Meltdown or Green Deal? The global financial crisis has created an opening for a sustainability revolution.

• Author: Gardner, Gary
• Position: ESSAY - Essay

The still-unfolding global financial crisis is claiming casualties far beyond either Wall Street or Main Street. With all eyes on financial markets and economic ministers, problems that only months ago were described as "urgent" and "historic" seem to have slipped off political leaders' radar screens. Climate change was commonly termed a "planetary emergency," modern species loss represented "the first mass extinction in 65 million years," and billions living on US$2 a day in a world of unprecedented wealth was nothing less than a "global scandal." Yet the global credit crunch threatens to slow funding for environmental and anti-poverty programs to a trickle.

Relegating urgent needs to the sidelines until the economic crisis is resolved is a luxury we cannot afford. The perfect storm of today's economic, environmental, and social ravages requires a robust, multi-pronged response. Indeed, the challenge for global political leadership, including U.S. President-elect Obama, is not merely to kick-start the global economy, but to do so in a way that creates jobs and stabilizes climate, increases food output using less water and pesticides, and generates prosperity with greater equality of incomes. Successful political leaders will be those skilled at identifying synergies among today's hydra-headed problems and using them to craft powerful global coalitions from such constituencies as business, labor, and community organizations.

This broad approach will require a conceptual blueprint evocative of America's 1930s New Deal--but more audacious in scope and vision. As groups ranging from the United Nations Environment Programme to Green for All have argued, the global community needs an initiative that will stimulate and transform the global economy so that it works for the broad majority of humankind, within boundaries set by the planet's rate of resource renewal and waste-absorption capacity. This historic moment calls for not merely repairs to our hyper-productive, yet ailing, economy, but for a new approach suited to the realities of a heavily populated and environmentally stressed world--a Global Green Deal that shifts the focus from growth to development, geared less to providing consumerist superfluities than to ensuring that nobody's true needs go unmet.

A Global Green Deal would have several strategic objectives:

* Transition to a renewable energy economy

Make renewable energy sources the dominant feature of the world's energy system, and systematically phase out reliance on fossil fuels. Wind and solar technologies are not just more environmentally benign than oil, coal, and nuclear power, but also more jobs-intensive. Alternative forms of energy already provide employment to more than 2 million people worldwide, and continued rapid growth will likely multiply these numbers in coming years.

* Launch an efficiency revolution

Doing more with less is one of the surest paths to wealth creation, and environmentalists have a great many ideas to raise energy and materials efficiency. Indeed, some European...