Korea's Green Growth and the New Expanison Paradigm

At the recent G20 meetings in Seoul, Korea put green on the the business summit agenda. The world wide recession propelled the global economy in a new direction, forcing many countries around the world to follow a new green expansion paradigm.

For sustainable and balanced development, governments are increasingly aware of the fact that green growth is the future of economic development.

In an interview with The Korea Times, Young Soo-gil, chairman of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth said, “The agenda for the summit will be crowded with other issues of pressing priorities to allow much discussion on green growth. The Korean G20 Summit Preparatory Committee is aiming for mainstream advancement on the agenda for the summit, and so ‘development’ will be a prominent theme.”

“This will hopefully allow President Lee Myung-bak to bring the attention of the G20 Leaders to the value of the theme of green growth as a catalyst for global cooperation in many development dimensions,” he added.

Young said that Korea is seeking to take a lead in the global green growth drive by sharing its knowledge and experience.

“Korea would like to help those developing countries harmonize their growth aspirations with the environmental ones by sharing its green growth tool kits and experiences, as well as by working together to undertake specific mitigation and adaptation projects in cost-effective and growth-friendly ways in individual countries,” he said.

“Korea is also willing to take leadership in the international efforts to help build physical infrastructures in the developing countries in climate-change resilient ways. For these purposes, Korea is to make green growth partnership a leading component of its increased ODA (Official Development Assistance) commitment as a new member of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC),” he added.

As part of this effort, Korea has launched the East Asia Climate Partnership (EACP). Most significantly, on July 16 of this year, the Korean government launched a Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) based in Seoul.

“Korea hopes to develop GGGI into an international treaty-based institution by 2012 with support from other countries which share belief in the value of green growth as well as of sharing insights, know-how and experiences on it,” he said.

“The Green Growth Committee also hopes that Korea’s green growth inspirations will play a facilitating role in making a breakthrough over the issue of how to reconcile economic, social and environmental development objectives at the Rio plus 20 Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in 2012,” he added.