A Special Lecture for Participants in the 2011 Model UNFCCC COP

Korea’s Green Growth Policies and Global Climate Change Cooperation

 

A Special Lecture for Participants in the 2011 Model UNFCCC COP

organized by the YTN and the Korea University held in Seoul, Korea,

at Korea University on August 10~12, 2011

 

 

It is a great pleasure for me to have this opportunity to address such a select group of young and high-minded students from countries around the world who commonly share interest in ensuring global cooperation to fight climate change.

 

Delegates!

 

As you are all well aware, a new round of UNFCCC negotiations was launched in Bali in 2007 for the purpose of agreeing on a post-Kyoto climate change regime but failed to be concluded at the COP 15 held in Copenhagen in 2009 as originally scheduled.

 

Fortunately, it regained a forward momentum at COP 16 held in Cancun last year, especially by agreeing on the long-term goal of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-Industrial levels, and to work towards identifying a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050.  It was also agreed that this goal should be considered at COP 17 to be held in Durban in November this year.

 

The Cancun Agreements also took note of the quantified economy-wide emission reduction targets to be implemented by Annex I countries as communicated by them under the Copenhagen Accord.  The Cancun Agreements also took note of nationally appropriate mitigation actions to be implemented by non-Annex I countries as communicated by them under the Copenhagen Accord.

 

In April this year, however, speaking at the first UN climate change negotiating session of the year, held in Bangkok, Ms. Christina Figueres, UNFCCC Executive Secretary,  pointed out that the sum of those national promises so far equals only around 60% of what science requires by 2020 to stay below the agreed two degrees goal.  She then called on governments to purposely address shortfalls in climate action in order to put the world on a climate-safe path.  This raises the serious question of whether governments, especially those of major emitter countries, in fact have the will to do so.

 

As Executive Secretary Figueres pointed out, there is,among others, also unresolved the fundamental issue of the future of the Kyoto Protocol which almost all industrialized countries agreed internationally-binding commitments to reduce emissions over time.  The first period of these commitments under the protocol expires at the end of 2012, that is, next year.  However, a number of current Annex I countries have declared their intention not to renew their participation in the Protocol beyond the current commitment period while the non-Annex I countries insist on the extension of the Protocol.

 

 

Should this issue remain unresolved at COP 17 in Durban,  there is the risk that the Parties to FCCC may let the Kyoto Protocol expire at their 18^th Conference to be held somewhere in Asia in late 2012 without any successor regime in sight.  This would cause a serious setback to the global effort to realize the 2 degrees Centigrade goal.  What an alarming scenario!

 

In this vein, Ms. Figueresurged governments “to push ahead to complete the concrete work they agreed in Cancun, and to chart a way forward that will ensure renewed success at COP 17 to be held in Durban.”

 

But indications so far are that governments taken together may not be ready to resolve a number of thorny issues, including those two issues mentioned above, at COP 17.  So, it seems that, encumbered by the current stalemate, the Parties to the FCCC should undertake a fundamental re-examination of the whole logic that underlies the UNFCCC process. 

 

In fact, the government of Korea believes that there is a serious in the UNFCCC approach to international cooperation to fight climate change.  It is that it relies on a top-down approach to global cooperation on climate change in the sense that it proposes to negotiate a global order and impose this on the respective governments.

 

The problem is that Parties to FCCC are expected to negotiate how much of their respective GHG emissions to be reduced while they believe that such reductions will be costly to their own economies. The top-down approach does not address this problem.  Accordingly, and naturally, many countries, including big emitters, in particular, are motivated to minimize their own respective offers of such reduction while urging others to maximize theirs.  As a result, they are engaged in what I may call the ‘You First’ approach to GHG reduction negotiation, which, in turn, tends to stalemate the negotiation itself.

 

The Korean government sees such a flaw in the UNFCCC approach to climate change negotiation as a major impediment to progress with negotiation.  But it does not argue for a major modification of the approach.  Instead, the Korean government believes that national governments can be persuaded to take a ‘Me First’ approach instead of the You First approach, or at least, to soften the latter approach, when the top down approach embodied in the FCCC negotiation process is supplemented with a bottom-up approach to climate change cooperation.

 

Under this approach, individual countries are persuaded to shift from their traditional ‘brown growth’ economic paradigm to a new economic paradigm which the Korean government has proposed to call the ‘green growth’ paradigm.   A definitive aspect of green growth is that such growth is ultimately driven by commitment for GHG emission reduction.

 

Such a shift from brown growth to green growth, when many countries around the world are engaged in it, would encourage those countries to go Me First, rather than You First, in climate change negotiation.  And this will hopefully facilitate global cooperation on climate change through the consequent bottom-up process. 

 

The Korean government is currently engaged in green growth which it has adopted as a long-term development strategy for the economy.  Furthermore, it has launched an international campaign to propagate it as a global development agenda.  It has also proposed a Me First approach to climate change negotiation at COP 15 held in Copenhagen.

 

I now would like to turn to a discussion of those Korean approaches. 

 

So, Delegates!

 

You have come to a country which has re-launched its economy on a new development paradigm called green growth.

 

This began more or less like a big bang with a speech by President Lee Myung-bak, on August 15, 2008, on the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the modern Republic of Korea in which he declared that green growth would be Korea’s new development vision for the next 60 years.

 

In this speech, President Lee said, “I want to put forward ‘low carbon, green growth’ as the core of Korea’s new vision.  Green growth refers to sustainable growth which helps fight greenhouse gas emission and environmental pollution.”  He further said, “It is also a new national development paradigm that creates new growth engines and jobs with green technology and clean energy”.

 

I invite your special attention to this statement of President Lee’s.  Contrary to the common belief, President Lee saw new business, employment, and economic opportunities in efforts to fight climate change and further preserve and enhance the environment.   I think that the unspoken key word here is innovation.

 

Our belief in Korea is that it is innovation which renders green growth a workable new paradigm for economic growth.

 

Since this declaration of green growth as Korea’s new development strategy, a green wave has been spreading in this country.  I would like to highlight several such phenomena.

 

At the level of both the central government and the local governments, policy programs are being introduced to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions as well as the environmental pollution, including the harm to the country’s eco system, from cities, to buildings, transportation, agriculture, as well as businesses and homes.

 

Various NGOs have been rallying in support of those moves by the central and local governments.

 

A national program of measures for adaptation to climate change, such as to anomalous weather phenomena and their harmful consequences, have been launched.

 

To help meet all those objectives effectively, and with as little cost as possible, scientists and entrepreneurs are investing in the development and deployment of new and renewable energy technologies, not to mention, a broad range of environmental technologies.  The government is introducing various measures to encourage them to do so.

 

The central government and the local governments have been at the forefront of all these efforts.  Their combined total investment in green growth has been scheduled to amount to 2% of the national budget each year during 2009~2013.  The central government has jump-started this green investment drive by launching the so-called Green New Deal consisting of 9 major, and 27 related minor, projects in a proactive response to the global economic crisis, during 2009~2012.

 

The market has begun to respond to all these policies and projects rather vigorously.  New green businesses are emerging on a broad front.

The total amount of investment in green businesses by 30 big business groups was 15.1 TW (or 13.7 B$) during 2008~2010, with the annual rate of increase of 75%.  It is projected to increase by 48% to 22.4 TW (or 20.2 B$) during 2011~2013.

 

The investment by big business groups is concentrated on the solar photovoltaic and wind power equipment, LED, fuel cell, batteries, hybrid and electric cars, among others

 

Encouraged by supportive measures from the government, small and medium enterprises have been participating in this green investment boom.  Many of them, mostly in new and renewable energy equipment, are emerging as ‘hidden champions’ in the global market.

As an undertaker of public projects, the central government has been concentrating on infrastructure.

 

The largest such undertaking has been a rather huge construction project to restore the four major rivers which run through most of the South Korean landscape.  There has never been any serious attempt to manage the river system in the Korean history while the rivers have been growing increasingly shallow due to accumulation of the earth and sludge.

 

Just about to be completed by the end of this year, the purpose of this project is to restore and enlarge the capacity of the Korean river system to cope with serious floods as well as to serve as the reservoir of water resources in preparation for the increasing vicissitude of the weather due to climate change.

 

The value of this project has just been proven irrevocably during last one month or so of many torrential rainfalls by the fact that the enhanced rivers have seemed to haveworked to prevent any serious water-related disasters along those four major rivers that used to be caused in the past under similar circumstances.

 

The government has also established and launched a 5-Year Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change for the 2011~2015 period.  This consists more broadly of the measures to address the impact of climate change on people’s health, food security, water, maritime and coastal safety, climate disasters, forest, and the ecological system.

The local governments are drawing up adaptive measures of their own in order to supplement the central government’s plan.

 

The transportation sector accounts for more than 20% of Korea’s greenhouse gas emission.  The government has announced a blueprint for green transportation.

 

The thrust of this blueprint is to induce a massive modal shift of passengers and cargos from road to rails, by remodeling the entire existing national rail system into a high speed rail network by 2020 while completing the urban mass rapid transit systems.

 

The existing automobiles and buses will be gradually replaced with hybrid or electric cars and buses.  More than forty percent of the automobiles on the streetsin Seoul will be those green cars by 2020.  Already, some of the buses on the street in Seoul are electric buses.  I am driving a hybrid car myself.

 

The government has launched an ambitious project to create a national smart grid by 2030.  By combining the power grid with IT, the smart grid will allow the electricity users to optimize their consumption of electricity, including renewable energies.

 

A smart grid test bed has just been completed on the Jeju Island off the peninsula’s southern coast and will be gradually expanded to the national scale.

Early in June, the government unveiled a new roadmap for green buildings and green homes.

 

To cite just one of many local governments’ green growth initiatives, the Special Autonomy Province of Jeju Island with a population of half a million is preparing to announce in early July its plan to become a carbon-free zone by 2020.

 

Delegates!

 

All these and more green developments have been brought about by the green growth policy initiatives launched by the Korean government under President Lee’s new development vision for the country.

 

The Presidential Committee on Green Growth was formally launched in February 2009 in order to follow up on the President’s new vision for the country, and specifically to elaborate and implement the green growth strategy in a systematic way.

 

The Presidential Committee has prepared and released a National Green Growth Strategy consisting of three components – pursuit of low carbon society and energy security, creating new engines for growth, and enhancement of quality of life and contribution to global green growth, all three geared to the ultimate vision of Korea as a model green nation which realizes a virtuous harmony of the economy with the environment.

 

The Strategy proposes to transform Korea’s entire system of resources and energy utilization practices over the whole range of sectors from power generation to industries, agriculture, forestry, land and maritime management, life styles, houses and buildings, transportation, and so on.

 

Korea has also legislated the Framework Act on Low Carbon Green Growth at the end of 2009.  This Act authorizes the government to intervene in the market in any way that is justified by market failures, with regulations, taxes and incentives.

 

Of a special significance is that the government adopted and announced the country’s medium-term greenhouse emission reduction target of minus 30% by 2020 relative to the BAU scenario.  30% is the maximum of the reduction range recommended to the developing countries by the IPCC.

This reduction target was presented to the international community in Copenhagen as a voluntary target.  But it has been made legally binding domestically under the Framework Act.

 

I would like to point out here that the emission reduction target and other environmental goals are serving as the key driver of all those green investments and projects in Korea, including the business efforts to ‘green’ the existing industries and further to shift to high-value-added services.  Korean experiences thus far thus demonstrate the importance of the will and actions to reduce greenhouse gas and protect the environment as the ultimate driver of green innovation.

 

Delegates!

We in Korea believe that the belief in green growth nurtures and enhances commitment to contribute to the fight against climate change and to protection of the environment which consists of the natural assets like the air, climate, water, the land, the forest and the ocean.

 

We also believe that green growth is more effectively pursued by all when countries join in the green growth strategy.  We further believe that all countries, and the developing countries, in particular, should join in the pursuit of this strategy for the strong, sustainable, and balanced growth of their economies, thus leapfrogging the brown growth path which the advanced industrial economies have developed along. 

 

The brown growth development model is collapsing in this era of energy, climate, ecological and food crises.

 

For all these reasons, Korea would like to make green growth a shared strategy for the world.   Korea has been undertaking a number of international initiatives for this purpose.

 

First, Korea launched an East Asia Climate Partnership initiative in 2008.  Since then, Korea has been expanding this program, helping the developing countries in Asia invest in water resources management, low carbon cities, low carbon power generation, forestry, and waste management.

 

Second, Korea has been increasing its ODA commitment, with focus on green projects.

Third, in May 2009, the OECD launched a 2-year study project on green growth strategy at the proposal of the Korean government.  The purpose of the project was to undertake research on the green growth strategy and to develop policy guidelines on this strategy, and more ultimately to promote broad application of green growth strategy and policy guidelines  to the member and non-member countries of the OECD.  The OECD concluded this project, and released its report, in late May this year.  Korea has been a key contributor to the project, and will act! ively participate in the effort to globalize the strategy, especially for the developing countries.

 

Fourth, in July last year, the Korean government launched a new international center called the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in Seoul.  GGGI will study green growth policies as well as offer advisory services to the developing countries on their green growth policies and projects. It is under the management of an international board of directors consisting of eminent former politicians and experts from both the developing and the developed countries. 

 

GGGI is establishing regional offices around the world and creating an international network of research partners.

 

Lastly, the Korean government has been trying to contribute to the overcoming of the deadlock of the UNFCCC COP negotiations. In 2009, in Copenhagen, President Lee unilaterally announced Korea’s voluntary medium-term GHG emission reduction target for 2020, in what he called a Me First spirit, urging others to do the same.

Also, in Copenhagen, Korea proposed the registration of the voluntary commitments of the non-Annex I countries in International Registry for the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation.  Those commitments would be legally binding but the developing countries which have registered them may be asked to bind then domestically.

 

The Korean government believes that the NAMA Registry which has been made open to all  non-Annex I countries, ensuring the transparency of those countries’ voluntary commitments in this way, may be used to provide a breakthrough over how to bring the developing and the developed countries to a deal on their respective mitigation commitments.

 

Now, the Korean government would like to make one more effort, this time, of crucial importance, to contribute to an early and successful conclusion of the Bali negotiation round on the post-Kyoto climate change regime. 

 

I have already argued that COP18 to be held somewhere in Asia next year is expected to be very crucial in ensuring future international cooperation on climate change.  Every possible effort should be made not to let the Kyoto regime expire without its successor agreement in view, if not, in place.

 

The Korean government successfully chaired the G20 Summit in Seoul in November last year.  In particular, it has successfully persuaded the developed country governments to agree to inclusion of the development issues on the agenda for the summit.  Furthermore, it has successfully brokered an agreement to adopt two important declarations on developing cooperation, that is, the Seoul Consensus on Development Cooperation, and the Multi-Year Action Plan for Development.

 

The Korean government is bidding to host COP18 in order to try its capability to broker another agreement between the developing countries and the developed ones on how to share the responsibility to mitigate global climate change.  Korea believes that, given its track record with the Seoul G20 Summit as its Chair, as well as its commitment to a global green growth strategy, it is in a better position than any other country in Asia to play such a constructive role at COP18 and bring a successful conclusion to the COP negotiations if and when it is asked to host, and chair, the COP.

 

In these ways, Korea would like to construct a global architecture for green growth and has launched an international campaign.  Korea hopes that such campaign will gather momentum so as to persuade many enough countries to adopt green growth strategy and go Me First on GHG emission reduction commitment at UNFCCC negotiations in support of that strategy. 

It is in this spirit that on behalf of Korea’s Presidential Committee on Green Growth, I ask you to support the Korean bid to host COP18.

 

Student delegates!

 

In closing, I would like to remind you that Korea’s green growth campaign at home and abroad, as well as its effort to contribute to a successful conclusion of the Bali round of climate change negotiations, is more for the benefit of your own generation, than for my own, older generation.  So, I invite you to join in these green growth campaigns and efforts, by practicing green life personally, and urging your own friends, relatives, communities, and governments, to go green, in order to save our earth, civilization, and shared prosperity. 

 

We should all get united under the banner of low carbon, green growth strategy.

 

Thank you for your attention.