In the context of Bangladesh, the concept of green growth is addressed disproportionately in our social discourse. We mostly entrance ourselves with talks of achieving economic growth and carbon goals through investments in green infrastructures and technologies, typically in the industrial sectors, eg ready-made garments.
It remains understated that green growth also advocates for natural resources management. More importantly, it calls for equity and inclusion that empowers poor and marginalized communities to take up resilient green livelihoods, and contribute to the transition towards green growth.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines green growth as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. But, as a developing country with economic and technological constraints, we simply cannot afford to take only a technological approach for achieving green growth. We should also build on the other two imperatives and utilize these leverage points for a smooth and steady transition towards a green economy.
Talking about leverage points, I see great opportunities for the youth to contribute and accelerate the process. The youth's expertise in technological knowledge and skills, their risk-taking attitude, and their networking skills allow them with scopes of leading the transition process.
Interestingly, as a plus point, we also have good opportunities to co-achieve some agendas of locally-led adaptation (LLA), for it overlaps with green growth. Locally-led adaptation is an approach that focuses on achieving inclusive growth and mitigating the impacts of climate change by capitalizing on the local people’s leadership skills, strategies, and knowledge.
In the recent Gobeshona Global Conference-2, an interesting session by Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, discussed at length about the incredible opportunity at hand to achieve green growth via locally-led adaptation. It is great to see that such discussions are happening and connections are being drawn among different agendas that will lead us to achieve sustainable goals.
Now, as we move forward with the idea of capacitating the youth for co-achieving green growth and locally-led adaptation, our first step should be building a solid knowledge base to facilitate sustainable solutions to our problems. It is imperative to have a robust information system to successfully address any problem. Again, while we set up the knowledge base, we are also co-achieving the fifth principal of LLA: Building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty.
A robust information system essentially means coupling of both local and global knowledge on the subjects for long term solutions. For this, technology would be an effective method. But, as we think of knowledge building in our remote vulnerable regions, there, elderly people mostly do not have the skills and gadgets to access information. In contrast, the younger generation are at an advantage; they have access to smartphones and can browse the internet for information. We should tap on this potential source and build a knowledge platform engaging the youth.
To break the language and education barrier, Bangla content with graphical representation will work great. More importantly, the young people can pass on their knowledge to the elderly and other groups, helping the community to develop a sound understanding of the issues, and design effective adaptation strategies. Here, helping the communities to make autonomous decisions, we are also achieving the first principle of LLA, that is devolving decision-making to the lowest appropriate level.
After we achieve our objective of creating a knowledge base, our path becomes easier, with support from our knowledgeable communities, to implement necessary actions for sustainable development. As we propose green livelihoods and efficient management of natural resources as our adaptation strategies against livelihood vulnerabilities and economic growth, we should step in with the youth.
Young people, by nature, are more resilient, optimistic, confident, and experimental than the elderly, who are often rigid and lack confidence to try new methods. Thus, it would be more agreeable to involve the youth in exploring new methods of green livelihoods, eg seaweed cultivation, eco-tourism, mixed farming, floating agriculture, hydroponic cultivation etc. Moreover, we can channel their enthusiasm to spontaneously participate in implementing nature-based solutions, like afforestation against cyclones and erosion.
Any positive outcomes from these would encourage other people, particularly the elderly to step in. This could be a turning point for a full-scale transition towards a green economy.
As far as equality is concerned, the youth have good opportunities to diminish structural inequalities. It is often noted that people from marginalized groups seem to lack trust in policymakers, practitioners, and the administrative body, possibly due to their bad experiences with the system. Also, it is difficult to take women's opinions due to different cultural and religious constraints. These drawbacks create a big hurdle in ensuring equal participation of different groups, also to establish trust to work together. But we have a leverage point, youth nowadays are more suggestible and less bound by negative stereotypes.
So, in our knowledge sharing stage, we can groom them to become more tolerant and inclusive, and work for solving issues of structural inequality by mobilizing women, children, disabled, and marginalized ethnic groups to actively participate in the transition process. Also, for restoring trust, the youth, being their own members, will have easy access to all the different groups and can convince them to participate in the process with equality. In this process, we would also implement the agenda of LLA principle 2, which is addressing structural inequalities faced by women, children, youth, and other marginalized groups.
Despite our insignificant contribution to global carbon emissions, our commitment to achieve green growth shows our strong determination to achieve the goals of sustainable development. As we set out to fulfill our objective, we should carefully evaluate our limitations, ie technological and financial constraints, and capitalize on our strengths, ie natural resource management and the potential of the youth, to overcome the issues and achieve our goals without any compromise.
Mohammad Budrudzaman is a Research Assistant, Center for Sustainable Development, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Dhaka. He can be reached at [email protected].
