Post-Carbon Future and Post-2015 Development Agenda

A Keynote Speech to be presented at the Conference on Green

Growth and Sustainable Development Goals: A Development Agenda for Post-2015 held in Seoul, at Walker-Hill Hotel, on 4

November 2013, organized by the Asia-Europe Environment Forum (ENVForum)

By

Soogil Young, Ph.D.

Visiting Professor, KDI School of Public Policy and Management;

Co-chair & Director, SDSN-Korea Forum

Former Chairman(2010~2012), Presidential Committee on Green Growth, Korea

Topics for Speech

The work of SDSN on the post-2015 agenda

SDSN‟s priority work agenda

Deep de-carbonization pathways

The significance of green growth

Sustainable Development as a framework to address those challenges

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SDSN Launched

The 15-year MDG period will be completed at the end of 2015.

Rio+20 Summit called for new SDGs, including the eradication of poverty and hunger.

The Summit launched an intergovernmental Open Working Group on the SDGs

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also launched the UN SDSN to mobilize global scientific and technological knowledge on the challenges of SD, including the design and implementation of the post-2015 global SD agenda.

• Appointed as its Director, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs launched its Leadership Council, a body comprising scientific and operational expertise on the broad range of SD challenges.

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SDSN’s ‘Action Agenda for Sustainable Development’

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www.unsdsn.org

SDSN’s ‘Five Shifts’ since the Millennium Declaration

On June 6, the SDSN LC submitted a report “An Action Agenda for SD” to SG Ban.

SDSN notes that there have been 5 shifts since 2000 to change the world profoundly:

• The feasibility of ending extreme poverty in all its forms

• A drastically higher human impact on the physical Earth

• Rapid technology change

• Increasing inequality

• A growing diffusion and complexity of governance

World needs an operational SD framework that can mobilize all key actors in every country to move away from BAU. Such a framework and the SDGs should identify the main objectives and strategies needed to make this shift.

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Rio+20’s Architecture for a Global Framework for Cooperation

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Four Normative Concepts as Basis for Sustainable Development Path

A SD path builds on a global framework for cooperation to address the 4 dimensions of SD and should be based on 4 related normative concepts:

• The right to development for every county

• Human rights and social inclusion

• Convergence of living standards across countries

• Shared responsibilities and opportunities

A shared framework for SD must mobilize the world around a limited number of priorities and associated goals, probably not more than ten.

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SDSN LC’s Ten Priority Challenges

1) End Extreme Poverty Including Hunger

2) Achieve Development within Planetary Boundaries

3) Ensure Effective Learning for All Children and Youth for Life and

Livelihood

4) Achieve Gender Equality, Social Inclusion, and Human Rights for All

5) Achieve Health and Wellbeing at All Ages

6) Improve Agriculture Systems and Raise Rural Prosperity

7) Empower Inclusive, Productive, and Resilient Cities

8) Curb Human-Induced Climate Change and Ensure Sustainable Energy

9) Secure Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity, and Ensure Good

Management of Water and Other Natural Resources

10) Transform Governance for Sustainable Development

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Framing SDGs

The set of SD challenges form a plausible basis for framing the SDGs to trigger practical solutions that governments, businesses, and civil society can pursue with high priority.

Well-crafted SDGs should:

• help guide the public‟s understanding of complex SD challenges

• inspire public and private action

• promote integrated thinking, &

• foster accountability.

They should be complementary to the tools of international law by providing a shared normative framework.

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Framing SDGs(Cont’d)

Children should learn the SDGs to help them understand the challenges they will confront as adults.

SDGs will mobilize governments and the international system to strengthen measurement and monitoring for SD.

The SDGs should be pursued in combination.

If the world mobilizes around a shared agenda for SD and ambitious time-bound SDGs, then rapid, positive changes on the required scale is feasible thanks to rising incomes and unprecedented S&T progress.

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SDSN’s 12 Thematic Groups (TGs) for Solutions Initiatives

TG 1. Macroeconomics, Population Dynamics, and Planetary Boundaries

TG 2. Reducing Poverty and Building Peace in Fragile Regions

TG 3. Challenges of Social Inclusion: Gender, Inequalities, and Human Rights

TG 4. Early Childhood Development, Education, Transition to Work

TG 5. Health for All

TG 6. Low-Carbon Energy and Sustainable Industry

TG 7. Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems

TG 8. Forests, Oceans, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Services

TG 9. Sustainable Cities: Inclusive, Resilient, and Connected

TG10. Good Governance of Extractive and Land Resources

TG11. Global Governance and Norms for Sustainable Development

TG12. Redefining the Role of Business for Sustainable Development

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The Challenge of Climate Change and Clean Energy for All

Despite the UNFCCC, the world is dangerously off course in mitigating human-induced CC. Progress in de-carbonizing the world‟s energy systems remains frustratingly slow. The situation is far more perilous today.

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Critical Steps Necessary for Deep Reduction in Emissions

Major gains in energy efficiency, including denser urban layouts

Intelligent grids and almost carbon-free electricity generation by 2050 using RE, nuclear, and CCS

Electrification of vehicle transport and remaining energy needs for heating and cooling of buildings

Advanced biofuels for a small but significant share of transport

Reduced deforestation and emission reduction in agriculture (livestock, rice cultivation, carbon from land-use change, and nitrous oxide)

Reduction of certain industrial gases with high warming potentials (HFCs, etc.)

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Policy Challenges of Deep Emissions Reduction

The required transformation of the energy, industrial, and agricultural systems will represent one of the greatest technical, organizational, and financing challenges that humanity has faced.

A complex and interconnected set of policies will be needed to drive this transformation: R&D of new technologies, support for technology transfer to developing countries, adequate market pricing of energy, including an end to fossil-fuel subsidies, and a social price on carbon (such as a carbon tax).

Developed countries will have to follow through on their promise to help finance the transformation of energy systems in low-income countries, including a flow of at least $100 billion per year by 2020.

The de-carbonization of countries‟ economies should not deflect attention from the urgent need to provide access to clean energy, including electricity and cooking fuels to the rural and urban poor.

Some severe climate change is unavoidable even under the most optimistic scenarios. This presents challenges of resilience, CC adaptation, and disaster risk management

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SDSN’s Deep De-carbonization Pathways Project

SDSN Leadership Council held the Inception Meeting of its DDPP in Seoul on October 12~13, hosted by SDSN-Korea as a coordinated international modeling effort in which each country analyzes what it must to achieve an emissions trajectory consistent with the 2⁰C target.

To develop DD Pathways for each of 12 largest emitters (EU counted as one) over the years to 2050 which will: • Provide information that decision-makers want are useful for COP21;

• Model the infrastructure and technology path and cost for each country to achieve its target;

• Make mitigation options and costs transparent across countries;

• Identify priority areas for technology R&D and commercialization; and

• Build a foundation for on-going joint analysis of national mitigation pathways.

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SDSN’s Deep De-carbonization Pathways Project (Cont’d)

The project is ideally positioned to contribute to a successful outcome of the COP21 in Paris:

• The SDSN was launched by UN SG Ban and will contribute to the preparation of the 2014 UN CC Summit as well as the French Presidency of the COP21;

• All national modeling teams taking part in the project are working closely with their governments to prepare their country position for the COP21;

• While also enabling the respective governments to debate their policy options domestically with all stakeholders with the model as frameworks, and also to formulate their long-term green growth strategies in order to harness the energy technology R&D, Demonstration and Commercialization to reap the benefits of green growth.

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Korea’s Green Growth: Looking Back

Korean government launched green growth as a national strategy on August 15, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Republic.

The then-President Lee Myung-bak declared in his address marking the anniversary that „low carbon, green growth‟ would now be a pillar of Korea‟s new vision, as well as the country‟s new development paradigm which seeks sustainable economic growth by reducing greenhouse gas emission and environmental pollution.

President Lee elaborated this, saying that key to green growth as such would be green technologies and clean energies, in other words, green innovation.

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Korean Green Growth in Transition

The Korean government has pursued green growth in a comprehensive, systematic, and vigorous way since then.

Those efforts began with the establishment of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth. President Lee‟s term expired on February 24 this year. So did that of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth at the end of last year.

Korea is now in transition from Green Growth(GG) 1.0 to Green Growth(GG) 2.0, to use my own language.

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Looking back on GG 1.0: Accomplishments

A comprehensive institutional framework for green growth has been established

A systematic approach to greenhouse gas emission mitigation has been launched.

A systematic approach to increasing the supply of clean energies has been launched

Investment in the development of green technologies and industries has been accelerated

Various measures taken by sector under a comprehensive plan for 2011~2015

Another accomplishment of GG 1.0 consisted of international GG policy initiatives: • the establishment of GGGI

• winning the bid to host the Green Climate Fund (GCF), etc.

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Criticisms Also Abound, Calling for the SD Framework

The public and business are broadly supportive of GG 1.0, but the civil society, and the environmental groups and the media, in particular, have been, by and large, critical of those policies.

To name just one of them, the government took the position that green growth is the operational manifestation of „sustainable development‟ and never had a serious discussion of sustainable development as a developmental paradigm.

In order for sustainability of green growth policies themselves, they should embedded in the larger framework of the sustainable development paradigm, to ensure that the benefits of green growth are seen to be shared widely within the society.

SDSN-Korea Forum, to serve as a bottom-up architecture for SD, is my answer to this need.

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Korea’s Creative Economy as a Platform for SDSN’s Solutions Initiatives

SDSNK will help pursue President Park Geun-hye‟s Creative

Economy Strategy of seeking:

• “the convergence of social science knowledge and S&T including ICT, in order to solve environmental, social welfare and public safety threats to people‟s wellbeing, and even to promote social and structural reforms” (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning)

• Green technologies + structural reforms → environmental solutions &

green growth → SD

• Appropriate application of new technologies with ICT + social innovation

→ social solutions & inclusive growth → SD

SDSNK will serve as an open platform for international

crowdsourcing of knowledge, technologies, creativity and new

business models in search of creative Solution Initiatives for SD.

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