MUSCAT, APRIL 17 - Establishment of a national economic programme in accordance with the concept of green supply chain management has been mooted to correct environmental and social imbalances. This is one of the many proposals made by Dr Mohamed Gamal Kafafi, Chairman of the World Green Economy Council and Senior Adviser to the United Nations World Fund for Development and Planning, at Oman Environmental Forum which began here on Wednesday. Other proposals made by Kafafi include introduction of a law on environmental accounting, carbon footprint tax, new accounting systems within national income and GDP to measure and evaluate economic activity.
“There should also be green standards and specifications in all purchases, tenders and contracts of government and private projects, and add green economy concepts and applications within curricula and researches”, he said. According to him, establishment of Omani National Centre for Green Economy can unify and integrate efforts among different actors in this field and issue indicators to measure the growth of the national green economy. “As environmental and societal risks increase, the ‘old’ economic concepts that neglected the environmental and societal dimension in economic development are no longer suitable for economic analysis”, he said.
New economic concepts (green economy) have been formulated to correct environmental and social imbalances. The volume of global green investment exceeded the $21 trillion with a growth of 50 per cent in the last three years alone. He also mooted establishment of a bank for the Arab Green Economy to meet investments and services needs in terms of funding and providing information, studies and expertise necessary for green projects and investments. “The rapid increase in population, internal migration to cities, urbanisation and subsidisation of goods and services over the past decades have contributed to an unprecedented increase in energy, food, water and other natural resources vulnerable to depletion in the Arab region”, he said.
Arab countries consume more than double the amount of resources their natural systems can reproduce. For this reason, there are many challenges at the level of Arab development in the field of green industry with the unsustainable use of natural resources and energy, the weak levels of the economy, and the high unemployment rate, which averages about 13 per cent. The annual cost of environmental degradation in the Arab countries is estimated at $150 billion, equivalent to 9 per cent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018. He stressed the need to secure nearly 50 million jobs for Arabs by 2020 in light of the absence of benefit from the accumulation of human capital, and the lack of linkage between human capital and economic growth. The Arab region has the highest population growth in the world and is expected to reach 586 million by 2050, representing 6 per cent of the world’s population.
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