Does Human Development Matter to Green Growth on the Path to Sustainability?: Evidence From BRICS Countries

Introduction

Sustainable development is a broad concept that encompasses environmental, economic and socio-demographic elements. According to the Brundtland Commission Report, the most important issue for sustainable development is that “meeting the needs of the current population in a way that does not prevent meeting the needs of future generations” (WCED, 1987). This emphasis, which can be interpreted as improving the quality of human life without harming the environment, is very important in terms of human development (Price, 1997). This concept also includes future generations and long-term education. Recently, it has been more clearly accepted that the relations between social, economic and environmental factors are mutual and affect each other in achieving sustainable development goals (Price, 1997:35).

Figure 1.

The relationship between components of sustainable development

(Price, 1997: 35; De Kruijf and Van Vuuren, 1998: 9)

According to Figure 1, the internal balance of each element must be sustainable and the relations between them must be balanced. In this case, the indicators to be developed in evaluating the developments that will emerge in sustainable development should be developed in a way that can measure the developments that will occur both for each element and in the areas where the elements interact with each other. Recently, there are many serious problems facing the world such as crises related to water, food and energy supply and variability in their pricing, increase in greenhouse gas emissions, income inequality, chronic monetary and financial imbalances, pandemic and terrorism. Developing countries are especially vulnerable to all these risks. A main question to resolve is how to reconcile goals focused specifically on environmental protection with growth and poverty reduction in the developing world. In this regard, both national and international policy designs focus on promoting green and inclusive growth as a new approach based on cyclical processes to increase sustainable welfare (WEF, 2012; OECD, 2012). In order to draw attention to this problem, the expression eco-development was created in the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1973 and was defined as an approach to achieve development through appropriate technology and production system that takes into account the protection of nature. Debates regarding the dependence of the sustainability of economic growth on the protection of the natural environment continued until the early 1980s. At the 5th Ministerial Conference on Environment and Development (MCED) in Seoul in 2005, attention was drawn to “green growth”, which emphasizes the necessity of evaluating the environment and economy together in public policies and increasing eco-efficiency in economic growth, specifically for the countries of the Asia Pacific Region. In 2008, UNEP launched the so-called “Green Economy Initiative” to reduce environmental degradation, and in 2009, the “Global Green New Deal (GGND)” report was published. Afterwards, it has been prepared “Europe 2020” by the European commission (2010), “Green Growth Strategy” by OECD (2011) and “Towards a Green Economy” by UNEP (2011). Additionally, in 2012, international organizations that support/promote green growth were brought together with the “Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP)” (OECD, 2012; Kasztelan, 2017). Thus, green economy is defined as an approach that increases social equality and social welfare and at the same time reduces environmental risks and ecological scarcities (ILO, 2015). Therefore, it is a concept that covers different implications regarding growth and prosperity or efficiency and risk reduction in the use of natural resources (Weng et al., 2018). Green growth, on the other hand, is the promotion of economic growth and development that catalyzes investment and innovation on the axis of sustainability, based on protecting natural resources, which are the basis of prosperity, and preventing environmental degradation (OECD, 2011: 11). From this point on, green growth can be interpreted as a subset of sustainable development and the connection between them is explained in Figure 2.