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Source: Reuters
The credit crunch is distracting from a shift to green policies that have big but often overlooked economic benefits, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme said on Monday.
Achim Steiner called on governments to do more to set higher value on the natural world, ranging from wetlands that purify water to forest parks that store billions of tons of greenhouse gases in their vegetation.
"The credit crisis is a very real but regrettable distraction" from efforts to protect the planet from threats such as climate change, he told Reuters during an October 5-14 International Union for Conservation of Nature congress.
He said governments should push ahead with a shift to a greener economy, including in the energy sector to break dependence on fossil fuels that U.N. Climate Panel says are culprits for most global warming.
"An energy transition is occurring for many different reasons. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted," he said.
"You are not talking about niches, pilot projects any more," he said of green technologies such as solar or wind power. "There is real money flowing."
"Germany has more jobs in the clean technology sector than in the automotive sector. There are more people working worldwide in renewables than the oil and gas sector," he said.
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