Learning Event No.4: Highlights. ARDD2012 Rio

Highlights from: A sustainable way to reach thegreen economy:

• Please give up to three bullets on key messages from your Learning Event1. Humanity has often faced prophesies of economic catastrophe. And one common theme that has run through all of them is the depletion of our natural resources, an inevitable outcome of the incompatibility between spiraling consumption and the limited supply of goods our planet can offer.2. In the 21st century, the world is therefore facing a four-pronged challenge, which actually represents the four faces of a pyramid that has still to be built: the Pyramid of Environmental, Social, Economic and Financial Sustainability.3. The financial and economic aspects of the problem lie at the heart of every decision-making process regarding the allocation of resources. And in order to redirect investments on the scale required to underpin a new low- carbon economy that is environmentally balanced and also socially fairer and more equitable, a new financial system is needed that is compatible with the existing one, but also quantitatively and qualitatively conducive with the objectives it sets out to achieve.

Please give bullets on evidence of the impact ofyour case example – ideally this should bequantitative data1. There is no need to undertake an economic catheterism to diagnose the size of the clot the American publicdebt represents. Fifteen trillion dollars is such a large sum that, if left to fester, it will surely kill. But if it weregradually put into circulation, it could certainly help any ailing planet recover. Nonetheless, in the economicdebate it is unusual to see an objective analysis of the effect on the global economy of a stagnation of resourceson this scale.2. US public debt securities constitute the main form of financial investments (thus far deemed to be low risk) inthe worlds savings. However, the sheer size of this debt and the stagnation of these securities as assets held bybanks and investment funds and in the international reserves of most economies ultimately hampers therecirculation of these resources, constituting a clot that drastically reduces the capacity to make productiveinvestments.

3. Money has the strange power to generate income wherever it circulates, and liquidity bottlenecks or areas of high concentration are not the outcome of any ideology. They are mistakes whose roots lie in the design of the actual source of its issue and the architecture of its irrigation channels.4. On the material plane, the currency is the best expression of primordial energy. It has the power to light up wherever it goes, spreading income and prosperity. Just like a beam of light in the middle of a circle, it is propagated out in every direction until it reaches every point on its circumference. 5. Even if we are capable of listing all the dark spots in the social, environmental and economic spheres, there will always be one common element lacking: the middle or the heart of the system. In an economy, this heart is the financial market, from which the energy that permeates everything circulates. The life blood of the financial market is called CURRENCY. A currency must circulate for it to generate income. However liquid the US public debt securities are, they are being stockpiled. They do not circulate. The only income they create is the yield paid by the US Treasury, which only serves to increase the country’s public deficit.

6. Investments in sustainable projects would yield a rate of return that would be added to the yields thatare today earned by the countries that have invested their reserves in US debt securities. In this way, the newcurrency would also be a solution for the problem of America’s excessive indebtedness, since, earning higheryields, these countries would not demand higher interest rates before they acquired future issues. 7. It would be totally ill-advised for the embryo of a new financial market to have an excessively longincubation period extended by drawn-out multilateral talks, as has been the case of its close relation, thecarbon market. In fact, if it mirrors the sluggish progress of the negotiations in the ambit of the United NationsFramework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), this new system, if it embarks on the tortuous path ofmultilateral negotiations, will only start to operate fully towards the end of the century. 8. If a new financial market is to have a normal incubation period and develop in an environment that islargely protected from serious oscillations, it must, since its conception, have healthy genes and be sturdy, andabove all it must be capable of projecting positive expectations within a time frame that is compatible with theurgency of today’s economic problems.

9. While the first world may be paralyzed and bemused in the face of the US and European crises, emergingcountries constitute a niche of prosperity, and amongst them Brazil, South Africa and India are showing signsof a growing awareness of the need to make a joint effort to fight poverty and environmental degradation. Oneexample of this is the constitution of IBSA, an investment fund specializing in financing sustainable projects inpoor countries. 10. The idea behind IBSA is perfectly attuned with the ideas being put forward in this book. The only thingit lacks is more robustness, which, in economic terms, means finding a way of capitalizing it that does notcompromise the foreign currency reserves of its three shareholder countries. As US public debt securities arestill considered low-risk assets, they constitute the ideal backing for the issue of a new international currency.As with Bretton Woods, when gold was the standard for the dollars used to reconstruct Europe after theSecond World War, a new currency backed by US public debt securities could also be issued for reconstructionafter the war of poverty and pollution.

• Please give up to three bullets on messages on what is needed to take your case to scale e.g. What policy change is required ? – What investment is needed ?– and who needs to take action?1. A gradual but significant transformation of the worlds energy matrix;2. The reforestation of the arc of deforestation in the Amazon with productive forests;3. Sophisticated REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) projects that would also help preserve the planet’s biomass and sources of fresh water;

•4. The accelerated development of fish farming and intensive livestock farming (forms of producing protein that could have a big impact on reducing hunger and pressure on native forests);5. The progressive eradication of poverty and hunger in Africa, India and other regions afflicted by poverty by using advanced technology in production processes, especially processes for agriculture and food security.

Learning Event No.4: Highlights. ARDD2012 Rio

by CCAFS | CGIAR program - Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security on Jun 18, 2012

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Learning Event No.4: Highlights. ARDD2012 Rio Presentation Transcript