On 17th December 2011, at a specially convened Forum in Beijing to consider the role of ICT in enabling China’s low carbon transition, Wu Jichuan, Director-General of Chinese Institute of Electronics and former Minister of Ministry of Information Industry set out the Chinese game plan in straightforward terms:
“The Chinese government has declared that carbon intensity will be reduced by 40-45% between 2005 and 2020, and the 12th 5-year plan aims to speed up energy efficiency and low carbon development models”.…
The South African Renewables Initiative, you may recall from previous blogs, has been established to:
“Secure financing arrangements enabling a critical mass of renewables development, with the associated economic and climate-related benefits, without incurring unacceptable incremental cost burdens on South Africa.”
Advancing such major national initiatives is no mean feat given perverse market signals, public investment priorities and the host of other factors that constrains us in addressing climate challenges and green growth oppportunities.…
Images of the green economy have gone viral, as a rash of celebratory reports hit the streets. But is this the long-lost key to the secret garden of sustainable development, or yet another impossible maze of words of wish-it-could-
be-but-it-isn’t?
Most visible has been the report, ‘Towards a Green Economy‘ launched last week at the global headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nariobi.…
Global businesses complain that emerging market companies compete unfairly by ignoring social and environmental standards. The accused in turn point to international media bias and argue that sustainability standards are North Atlantic clubs dominated by incumbent businesses using NGOs to protect profitable markets.
At stake is not just the fate of individual companies, but the impact of intensified global competition on our natural environment and communities.…
There is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked. But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. (Book of Isaiah 57:20). Classically, yes, but the street level meaning is more often that ‘something not very good is continuing although you might like to stop‘.
The busy-bee activities of the financial community fit this bill rather well right now.…
History will associate Egypt with the last week of January 2011 irrespective of what comes next in what could be a revolutionary moment in the region that the Chinese call ‘West Asia’. But although Davos was eclipsed by real time political transformation, that does not mean that the mountain chatter was in vain.
Davos 2011 may well not go down in history, but maybe it should.…
How much is WEF worth…well, obviously a lot given who it can draw to the table and what folks pay to get in the door and how the media covers Davos in particular…but how much?
Of course one answer is that it is a public interest organisation and cannot be thought about in that way. Trust in commercial organisations is after all painfully low, as the Edelman Trust Barometer for this year highlights.…
Njongonkulu Ndungane, then Archbishop of Cape Town (following on from Desmond Tutu) turned up on my doorstep in London shortly after the G8 Gleneagles Summit at which US$50 billion in additional commitments of international development assistance were made. His question, put simply, was how best to track the delivery of real money against these commitments. My answer, crudely, was that he was watching the wrong ball, and that the real menace was the arrival in Africa of ‘private finance initiatives’.…
