Mary Robinson delivered a speech at the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) conference in Jeju Island, Republic of Korea entitled ‘Fast Forwarding the Inclusive Green Growth Agenda’.
The conference was part of the events during the Global Green Growth Week which was organised by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) which convened 300+ heads of private and public financial institutions, heads of governments, and project developers from 30+ countries. GGGI is an international multi-stakeholder organisation that promotes inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies.
Mary Robinson commented in her speech that a lot was achieved in 2015 from the perspective of the international system. She pointed to the Financing for Development outcomes, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Change Agreement describing them as “unprecedented” successes.
But Mrs Robinson added that the international agreements of 2015 do not “in themselves change much for the billions of people around the world who are most in need of the commitments set out in the agreements”. “We have fragile foundations and we need to construct far-reaching solutions,” she added.
Mrs Robinson praised the focus of the Global Green Growth Week on the need for inclusive, pro-poor approaches. “Inclusiveness and pro-poor approaches directly address the challenge of fragile foundations and the need to act at pace and scale,” she said, adding that they are “moral imperatives”.
Mrs Robinson said that they are also “hard-headed pre-requisites for building and aligning solutions to eradicate poverty, address inequality and combat climate change”. She gave examples of developing countries “seeking to do something that has never been done before: to develop and grow their economies, sustainably and without greenhouse gas emissions”.
She called on the members of GGGI and its partner institutions to support this leadership “by putting country-led efforts at the centre of your work. Collaborative action, ensuring that all countries and all people are treated fairly and with dignity, is not only the right thing to do – it is the only approach that will work”.
Other speakers at the conference included Carlos Lopes Under Secretary General, The United Nations And Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Naoko Ishii CEO, Global Environment Facility and Dr. Hoesung Lee Chair, Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The GGKP, founded by GGGI, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Bank, is the world’s largest global partnership of organizations and experts committed to collaboratively generating, managing, and sharing green growth knowledge and data to mobilize a sustainable future.