Keynote Speech at The Luncheon Roundtable on Building a Global Architecture

Building a Global Architecture for Green Growth

Keynote Speech at The Luncheon Roundtable on Building a Global Architecture for Green Growth held in Washington, on June 24, 2011, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Key to green growth is innovation

Green growth (GG) was succinctly defined by President Lee Myung-back of Korea in his speech delivered on August 15, 2008, as follows:

GG seeks sustainable growth by reducing GHG emission and environmental protection.

It is a new development paradigm which creates new growth engines and new jobs from green technologies and clean energies.

The key to sustained green growth is innovation, in fact, a pervasive and continuing process of innovation, both technological and institutional.  This is key to delinking economic growth and environmental degradation.

Commitment to reduce emission drives innovation

The ultimate driver of sustained innovation is the compelling need to reduce GHG emissions, as well as the confidence in an emerging global carbon and pollution market.  This is to say that successful green growth requires sharing of the same strategy by all major economies around the world, as well as a credible global effort to reduce GHG emissions as well as environmental degradation.  Furthermore, globally shared confidence in green growth will foster such global efforts as effective climate change negotiation.

Confidence in green growth will foster shared commitment to reduce emissions

This is to say that successful green growth has to be a shared and coordinated global growth strategy, that the success of this strategy has to be underpinned by an effective international environmental regime, including the climate change regime, and that a globally shared confidence in green growth will foster international cooperation for an effective environmental regime.

The UNFCCC process has been stalling in reaching an agreement on sharing of the responsibility for mitigation. The creation of an effective global architecture for green growth will help facilitate international cooperation to reach such an agreement.

Various pieces of a global architecture for green growth

The OECD has released its Report on Green Growth Strategy in which it argues that creating a global architecture that is conducive to green growth requires enhanced international cooperation in many fields as follows:

-      Strengthening arrangements for managing global public goods, especially biodiversity and climate;

-      ODA for creating enabling conditions for green growth;

-      Increased cooperation in science and technology; and,

-      Increased efforts to boost global trade and investment flows.

Based on this premise, the OECD is launching a long-term agenda to support national and international efforts to achieve greener growth.

The OECD’s Green Growth Strategy reports on a number of international initiatives on green growth:

The UNEP-led Green Economy Initiative which, involving over 20 UN agencies, offer advisory services to governments, under the overarching objective of promoting investment in green(er) sectors;

OECD-UNEP-led work to develop a common set of core indicators for green economy;

-      International initiatives at the sectoral level such as agriculture and energy by organizations such as FAO and IEA, which work with other IOs such as the OECD;

-      World Bank proposal to work with governments, UNEP, OECD, etc., to create a new global knowledge platform on green growth,

-      The GGGI launched by the Korean government aims to support the creation and diffusion of green growth which integrates objectives such as poverty reduction, opportunity creation, and social development with objectives for environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and energy security.  GGGI proposes to play a critical role in the creation of a global architecture conducive to driving green growth. For this, GGGI will h! ave to promote a strong partnership and knowledge-sharing between a diverse group of internal and regional organizations as well as governments. 

In addition, there are also a number of international venues geared to the objective of promoting energy policy cooperation such as IEA, MEF, CEM, APEC Energy Ministerial, the newly launched International Renewable Agency (IRENA), and the Green Technology Center to be created by the Korean government under GGGI, and OPEC.

There is also the Global Green Growth Forum launched by the Denmark in partnership with Korea and the GGGI, for global public-private partnership initiatives in specific sectors.  The GGG Summit will meet for the first time in Copenhagen, in October 2011.

There is also the ‘Green Growth Leaders’, an international NGO for the ‘documentation, demonstration, and communication’, of, or on, best practices of green growth by countries, regions and cities, newly launched in September, 2010, by The Monday Morning, a think tank based in Copenhagen.

The G20 Summit should acknowledge green growth as new paradigm for global growth and development

All these institutions can function more effectively, and may fall into places over time to form a global architecture for green growth, when the G20 Summit, the self-proclaimed ‘premier forum for international economic cooperation’, commits itself to the promotion of global green growth and assumes a leadership role in building the architecture.

Colin Bradford [of CIGI and the Brookings] argue that GG is a possible action agenda for the G20 Leaders who could make the G20 a global steering mechanism capable of providing a vision of the future, and a strategic guidance for the international institutions and global leaders for the 21^st century.

The Seoul G20 Summit, on the one hand, reiterated their commitment to take strong and action-oriented measures and to remain dedicated to UN climate change negotiations.  On the other hand, the G20 committed themselves to support country-led green growth policies, and further to take steps to create, as appropriate, the enabling environments that are conducive to green growth.  The G20 Summit to meet in 2011 and beyond should follow-up on this commitment.

Under the agenda of green growth, the G20 should discuss the global architecture for green growth as a new paradigm for global economic growth, and reframe the global climate change regime to be created as part of this new paradigm.

Green growth as platform for bottom-up approach to new climate negotiations

Based on the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy, the G20 should discuss the feasibility of global green growth, acknowledge key principles for such growth and the crucial importance of pricing carbon and environmental pollution in enabling global green growth.  Furthermore, the G20 should discuss, and possibly agree on the need, as well as how, to develop and take a bottom-up approach to the global climate change regime. 

Such new approach to climate change negotiations will hopefully facilitate progress toward an effective regime, with countries making voluntary and strong commitments in what President Lee Myung-bak of Korea called the ‘Me First’ spirit when he proclaimed Korea’s voluntary medium-term GHG emission reduction target in Copenhagen.