The Global Quest for Green Growth: An Economic Policy Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Sustainability -1696851

The global quest for green growth: an economic policy perspective. The manuscript deals with an important topic of global relevance or impact.

Following suggestions are provided to improve the quality of the manuscript :

1. The literature survey mainly relies on the general aspects. Section 2 and Section 3 must be improved with the problems of climate change, GDP,economic issues and green growth policy?? List the objectives of the work at the end of the Introduction. The terms Decarbonisation/decoupling,Degrowth and kaya indentify needs better explanation
2. It would be appreciated if the author improved and updated the climate neutrality goals of various nations and the condition for the green growth .
3. The Methodology/ approach of this study may be well presented in the flowchart form. Please relate the terms Decarbonisation/decoupling,Degrowth and kaya identify with other literature .It is better if authors consider relevant government policies and documents as well It is suggested to provide more comprehensive data for the analysis .
4. Table 2 contribution may be extended to other regions .The interesting aspects of the study are the green growth scenarios, targeted emission reductions, and GDP impact.However, it can be extended to other continents or regions to reflect the nature of the title .I understand that the EU case alone doesn’t represent the global view . The quality of the data and the information can be improved

5.Similarly Some Figures may be represented to show the results of the present analysis with respect to the Green growth scenario and  world as a whole ?

 6..How the GDP and GHG emission are perceived by different nations ? There is huge disparity in the level of income and the status of the countries ? What policy decisions are need to achieve SDG goals and green economic growth .The arguments presented in the analysis may provide some key questions which can be lately addressed by the other researchers  towards Net Zero Transition and Global sustainability?

7. The electricity consumption pattern for the several households years may be included? Some specific insights on Linkage between GDP and GHG emission are missing .Any other parameters can be considered for the green economic growth?
8. Some of the conclusions drawn may be provided with key numbers and takeways which may be useful for the policy support and readers to gain new knowledge on green economic growth

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We thank you for taking the time to help us improve our manuscript. We read your feedback with much interest and found it very useful. To incorporate all suggestions, we made a number of changes to our manuscript, which you will find in track changes. We also list the most notable changes in response to your comments here, for your convenience.

 

1. We modified the last paragraph of our introduction to specify more clearly the objectives of our article. Additionally, we clarified the terms ‘decoupling’, ‘decarbonisation’, ‘degrowth’ and ‘Kaya identity’ on their first occurrence in the main text to facilitate reading.

“Yet, the sharp contrast in the theoretical positions of scholars is a way to conceptualise the magnitude and uncertainty of the climate challenge and should remind policy makers not to take established narratives for granted. The purpose of this paper is therefore to introduce the reader to the debate by briefly reviewing the main green growth and degrowth ideas, and to assess whether these visions can realistically help us reach net zero in due time. To that end, section two first explains the problem of decoupling by discussing the so-called ‘Kaya identity’ and by offering a simple quantitative assessment of the gap between our historic performance in reducing the emission intensity of GDP and what is required for green growth, the basis of ongoing disagreement. Section 3 reviews the literature on degrowth, while section 4 discusses green growth. Section 5 presents some critical comments and concludes that, despite the fact that both visions suffer from uncertainties regarding their feasibility, unlikely support for degrowth make striving for green growth an imperative. Section 6 concludes.”

 

2. We inserted an overview of climate neutrality goals in various G20 countries into Section 5 to give a better idea of the various official initiatives taking place worldwide.

Table 3 G20 members net-zero emission goals. Source: UNEP (2021).

Country	Net-zero year	All GHG	Commitment
Argentina	2050	?	announcement
Brazil	2050	?	announcement
Canada	2050	yes	law
China	2060	yes	announcement
EU	2050	yes	law
India	2070	?	announcement
Japan	2050	yes	law
Rep. of Korea	2050	?	policy document
UK	2050	yes	law
USA	2050	yes	policy document

 

 

 

 

3. We inserted a flowchart to better explain the methodology we used when calculating the decoupling numbers in Table 1, which we extended to also include estimates for different large economies.

Table 1 Factors of the Kaya identity, CO₂ and CO₂/GDP, average yearly rates of change (%) in 1995-2018 (historical data) and in net-zero emission scenario 2019-2050. Source: Bruegel, based on data from IEA (2020a) for CO₂ emissions, CO₂/real GDP, and CO₂/energy demand, OECD (2018) for GDP per capita, OECD (2021a) for population, and OECD (2021b) for energy demand/real GDP.

 

Figure 2 Methodology for the calculation of Table 1.

^a For this simple exercise, we assume that all regions must reduce CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels by 90% between 2019 and 2050 (remaining emissions are offset by negative emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use), consistent with IPCC (2018) pathways that lead to 1.5°C warming with low temperature overshooting. We disregard international fairness and efficiency arguments.

^b We assume that energy demand/real GDP will continue to decline at the same yearly rate as its average in the period 1995-2018, the last year for which data was available for all regions.

 

4. We referred to some additional pieces of literature throughout the text to discuss decoupling, the Kaya identity and government policies. These sources provide in our view interesting additional information and examples of analyses that detangle emissions into its drivers:

• DOE (2022) America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition. U.S. Department of Energy
• Hwang Y, Um J, Hwang J, Schlüter S (2020) Evaluating the Causal Relations between the Kaya Identity Index and ODIAC-Based Fossil Fuel CO2 Flux. Energies 13(22):6009. https://doi.org/10.3390/en13226009
• Mavromatidis G, Orehounig K, Richner P, Carmeliet J (2016) A strategy for reducing CO2 emissions from buildings with the Kaya identity – A Swiss energy system analysis and a case study. Energy Policy 88:343-354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.10.037
• O’ Mahony T (2013) Decomposition of Ireland’s carbon emissions from 1990 to 2010: An extended Kaya identity. Energy Policy 56:573-581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.04.013
• Parrique T, Barth J, Briens F, Kerschner C, Kraus-Polk A, Kuokkanen A, Spangenberg J (2019) Decoupling Debunked. Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability. European Environmental Bureau

 

5. We added to our conclusion some suggestions for future research.

“We do not mean to suggest that no more scholarly work should be done on alternative development paths and measures of welfare, but would rather advocate more specific attention to how such visions can avoid pitfalls such as lack of technological innovation and misalignment of economic incentives, or for example how individual jurisdictions could implement degrowth in a non-degrowth world. On the other hand, more research could also focus on the presence of interdependencies between factors of the Kaya identity that threaten to undermine green growth efforts (such as the rebound effect), and how such effects could be minimised by adequate policy design.”

 

6. We clarified in section 2 the paragraph explaining the causality between GDP growth and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Historically, economic growth – by which we mean real GDP growth – has long been associated with increasing GHG emissions. Empirically, the causal chain is straightforward: higher levels of economic activity tend to go hand in hand with additional energy use, for example by households wishing to travel more or by industry to meet a higher demand for manufactured goods, and with more consumption of natural resources. Fossil fuels still account for 79 percent of the global energy mix (IEA 2021b), and so energy consumption is closely related to GHG emissions and hence to climate forcing. Expansion of industrial processes, livestock rearing and other agriculture adds to emissions, while deforestation reduces carbon sinks.”

 

7. In our conclusion, we highlighted once more which conditions must be in place to unlock green growth. We also recall some key numbers from section 2.

“Average decoupling rates of 1.6% per year have indeed been insufficient to lower global emissions. However, in several developed countries absolute decoupling is happening, thanks to slower GDP growth and higher decoupling rates of around 2.5%. But this too falls far short of the sort of what is needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050.”

“We would argue that faster decoupling then today is possible, given the vast potential to expand renewable energy at competitive prices, which have declined by up to 85% during the previous decade.”

“From a pragmatic point of view, it is therefore imperative that governments and society at large start creating without delay the necessary conditions for green growth, by assertively pushing clean energy and efficiency investments, introducing broad carbon pricing with revenue distribution to vulnerable households, casting green commitments into an enabling regulatory framework, doubling down on green innovation and encouraging behavioural change where necessary.” 

 

We hope that these modifications will improve the draft and thank you once again for your thoughtful comments.

 

Sincerely,

 

The authors

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is well written, but there are some minor issues that must be revised: 

• Since sections after Introduction immediately talk about decoupling, degrowth, and green growth issues, Introduction section must explain why these issues are relevant to the research topic and question and what method used for analyzing them. 
• In sub-section 4, authors include EU to justify the relations between emission reduction and GDP impact. The focus of this study is global case, thus authors must write the relevance of focusing on the EU in this sub-section, specifically in Table 4. 
• In Conclusion, it will be better to write the impacts of this study to the developed and developing countries. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We thank you for taking the time to help us improve our manuscript. We read your feedback with much interest and found it very useful. To incorporate all suggestions, we made a number of changes to our manuscript, which you will find in track changes. We also list the most notable changes in response to your comments here, for your convenience.

 

1. We revised the final paragraph of our introduction to clarify the relevance of issues such as decoupling, degrowth and green growth in the debate about climate change mitigation pathways and to explain our approach.

“Yet, the sharp contrast in the theoretical positions of scholars is a way to conceptualise the magnitude and uncertainty of the climate challenge and should remind policy makers not to take established narratives for granted. The purpose of this paper is therefore to introduce the reader to the debate by briefly reviewing the main green growth and degrowth ideas, and to assess whether these visions can realistically help us reach net zero in due time. To that end, section two first explains the problem of decoupling by discussing the so-called ‘Kaya identity’ and by offering a simple quantitative assessment of the gap between our historic performance in reducing the emission intensity of GDP and what is required for green growth, the basis of ongoing disagreement. Section 3 reviews the literature on degrowth, while section 4 discusses green growth. Section 5 presents some critical comments and concludes that, despite the fact that both visions suffer from uncertainties regarding their feasibility, unlikely support for degrowth make striving for green growth an imperative. Section 6 concludes.”

 

2. In section 4, we inserted a few sentences to better relate Table 2 to the text. We chose to include an EU study in this table alongside global studies because it provides a relatively rare and recent example of an elaborate simulation of a deep decarbonisation pathway within a green-growth paradigm, not because we wish to focus on the EU in this section. We note however that

“whereas green growth plans from advanced economies such as the EU are confident that the green transition will bring new business opportunities and jobs to replace old ones, global green growth plans can hide regional differences, since for instance low-tech or fossil fuel exporting economies are less well-positioned to benefit economically from a global energy transition (Barrett et al. 2020).”

 

3. In our conclusion, we rewrote a paragraph to highlight the importance of green growth for the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to reiterate that green growth narratives do not apply to emerging economies in the same way as advanced economies.

“It remains to be seen to which extent GDP growth can be boosted by global climate action, but any scenario where climate targets are reached without drastic economic contraction in advanced economies or stagnation in emerging economies is preferable, since the latter would go against the eighth UN Sustainable Development Goal. The economic opportunities of the transition seem to be concentrated in advanced economies, although emerging countries around the equator also stand to benefit from avoided damages and from the possibility to produce and export cheap and renewable energy. Advanced economies will have to support emerging partners to make the global transition fair and inclusive.”

 

We hope that these modifications will improve the draft and thank you once again for your thoughtful comments.

 

Sincerely,

 

The authors

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

 The idea of the article is clear and justified. Traditionally, the GDP was used as a measure of economic growth and level of well being in the country. Idea of sustainable development pointed out the role of social and environmental aspects of economic  activity. Concept of greening the economy underlines the problem of climate change and environment destruction for which greenhouse gas emission and energy consumption are main factors. Growth rates for GDP, gas emission and energy consumption are interrelated and differs each other. These complex requires decoupling. Decoupling this aggregate  can help recognise a key factors and  create adequate economic policy tools to attain the economic progress and avoid natural and climate aggravation for the future. Paper refers to to that problems. Authors recognise 4 factors influencing green growth;1/population, 2/ the GDP, 3/ energy intensity of GDP and, 4/carbon intensity of energy. They however concetrate attention only on 2, 3 and 4 group of factors, what may be assesed as a weak point of the paper. Paper is well organised. It has three important sections describing: decoupling, degrowth and green growth, where own and other authors oppinions have been presented. All of them have an interesting contents of knowledge and assessment. Analysis of decoupling is well settled in literature and supported by historic and future scenarios data. Section 3  includes review and assessment of degrowth theories as well as description of different specific concepts and definitions. The green growth, one amongst different degrowth proposals, is presented in section 4. Green growth is closely lnked with amount and type of energy used. Paper presents short look on definitions and facts concerning green growth. Interesting data refers to the costs of different traditional and renevable energy production sources and show the results of technological progres influencing the green economy and green growth. Interesting novelty proposal are description of four pillars of green growth policy and comparison of the different scenarios of future green growth.

Generally paper is very interesting, well prepared and well settled in actual literature and knowledge related to green growth and degrowth ideas. It gives a good recognition of factors for creation of global economic policy with respect to climate change, environment preservation and socio-economic development. The week point of the paper may be addressed, partly to discussion and mainly  to conclusion, were attention which is given on selection  (choice) between green growth and degrowth ideas while relations of green growth concept to sustainability and sustainable development goals are omitted.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We thank you for taking the time to help us improve our manuscript. We read your feedback with much interest and found it very useful. To incorporate all suggestions, we made a number of changes to our manuscript, which you will find in track changes.

Regarding the omission of population, the first factor in the Kaya identity, from our discussion on how to reduce emissions, we did so consciously, as it is generally also not considered in either the green growth or the degrowth literature. Moreover, the limitation of fertility rates in emerging countries is an important topic in development economics, but it is subject to ethical discussions when mentioned in the context of ecology. It therefore merits a more thorough discussion in a separate publication, in our opinion.

Finally, we added references to the relation between green growth and the concept of sustainable development in section 4 and particularly in the conclusion (see abstracts below).

“The 1987 Brundtland report Our Common Future is seen as a milestone for green growth with its definition  of ‘sustainable development’ (Jacobs 2012), since it lay at the basis of global ecological policy thinking of the next few years, such as at the Earth Summit and the Rio Declaration in 1992, which explicitly called for economic growth to address environmental problems. The term ‘green growth’ only gained popularity in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 as an idea for short-term stimulus that incorporated environmental objectives (e.g. OECD 2009), and was adopted as a policy objective by international organisations in the subsequent years (Jacobs 2012). Today it underpins the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (goal 8), and most governments and international organisations have adopted the green growth narrative as part of long-term development policies (e.g. European Commission 2019; OECD 2011; UNEP 2011; World Bank 2012) and post-covid recovery plans (e.g. The White House 2022).”

“It remains to be seen to which extent GDP growth can be boosted by global climate action, but any scenario where climate targets are reached without drastic economic contraction in advanced economies or stagnation in emerging economies is preferable, since the latter would go against the eighth UN Sustainable Development Goal. The economic opportunities of the transition seem to be concentrated in advanced economies, although emerging countries around the equator also stand to benefit from avoided damages and from the possibility to produce and export cheap and renewable energy. Advanced economies will have to support emerging partners to make the global transition fair and inclusive.”

We hope that our modifications will improve the draft and thank you once again for your thoughtful comments.

 

Sincerely,

 

The authors

 

Reviewer 4 Report

The article discusses the decoupling proposition concerning GHG global emissions and GDP growth. One group of researchers believes that appropriate policies will produce decoupling; the others believe that the only way to reduce GHG emissions is to reduce global GDP. The authors declare that they want to discuss the main conditions necessary to enable green growth.

The authors did a literature review and presented arguments for and against decupling, and discussed how realistic are various solutions to the problem of global warming. The literature review shows exciting data, for instance, that the global decoupling rate would have to accelerate by a factor of six to reach net-zero by 2050.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We thank you for taking the time to help us improve our manuscript. We read your feedback with much interest and found it very useful. To incorporate all suggestions, we made a number of changes to our manuscript, which you will find in track changes.

We hope that these modifications will improve the draft and thank you once again for your thoughtful comments.

 

Sincerely,

 

The authors