UN calls for dev’t ‘overhaul’ using green technologies

ECONOMIES WORLDWIDE must start using “green” technologies to overhaul production processes in their effort to end poverty while averting the impact of climate change and environmental degradation, said a United Nations (UN) report launched in the Philippines on Monday.

The report, titled: “The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation” and published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), said that about $1.9 trillion per year will be needed for incremental investments in green technologies over the next 40 years.

More than one-half, or $1.1 trillion per year, of the required investments will need to be made in developing countries to help them meet their rapidly increasing food and energy demand.

Such investments should be channeled into a vast area of activities, including clean energy, sustainable farming and forestry techniques, “climate-proofing” infrastructure and reducing nonbiodegradable waste production, the report said.

“If we keep on using the technologies we have today, it will make the planet unlivable,” Manuel F. Montes, chief of UN-DESA’s Development Policy and Analysis Division, said during his presentation of the report yesterday in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. “Therefore, we have to change the current technologies, but at the same time increase these new green technologies for the poor people. Otherwise, they will never overcome their poverty. So, there are two objectives: overcome poverty and the other one is to prevent the adverse effects of climate change.”

“Business as usual is not an option,” lead author Rob Vos wrote in the report. “Even if we stop the global engines of growth now, resource depletion and pollution of our natural environment would continue because of existing production methods and consumption habits.”