THE run-up to the Rio+20 conference (which opens in that Brazilian city on June 20th) has seen even more than the usual flood of statements, position papers and demands about every subject under the sun. The trouble is the conference's subject, sustainable development, which can mean almost anything and therefore means practically nothing. The Economist this week makes its contribution to this flood, by looking at a subject which does, one hopes, mean something: green growth. Admittedly, green growth might not sound very crunchy. It says countries can have both growth and greenery. Well, whoop-i-doo. Who's going to object to that? Actually, lots of people, it turns out. Many environmentalists think green growth does not go far enough. They argue the only hope of saving the planet—by keeping carbon emissions low enough to reduce global warming—is to cut consumption, ie, reducing growth. Some developing countries think green growth goes too far. They call it a mercantilist attempt to impose holier-than-thou environmental restrictions on emerging markets that need to grow to lift millions out of poverty. So green growth is less anodyne than it sounds at first hearing.
Its core perception is that the old trade-off pattern pursued in America and Europe is impossible now. This was “grow first, clean up the mess later”. (The pattern has lasted a long time and was enshrined in the Kyoto treaty on climate change, which exempted developing polluters from obligations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions). The reason it won't work any more is that the environmental mess caused by unrestrained growth is so severe that it is undermining growth itself. So countries risk getting less growth and more pollution, the worst of both worlds. China reckons the cost of its environmental damage is the equivalent of about 9% of national income every year.
Green growth tries to bring pretty conventional economic thinking to the matter. The environment, its proponents argue, should be thought of as a form of capital—natural capital. And like other forms of capital, it needs to be measured accurately, invested in, exploited efficiently and (ideally) increased in value. The idea of exploiting the environment efficiently drives some greens mad: this is exactly the problem, they argue. But it has two advantages. First, it means that the value of the services that a good environment provides are accounted for properly and not (as now) ignored. Thailand used to cut down mangrove swamps and turn them into shrimp farms on the grounds that a shrimp farm was worth far more per acre than a mangrove forest. Then the country was hit by enormous and costly floods partly because the mangroves were not holding back the water any more, and it turned out that the mangroves were actually worth more than the shrimps.
Second, it focuses policymakers and private businesses on those areas where the environmentally friendly thing to do is also profitable: win-wins. These areas include hybrid cars, switching to LED light bulbs and new building standards. There are a lot more such things than the “trade off” view of growth and the environment would lead you to think.
That doesn't mean green growth is a panacea. It is better at dealing with local and national environmental problems (like those mangrove swamps) where the benefits are specific and immediate than with global ones such as carbon emissions in which—if emissions can be cut—the benefits will be spread round the world and probably won't be seen for 50 years. But green growth policies are better than the real alternative, which in many developing countries means no green policies of any kind. They deserve a boost at Rio, among the 99,000 other things the conference delegates will opine about.