THE GREEN ECONOMY -- EU SOLUTION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?

Sustainable development has been established on an EU level in the form of a strategy and some high-level political promises. However, when measured against the overall rationale and ambitions of the sustainable development discussion, EU level action towards sustainability has experienced serious shortcomings, and has evolved into a very complicated, unclear and ambiguous discussion that is of little real concern to policy makers at the moment. Particularly since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, there has been a range of new initiatives creating new pushes around sustainability - the Green New Deal discussions, UNEP's Green Economy Initiative work, the OECD's green growth work- The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). Green growth and transition to a green economy is a core element of the EU's overall growth strategy towards 2020. In the present economic context, it is vital that a holistic approach to the work on green growth must be adopted and that the EU's energy, resource and environmental policies as well as development policy must be coordinated so as to ensure maximum possible coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]