In a little more than one generation—by the time your grade-schoolers will be seeing their own kids off to school—our planet will be home to 9 billion people. This will create an unprecedented demand for water, food, and energy–and stress the supporting infrastructure required for life in the 21st century. How are we to meet this demand while respecting planetary boundaries? And importantly, how will we pay for it?
A recent publication by the Green Growth Action Alliance (G2A2), aims to provide some answers. WRI and others provided guidance, case studies, research, and data to the publication, The Green Investment Report: The ways and means to unlock private finance for green growth. The findings were discussed widely at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
Under current OECD growth projections, the world will need to invest $5 trillion annually until 2020 in the water, agriculture, telecommunications, power, transport, buildings, industrial, and forestry sectors. However, solely delivering this investment to maintain “business-as-usual” economic growth will not lead the world onto a sustainable growth path. We need to find ways to “green” our growth to cope with resource scarcity and alleviate risks from climate change and environmental degradation. Greening this investment will require a mix of appropriate policies and capital. The lion’s share will need to come from the private sector, given the scale required.
The “Green Investment Report” estimates that an additional $700 billion will be needed annually to green the business-as-usual investment in the global economy. This is a large sum, but relatively insignificant compared to the cost of inaction as negative environmental impacts increasingly take their economic toll.
