Bringing about a green economy is about radical resource efficiency, green jobs, clean technologies, and enabling frameworks for more sustainable consumption and production.
GRID-Arendal highlight inspiring examples from everyday life, whilst addressing economic activity based on social, natural, and financial capital. It is not one or the other, but it is about finding an integrated and balanced way to work with all three.
Natural capital supplies a stream of benefits, without which human life would cease to exist. These benefits flow as long as the ecosystem is carefully nurtured and kept intact. Like a business, living from income and reinvesting in the capital makes sense.
Ecological limits are rapidly converting “economic growth” into “uneconomic growth” - that is, throughput growth that increases costs by more than it increases benefits, thus making us poorer not richer. A green economy fosters a more long-term effective economic activity, not just bigger in short terms.
“The larger system is the biosphere and the subsystem is the economy. The economy is geared for growth, whereas the parent system doesn’t grow. It remains the same size. So as the economy grows, it encroaches upon the biosphere, and this is its fundamental cost.”
- Prof. Herman Daly, former senior economist at the World Bank