Trade and environment review : promoting poles of clean growth to foster the transition to a more sustainable economy

The key message of this publication is that the occurrence of the global economic and financial crisis and the interrelated climate, food, and water crises offers a window of opportunity to embark on a path of more resilient and sustainable economic growth. The key challenge is to avoid responding to the crises with measures that perpetuate economically, socially and environmentally unsustainable production and consumption patterns. The key opportunity is to seek ways to respond to the crises by identifying dynamic synergies to initiate change. Developing countries can seize real opportunities for cleaner growth, including low-carbon growth. This report argues that, while complex and long, the process of greening economies can and should be gradually piloted towards selected "poles of clean growth". A successful combination of sound economic and ecological management of such poles would steer economies towards more environmentally friendly development and, hopefully, generate positive spillover effects in other sectors, even under conditions of no or imperfect internalization of many key externalities. The review offers three illustrations of promisigin poles of clean growth, especially relevant to developing countries: energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture, and renewable energies for rural development.