continent is green.

The conference in Brazzaville aims to respond to 'current concerns' and to 'sensitise' the public to the importance of sustainable business, conservation of the forests in the Congo Basin and the fight for food security, according to Sylvestre Didier Mavuenzela, president of Congo’s Pointe-Noire Chamber of Commerce, who spoke in Paris ahead of the meeting.

'For investors from central Africa, Europe, Asia and America, the forum represents an occasion to benefit from the real opportunities offered by eco-business in the sub-region, on one hand, and emphasises the need for the development and the improvement of conditions for the people who live there, on the other hand,' he said.

Mavuenzela told journalists that the organisers (including Congo’s Ministry of Sustainable Development and the Environment) were aware of the boom in green business. 'If central Africa doesn’t get involved and move forward in this sector, it won’t be able to benefit from the advantages of green business that would allow it to reduce its economic vulnerability,' he said.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said that 'governments must look to the green economy to find new sources of growth and jobs' and that countries should 'put in place policies that tap into the innovation, investment and entrepreneurship driving the shift towards a greener economy.'

In a report published late last month titled 'Towards Green Growth', the organisation outlined a practical framework for governments to boost economic growth and protect the environment.

'Many countries in Africa have strong wealth in natural assets, and there is the need to have specific policies to develop these assets in a sustainable way and this is now happening in an organised fashion,' Nathalie Girouard of the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy team told IPS.

'Green growth makes economic as well as environmental sense,' the OECD has stated. 'In natural resource sectors alone, commercial opportunities related to investments in environmental sustainability could run into trillions of dollars by 2050.'

In the run-up to Rio+20 - the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 — various countries across Africa and other regions have already come to that understanding, with new investments being made and many partnerships being formed, according to experts.

In Rwanda’s 'Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy', for instance, environment is 'identified as a key cross-cutting issue', Girouard told IPS.

'In the area of green growth, Rwanda of course has a different need than Germany or Canada, so the idea is to tailor policies to different stages of development,' she said. Rwanda has also identified various sectors with strong 'environmental and natural resource content' as critical to achieving its development objectives, the OECD says.

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

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