EXPERTS AT UN-BACKED FORUM CALL FOR MAJOR GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT IN GREEN ECONOMY

Participants at a United Nations-backed conference heard calls today for greater investment and robust government policies to allow a shift towards a low-carbon, environmentally friendly economy with "green industry" at its core.

"The current global financial and economic crisis must be used to our advantage to bring about a green energy revolution," said Kandeh K. Yumkella, Director-General of the UN Industrial Development Organization.

"Promoting domestic and international policies that encourage green investment in the next decade should be a major priority for a climate deal to be concluded in Copenhagen," stressed Mr. Yumkella, referring to the UN conference in December aimed at reaching an ambitious new greenhouse gas emission reduction agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Mr. Yumkella was speaking at the opening of the three-day event in Vienna, "Towards an Integrated Energy Agenda Beyond 2020," organized by UNIDO, the Austrian Government, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Global Forum on Sustainable Energy.

The conference is designed to provide a framework to guide the path "towards a low-carbon global green economy powered by green industry," Mr. Yumkella told some 500 government officials, energy and economics experts, and civil society representatives attending the gathering.

Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, said that energy remained the "missing Millennium Development Goal," referring to the set of anti-poverty targets world leaders have pledged to try to achieve by 2015.

Mr. Pachauri said that without an adequate supply of energy to the poor, there could be "no talk about eliminating poverty in the world."

IIASA Director, Detlof von Winterfeldt, stressed that today over 2 billion people were without access to modern energy services, but the Global Energy Assessment (GEA) – the most comprehensive analysis of worldwide energy challenges – suggests energy for everyone is not only achievable but also affordable if the political will exists.

"We are facing a convergence of challenges that require a fundamental transformation of energy systems, 'business-as-usual' solutions are not an option," said Mr. von Winterfeldt.

"The magnitude, pace, and scale of the impact of climate change is greater than predicted even as recently as a couple of years ago – the need to respond to this change is urgent," he said.

Mr. von Winterfeldt said that a tripling of the current $350 billion annual investment in energy, over $100 billion of which is in renewable energy, is needed to meet global energy challenges, adding that an opportunity exists "in the several stimulus packages introduced by many countries in response to the global financial and economic crisis" to find the funding necessary for the shift towards a green economy.
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INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT OFFERS HOPE FOR WORLD’S POOREST ‘BOTTOM BILLION,’ SAYS UN

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT OFFERS HOPE FOR WORLD'S POOREST 'BOTTOM BILLION,' SAYS UN
New York, Feb 23 2009 10:00AM
Sustainable industrial development offers a ray of hope for lifting the world's "bottom billion" – those that live on less than $1 a day – out of poverty, according to a new report released today by the United Nations.

The <"http://www.unido.org/index.php?id=6519&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=326&tx_ttnews[backPid]=6&cHash=72bc073545">Industrial Development Report 2009, launched in London by the UN Industrial Development Organization (<"http://www.unido.org/index.php?id=28"UNIDO) and the lead author, Professor Paul Collier, University of Oxford, is about the opportunities and constraints faced by two groups of countries.

The first are the countries of the "bottom billion" trying to break into global markets for manufactured goods, and the second are the middle-income countries that are striving to move up to more sophisticated manufacturing.

The report identifies a comprehensive set of policies to help both groups break out of poverty and achieve accelerated economic growth and sustainable development through "value-creating" industrialization.

"Our report represents a major conceptual breakthrough on how to tackle global poverty through sustainable industrial development," UNIDO Director-General Kandeh Yumkella <"http://www.unido.org/fileadmin/user_media/News/2009/PR07.pdf">said.

"Bottom Billion nations will be able to arrive at their own, tailor-made solutions to successfully tackle poverty building on the research findings and informative case studies highlighted in this report."

Among the main features of the report include helping reduce global poverty by assisting the poorest countries choose the right products to manufacture for the global market, supporting their efforts to penetrate markets by improving export supply capacities and meeting international quality and safety standards, and identifying polices to accelerate industrial growth.

The report also proposes a new UN category of "least developed manufacturing countries" that could be used by the World Trade Organization with respect to trade preferences for the manufactured exports of low-income countries.

Ten case studies of "dynamic industrial locations" in developing countries are presented in the report to demonstrate that the right policies have made a significant difference in the economic development of these countries.

They show, for instance, that countries that specialized in making an individual component of a whole product, rather than the entire product, grew more rapidly. One example of this is the Chinese city of Qiaotou that built its industry on the production of buttons and now accounts for 65 per cent of the world's production of buttons.

UNIDO added that the report shows once again that poorer countries should not rely on the export of primary commodities to bankroll their development, noting that commodity prices are subject to the volatility of global markets and that such a focus can sometimes discourage the growth of manufacturing.
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For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news