The Canadian Earth Summit Coalition expects that the UN Conference on Sustainable Development will lead to A green economies’ roadmap that sets out clear, mutually-agreed upon sustainable development goals and targets (to complement and build on the Millennium Development Goals) accompanied by a timeline to undertake the great global transition to sustainability.
The Canadian Earth Summit Coalition puts forth the following specific remarks on the green economy:
-The concept of the “green economy” should not replace “sustainable development”; although greening economies plays an important role in achieving sustainable development, current definitions of a green economy ignore or gloss over the central questions of fairness, social justice and the rights of both humans and non-humans.
-The overarching goal of the green economy should be defined in the context of sustainable patterns of consumption and production that are built on a fair and socially just economic system that meets the needs of all people and respects animal welfare within the ecological carrying capacity of the planet.
A green economy calls us to:
-Make sustainability a political priority
-Think in terms of systems, and act on the high leverage points (structures and mindsets)
-Develop a bold, new economic vision that plans for the long term and provides for future
Generations
-Live within safe ecological margins, and redefine our relationship to the natural world and to
each other
-Address unjust disparities of wealth and income
-Prioritize meeting the needs of the world’s poor (in both high- and low-income countries) while simultaneously reducing the unsustainable Ecological Footprint of the world’s rich along a global framework of ‘contraction and convergence’
-Redefine prosperity in more than simply economic and consumptive terms, and adopt new measures of progress and wellbeing
-Recognize that a country cannot “go at it alone”, and that reciprocity and cooperation is a key pillar of global wellbeing
Read the Canadian Earth Summit Coalition Input for Zero Draft compilation document from here
I always thought "green" and "sustainable" were terms for the same thing, but apparently that is not the case. Am I understanding correctly that "green" is more comprehensive?
ReplyDelete