Green economy – the salvation of Humanity

During the past few years the world has experienced the number of crises from fuel to climate and financial. For last few decades about 60% of ecosystems has degraded, the level of carbon emissions has reached 40%, there is a significant deficiency of water sources, 1 billion of people suffers from hunger, another billion suffers from the consequences of over-nutrition and related diseases, every fourth person in developing countries lives below poverty line, two billions of people live for less than $2 per day.
In 2008, responding to financial and economic crisis, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) proclaimed switching into Green economy that should help to restore the world economy and to increase the employment among population, and, at the same time, to accelerate struggle with climate change, degradation of environment and poverty. UNEP calls for maximal attention to five major directions:
- Energy efficient constructions;
- Switch to renewable energy sources, including wind power, sun energy, geothermic energy and biomass;
- Sustainable development of transport;
- Ecological infrastructure of planet, including fresh waters, forests, soils and coral reefs;
- Agriculture development, including organic production.

The transition to green economy can be considered as a way to sustainable development. The sustainable development involves straightening of its three interrelated factors: environment protection, social and economic development. At the same time, green economy and sustainable production, and consumption are both sides of one coin. They both have same goals of promoting sustainable development that includes both micro and macro-economic aspects of governmental policy, regulation of economical activity and social behavior. Sustainable production and consumption are basically aimed to raise the effectiveness of sources in the process of their production and consumption.

Switching into “green economy” can be evaluated by few indices that can conventionally be divided into following groups:
- Economical indices: part of investments or production and employment in the sectors that correspond to “sustainable” standards like “green” GDP;
- Ecological indices: effective use of sources, intensiveness of pollution on sectorial and global levels, for example – using of energy (relatively to GDP) or water use (relatively to GDP);
- Summary indices of progress and prosperity.

UNEP and other international organizations that support the initiative, propose to invest up to 2% of world GDP (that is about $1,3trillion per year) into ecologization of the economy. Nowadays about the same money is directed to subsidizing to “unsustainable” using of sources in such sectors as fuel production, agriculture, fishing, etc.
First of all, the investments are to be channeled into agriculture, because no other economy sector is connected with such great amount of green economy aspects. It is the major source of income for the majority of the world population, provides it with food and occupies about 40% of territories. Besides 70% of drinking water are used in agriculture and it is one of the greatest sources of carbon emissions. Modern agriculture significantly harms the environment and leads to erosion, water logging and salinization of soil, contamination of soils and water. Ecologization of agricultural economy sector demands efforts both for raising productivity as well as for improvement of ecological and economical effectiveness of source using in the process of production, recycling and consuming (chain approach). While applying of ecosystem approach for agriculture, forestry and fishing industry, this sector might provide more ecological products and services than any other, improving food and conditions for living for the majority of population, and thus, to allow real switch to green economy. For example, every year 12 millions of hectares (area of Greece or Nepal) are lost because of desertification; the area of the same size annually can provide 20 millions tons of grain and foodstuff to feed more than six million of people.
Another important step should be redemption to traditional methods of agriculture in mountainous areas. After all, mountains occupy 24% of Earth land surface and are inhabited by 12% of population, other 14% live in close proximity to the mountains. Returning to traditional methods of mountain areas agriculture gives greater feedback in the struggle against poverty than any other economy sector. This ecosystem approach can be switching to organic agriculture. It can be considered at the level of the mainstream of the policy of all agriculture as a key strategy.