With unemployment soaring, bankruptcies climbing, and stock markets vulnerable it may at first glance seem sensible to ditch the fight against climate change and put environmental investments on hold.
This would be an enormous mistake of immediate as well as inter-generational proportions.
Far from burdening an already over-stressed, over-stretched global economy these are the very investments needed to get people back to work; to get the order books flowing and to assist in powering economies back to health.
In the past the environment was viewed as a luxury, today it is a necessity. A point grasped by some but by no means by all economic architects yet.
A big slice of US President Barack Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package includes a boost to renewable energy, ‘weatherizing’ a million homes and upgrading the country’s inefficient electricity grid.
It could generate an estimated five million ‘green collar’ jobs, prove a shot in the arm for the construction and engineering industries alongside getting America back into the equally serious business of combating climate change and achieving energy security.
The Republic of Korea, where jobs are being lost for the first time in over five years, has also spotted the green lining to grim economic times.
President Lee Myung-Bak’s government is to invest $38 billion employing people to clean up four major rivers and reduce disaster risks by building embankments and water-treatment facilities.
Other elements of his ‘Green New Deals’ include construction of "eco-friendly" transportation networks such as high-speed railways and hundreds of kilometres of bicycle tracks alongside generating energy from waste methane from refuse tips.
With an eye on both the short and the long term, the package will also invest in developing hybrid vehicle technologies for the car industry.
Similar pro-employment Green New Deal packages have been lined up in China, Japan and in the United Kingdom. They are equally relevant to developing economies such as Kenya or Laos in terms of jobs but also in fighting poverty and creating new livelihood opportunities at a time of increasingly uncertain commodity prices and exports.
In South Africa, the government-backed Working for Water initiative which employs over 30,000 people including women, youth and the disabled has also seen opportunity in crisis.
The country spends around $60 million annually fighting invasive alien plants—trees and shrubs like wattles from abroad that are waging an environmental and economic war against native wildlife, water supplies, important tourism destinations and farmland.
This work is set to expand by harvesting over 40 million tonnes of invasive alien plants as power-station fuel. An estimated 500 MW of electricity equal to two per cent of the country’s electricity needs will be generated along with over 5,000 additional jobs.
So it is clear that some countries are now deliberately viewing environmental investments in infrastructure, energy systems and ecosystems as among the best bets for recovery.
Others may be unsure, about the potential returns from investing in ecosystem services such as forest carbon storage or in renewable energy for the 80 per cent of Africans who have no access to electricity. Others may simply be unaware of how to precisely follow suit.
In early February UNEP convened some of the world’s leading economists at the UN headquarters in New York.
Here a strategy for Global Green New Deal, one that echoes to different national challenges has been fleshed out to assist world leaders and ministers make stimulus packages work on multiple fronts.
Its inspiring recommendations were put before over 100 environment ministers attending UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi a few days later and the response is gathering pace.
The Global Green New Deal, which UNEP launched as a concept in October 2008, is in response to the immediate economic and employment malaise.
Spent wisely however these stimulus packages could trigger quite far reaching and transformational trends: setting the stage for a more sustainable, urgently-needed Green Economy for the 21st century.
The 2.5 to 3 trillions of dollars that have been mobilized to address the current woes, alongside the trillions of investors’ dollars waiting in the wings, represent an opportunity unthinkable only 12 months ago.
An opportunity to steer a more resource efficient and intelligent course that can address the problems of now and also those looming from serious climate change and natural resource scarcity to water shortages and biodiversity loss.
Blindly pumping the current bail-out billions into old industries and exhausted economic models will be throwing good money after bad while mortgaging the future for the next generation-it is they who will pay off our debt and it is our children’s’ jobs which will be at risk if we selfishly care only about our own.
Political leaders must use these windfalls to instead invest in innovation; promote sustainable businesses and new patterns of decent, long lasting employment.
Asked why, at a time of recession, the UK was bothering to invest in wind power and electric cars, Prime Minister Gordon Brown pinned his colours firmly to the Global Green New Deal lifeboat—“the environment, it is part of the solution”.