CASTRIES, St Lucia — Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) defines green growth as a development approach that seeks to deliver economic growth that is both environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive. Green growth is central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in targets to provide opportunities for economic growth that are low-carbon and climate-resilient, prevent or remediate pollution, maintain healthy and productive ecosystems, and create green jobs, reduce poverty, and enhance social inclusion. If properly designed and implemented, policies and investments that promote green growth can support the achievement of SDGs. Measurement of green growth performance using innovative tools aligned to or benchmarked against the SDG targets will help guide countries in their green growth transition.
Co-organized by GGGI and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Commission, this session aims to showcase innovative tools for assessing performance in green growth and SDGs, and discuss the significance of these tools for policymaking and how to enhance uptake of their results in policy decisions.
Presenters with expertise on both green growth and SDGs will introduce and discuss various methods and approaches that they have developed to assess performance in transitioning to green growth and achieving SDG targets. The first round of presentations will illustrate how frameworks for global green growth indices can be applied to develop scenarios for different sectors (Presentation I) and assess green economy performance at the subnational level (Presentation II) using innovative tools. The application of green growth frameworks in models and scenarios is often constrained by the availability of data.
The second round of presentations will illustrate approaches to improve environment databases, including those for the SDGs (Presentation III) and use other forms of databases (i.e., input-output) to support innovative models and scenario analysis.
Each round of presentations will be followed by a panel discussion to understand, among others, the policy relevance of the tools and potential challenges in their applications/uptakes. The session’s panel members who represent a wide range of expertise include:
- Dr Jose Pineda, Consultant to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Senior Advisor at DevTech Systems, Inc., Arlington, Virginia, United States
- Ingvild Solvang, Deputy Director, Head of Climate Action and Inclusive Development Unit, Global Green Growth Institute, Seoul, South Korea
- Dr János Abonyi, Department of Process Engineering, University of Pannonia Budapest, Hungary
- Dr Ali Kerem Saysel, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.
