A Green and Fair Challenge and a Global Crisis
A green recovery can only go hand in hand with a fair recovery, panelists agreed at a debate on “A Green and Fair Recovery: When the Unprecedented Becomes the Precedent.”
“If we don’t have a fair recovery, that involves whole world, we will not have a green recovery,” said Esther Duflo, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“In rich countries we were lucky enough to find vaccines,” she explained. “But from the vantage point of poor countries there is no recovery in view,” said Duflo, a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences.
Paolo Gentiloni, European Commissioner for the Economy, agreed that in “a crisis this size is not an equalizer.” Even within wealthy countries, “inequality will increase because of the different paces of vaccination,” he said
He told the audience that the EU is the world’s largest exporter of vaccines to poor countries and was putting pressure on other economies to follow suit.
The commissioner added that the green transition would be a challenge even for EU countries, with or without international support.
EU policy targets such as a 55% cut in greenhouse gas emissions this decade “are not neutral from a political or social point of view,” Gentiloni said. “These decisions should be handled with care.”
“At the same time, we have to compare them with the cost of doing nothing. By and large I think everyone now agrees that doing nothing is more costly and dangerous,” Gentiloni said.
He added that, to be successful, the green transition would have to raise large amounts of investment from the private sector. “I doubt that the invisible hand of the markets is green,” the commissioner joked. “If we don’t have strong private investment for the green – and digital – transition, it will be very difficult to raise public investment.”
“We don’t want simply a rebound, going back to where were before the crisis,” Gentiloni added. “We have to increase our innovation and competitiveness.”
Jesper Brodin, President and CEO, Ingka Group, said the European Commission had done “incredible work on the Green Deal.”
He agreed that the EU economy showed signs of recovery but added “we need to brace ourselves. We have at least one more year of consequence to be ready for.”
And he warned “There may be an even bigger crisis we stand at the beginning of: the climate crisis.”
“We take this as an opportunity to actually speed up not only conversations with the EU, but also all actions.”