"The future is already here, just not very evenly distributed"
William Gibson

What does it mean for something to be Green? The word itself comes from Germanic roots and it means “grass” and “grow”. Throughout the world, it is most commonly associated with springtime, growth and nature. In contrast, we think of an economy as something harsh and sterile that serves only to mash together resources, capital and labour. Why would it then make sense to talk about a “Green Economy”?

In essence, a Green Economy is one that melds issues of human wellbeing and or ecosystem resilience with the standard economic considerations of resource efficiency, waste management and waste prevention. As such, the idea of the Green Economy is a way of thinking about economic issues, rather than an end in itself. Indeed, looking into the medium to long-term future, two very different trajectories emerge. The first trajectory sees economic growth continuing into the future while human impact on the environment diminishes to a globally-sustainable level. A second, more challenging trajectory sees both economic growth and environmental loadings dropping to stable levels in the longer term.

The idea of balance between nature and humanity reaches back to the earliest roots of the green movement. In its earliest incarnations around the 1870-80s as the “Back to Nature” movement, it was a response to the rapacious character of economic activity of the time. Astonishingly, its elaboration echoes hauntingly into the political arguments we sometimes hear today. It argued that there was a “fundamental opposition of nature to civilization, which the assumption of all virtue, repose, dignity are on the side of ‘Nature’ spelled with a capital and referred to as feminine against the ugliness, squalor and confusion of civilization for which the pronoun was simply ‘it’” i.

In terms of the WikiCurve, the issue jumped quickly from Discovery through Theory Development and then to Popular Interest on the wings of the ‘literary gentlemen’ of the time, and then to Public Debate with some early responses spreading both in America and in Australia with the creation of the first national parks such as Yellowstone in 1872 and Australia’s Royal National Park in 1879. It would then be almost a century, and two world wars, before the issue took on a more complex and broader political context with the publication of seminal texts such as Kenneth Boulding’s “The Economics of the coming Spaceship Earth” in 1966, E.EF Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered” in 1973, and Herman Daly’s “Steady State Economy” in 1977. It is worth noting that these books were published at a time when the first climate models showed a rise of several degrees for doubled atmospheric CO2 levels (1975) and when the broader scientific opinion converged on global warming, not cooling, as the chief climate risk for the next century 1.

Over the following two decades, as the ideological battles between Western Capitalism and Socialist Totalitarianism waxed and waned, many scientists, economists and commentators sought to bring ideas behind what would become the Green Economy into broader debate. These included the meeting in 1982 in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden that would lead to the establishment of the Ecological Economics Journal. Even more significant, was the creation of the International Society for Ecological Economics in1989 and of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 1995 This latter body is a CEO-led grouping of forward-thinking companies seeking to galvanise the global business community to create a sustainable future for business, society and the environment. Its purpose presaged the introduction of the concept of the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ by John Elkington in 1994. Elkington’s idea was that organisations, both governmental and private, should use an accounting framework that valued not just financial sustainability, but also social and environmental (or ecological) sustainability. This concept is not without its difficulties, however, chief among them that accounting is an organisational-level concept, while sustainability is a systems-level (or even planetary-level) concept. This may be at the heart of why after twenty-five years of advocacy; the promise of John Elkington’s thinking remains unfulfilled ii.

The following two decades saw a number of global attempts to bring the issue into WikiCurve’s Policy and Regulation level as part of the global response to climate change, through the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which also opened for signatures that same year. By 1995 signatories realised that the emission reduction provisions in the Convention were inadequate, and two years later adopted legally binding commitments as part of the Kyoto Protocol.
Progress towards a Green Economy has been difficult. This is best articulated by the OECD, which in 2011 launched an ambitions strategy titles “Towards Green Growth”. It its four-year review “Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress”, published in August 2015 the organisation notes that while most countries are adopting green growth policies, overall progress is “uneven”, particularly because of failures to link economic and environmental priorities. This is particularly noticeable in countries that are commodity and energy resource exporters, such as Canada and Australia.

As we move closer towards a post-Kyoto world and the warnings regarding climate change become ever more dire, we are left with the strong impression that, in terms of the WikiCurve, we have entered the Mainstream Acceptance stage, but that the policy responses to the question of how to develop a Green Economy will remain diverse. Furthermore, the eventual shape of the Green Economy is tightly bound to the issue of global population, specifically on the question of whether the Green Economy remains on a globally-sustainable growth path, or trends towards balance and equilibrium.

It is now clear that, by its very nature, to move towards a Green Economy will require policy responses that are planetary in scope but targeted in their implementation. Following the RIO+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) was founded as an international treaty-based organisation with the aim of accelerating the transition towards a new model of growth – green growth – that was founded on principles of social inclusivity and environmental sustainability. Its programs focus on developing and emerging countries and are intended to assist target countries to develop, finance and implement policies that help them to move towards achieving a Green Economy.

The WikiCurve suggests that the concept of the Green Economy has now reached the Public Acceptance stage in significant parts of the global society. However, difficult questions about values, sanctions and national economic practices still remain before the curve can climb further on its maturation path. These include:

• Is poverty remediation today a valid argument for national economic policies that work against the establishment of a Green Economy tomorrow?
• What sanctions could/should be applied to developed economies that pursue export policies that hinder the development of a Green Economy in the recipient countries?
• How do we bring countries high on the Human Development Index, but which have too-extensive an ecological footprint back within the world’s overall bio-capacity without damaging their social achievements?

1 Timeline for the discovery of global warming (as of Feb 2015) https://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm. Accessed 25 Aug 15
i Smith N. “Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space”. University of Georgia Press, p.22
ii Grey R. “Explainer: What is the Triple Bottom Line” The Conversation 6 Feb 14. https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-the-triple-bottom-line-22798 Accessed 25 Aug 15