Page 19 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Mehmet Emin Birpınar - Ersin Gürtepe

Two years after the report titled “Our Common Future”, also known as
the Bruntland Report in short, the concept of “green economy/growth” was
discussed again in the report titled “Green Economy Plan” prepared by the
London Environmental Economics Center (LEEC) (Pearce, 1989).
The term, green growth, became the main focus of the Ministerial
Conference organized by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and the Pacific, “UNESCAP” in short, in 2005, and it was more addressed
by the world’s agenda with the Global Economic Crisis in 2008, and it was
included in the growth plans of countries such as South Korea and China in
the following years (UNESCAP, 2005).

Green Growth

As emphasized in the report titled “Towards a Green Economy: Pathways
to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication” published by the UN
Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2011, green growth was considered as an
effective tool for achieving sustainable development rather than an alternative
term to sustainability and was defined as an economic model that reduces
environmental risks while bringing human well-being and social justice to a
better level.
The focus of green growth is generally on energy transformation and
resource efficiency. However, the concept of the blue economy was used to
protect marine and coastal ecosystems, to ensure effective management of
water resources, and to focus on this subject, but in essence, it emerged as
a supporting element to achieve sustainable development by adopting an
integrative approach with the green economy (Mavi Ekonomi Nedir, 2022).
In 2015, many policies dominated by environmental factors were adopted,
and 17 sustainable development goals (UN Development Goals), in other
words, global goals that formed the new road map covering the period
until 2030 (UN, 2030), were determined in the summit held by the UN on
September 25, 2015. In December of the same year, the first action plan for
the circular economy, which is an independent source-based growth method,
was adopted by the European Union (the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan,
2020), and in the following days, the Paris Climate Agreement, which primarily
aimed to keep the global temperature increase below +2.0℃ as much as
possible compared to the pre-industrial period, and to strive for 1.5℃, was
accepted at the 21st Conference of the Parties on Climate Change hosted by
Paris (Conference of the Parties) (COP21), 2015).
On the eve of the actual implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement,
namely, at the end of 2019, the European Union announced, to the world,
the European Green Deal (EGD), which it defined as its new development

4 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate