21 January 2008 | Luca Del Buono

 

Pioneering entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organisations, and governments around the globe are inventing the Earth's first sustainable global economy, according to State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy.

In response to climate change and other environmental problems, these leaders are field-testing a remarkable array of economic innovations that offer surprising and hopeful new opportunities for long-term prosperity, finds the new report from the Worldwatch Institute.

"Once regarded as irrelevant to economic activity, environmental problems are drastically rewriting the rules for business, investors, and consumers, affecting over $100 billion in annual capital flows," say project co-directors Gary Gardner and Thomas Prugh.

The report describes a host of new economic opportunities that are attracting capital. An estimated $52 billion was invested in renewable energy in 2006, up 33 per cent from 2005.

Preliminary estimates indicate that the figure reached $66 billion in 2007.

Carbon trading is growing even more explosively, reaching an estimated $30 billion in 2006, nearly triple the amount traded in 2005.

Some of the most powerful players in today's economy have announced breakthrough environmental initiatives in the past two years, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, McKinsey & Company, and Wal-Mart.

And many large companies are putting their political muscle where their investment capital is: 27 major corporations, including Alcoa, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, General Motors, and Xerox, are actively urging the US Congress to pass legislation regulating greenhouse gas emissions-something that would have been unthinkable two years ago.

Innovative companies are also revolutionising industrial production to meet environmental challenges, while finding that they're saving money: the chemical giant DuPont cut its greenhouse gas emissions 72 per cent below 1991 levels by 2007, saving $3 billion in the process.

Another sign of dramatic change is the 575 environmental and energy hedge funds now in existence, most of them formed in the last few years.

"Clean tech" has rapidly grown to be the third largest recipient of venture capital, trailing only the Internet and biotechnology. And 54 banks, representing 85 percent of global private project finance capacity, have endorsed the Equator Principles, a new international standard of sustainability investment.

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