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BLUE SUMMIT: STRATEGIC REVITALIZATION OF MYKOLAIV THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE BLUE ECONOMY MAY 14, 2024, MYKOLAIV CITY Mykolaiv faces the challenge of rebuilding and reimagining its future within the framework of sustainable development and the blue economy. Considering both global and local challenges, the city is presented with unique opportunities for the integration of innovative technologies, sustainable management, and environmental awareness into the foundation of urban development. The BLUE SUMMIT aims to unite representatives from small and medium-sized enterprises, local government bodies, the academic community, and the public of Mykolaiv to promote and further develop the blue and green economies. The event is focused on stimulating innovation, exchanging experiences and best practices, and forming strategies for collaboration towards a sustainable future for the city of Mykolaiv! Key Topics for Discussion: 1. Fundamental Principles and Objectives of the Blue Economy: key aspects of the blue economy, its role in the sustainable development of the city, and its impact on the local community. 2. Innovations and Technologies in the Blue Economy. 3. Strategic Partnerships for Sustainable Development. 4. Economic and Social Aspects of the Blue Economy: economic benefits and social impacts that the blue economy can bring to Mykolaiv. 5. Education and Skill Development: needs for retraining and education to prepare the workforce for working under the new conditions of the blue economy. 6. The Role of the Academic Community and Scientific Research in the Development of the Blue Economy and Sustainable Technologies. 7. Experience Sharing with International Partners and Adapting Successful Global Practices to Local Conditions. 8. Strategies for Attracting Investments in Blue Economy Projects and Sustainable Development. Strategic recovery of Mykolaiv through sustainable development and the blue economy is a crucial step in ensuring a sustainable and innovative future for the city. This process involves the integration of key stakeholder groups such as local government representatives, business communities, expert public, academic circles, as well as national and international experts in sustainable development. Join on Zoom: BLUE SUMMIT: Strategic Revitalization of Mykolaiv through Sustainable Development and the Blue Economy https://lnkd.in/eC4iiz5M Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eGui79Rw The project is implemented within the framework of the Mayors for Economic Growth facility and supported by the Innovation Fund Project funded by the Kingdom of Denmark. The projects are implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

As our planet is pushed further and further past its ecological limits, and the devastating results become part of our daily news, it is vital to recognise that continuous economic growth is not only damaging, but also ecologically impossible. Chief Economist at Triodos Bank, Hans Stegeman, has written a fascinating piece for The New Statesman, exploring the debate between ‘Green Growth’ and ‘Degrowth’. Whilst growth did aid in the enhancement of quality of life for many, as Stegeman says, growth is simply ‘not available in the colour green’. Globally low economic growth prospects, and the realisation that continuous growth is simply not ecologically possible, points us towards a middle ground method of ‘Limited Growth’, in which our economic goals move from being focussed on major year-on-year growth, and instead focus on maintaining our economy in an ecologically mindful way. Stegeman points towards the idea of ‘wealth, pollution, resource utilisation and emissions’ taxes, to move away from profit and income taxes, which currently further intensify the relationship between income creation, and growth. These ideas show practical ways in which a sustainable economic model, such as Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economic system, could be realistically implemented in our current society. Stegeman’s and Raworth’s ideas of creating an economic system which benefits all, whilst operating within the capabilities of our ecosystem, appear to offer a glimmer of hope, that it may not be long until we see these systems adopted by countries worldwide. One last quote from Stegeman – ‘A mature economy does not hinge indispensably on perpetual growth; rather, it aligns our institutions and attitudes with the realities at hand.’ The article: https://lnkd.in/eMqnrPmF

Today is World Donut Day so at Sustainable HB we're talking about #DoughnutEconomics! Doughnut Economics is a framework like a graph that helps us to measure how sustainable an economy is, and to envisage what a truly sustainable economy could look like. Rather than concentrating on growth at any cost, a doughnut economy is focused on meeting the needs of all the people in a society without overshooting Earth's capacity to accommodate them. The phrase was coined by British economist Kate Raworth in her 2017 book, 'Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist', which is a great read! The aim is for us all to live in the "dough" of the donut graph, which is the "safe and just space for humanity" to exist, between the minimum social foundation and the maximum ecological ceiling. If the graph starts poking into the hole in the middle of the donut, that means that our social foundation is failing and people's needs are not being met. If our ecological footprint starts to go outside the donut, then our economy has breached the ecological ceiling and we are overshooting the planet's capacity to provide for us: we are living beyond our means. It all ties in with the concept of Earth Overshoot, and it is very difficult to summarise in two paragraphs. So that's what we're thinking about this Donut Day! Now, what to have for morning kai... Image credit: DoughnutEconomics - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://lnkd.in/gaVd_5Td

💰Investments in the Green Economy!♻️ ☝️If considered as a sector in its own right, the green economy would become the fourth largest sector in global stock markets, with a total market capitalization of US$6.5 trillion.💰♻️ ☝️After a downturn in 2022, the global green economy has returned to form in 2023. Green revenues for listed companies are on track to exceed US$5 trillion by 2025 7 — doubling in size since the conclusion of the Paris Agreement in 2015 — with 6 market capitalisation of the green economy.♻️ 👉Achieving net zero is estimated to require US$109–275 trillion of investment by 2050. approximately 20% of revenue from listed equities globally would be ‘green’ . This is likely to result in the green economy becoming the largest single sector in the global economy. 🌏💥 ♻️The transition to a low-carbon economy will support countries' recovery and promote long-term prosperity, while helping to make our planet more resilient and driving inclusive growth. This will lead to the emergence of new products and services, which will create a green growth “multiplier” for businesses and consumers.🌏✳️♻️🔰 🔰Our company "Green Alliance" - has a “Portfolio of Sustainable Green Mega Projects”, Investing in food systems and obtaining green energy for a sustainable future, which will be the most successful in the coming years soon!🌏 👉We invite investors - to invest your investments in our projects, we issue “green bonds” and financial instruments for each project and bring it to the stock exchange! 💰♻️✳️🛟 ☝️We give the investor the lowest percentage of the entire project cost to enter the project! This is 0.01%. With further high sustainable profitability!💰 👉Our projects - are not startups, they are - only working projects, that are time-tested and quality-tested!🌏💫💰♻️ 💥Hurry up to take your place in the green niche!🌏💫💰♻️ 👉Please look for the Portfolio in the publications of our feed!🤝 Contact us.☎️

🌍 A new definition of progress: insights from Kate Raworth 📈 Last year we were delighted to have Kate Raworth deliver our opening keynote. This year we are building on her key themes with a number of fantastic keynotes focusing on establishing an economy that is regenerative, distributive by design, and lives within the planetary boundaries. In this week's The Guardian, Kate challenges conventional notions of progress on a planet pushed to its limits. Relying solely on GDP as a measure of success is no longer feasible in an era where ecological boundaries are strained and social inequalities persist. 🌱 Drawing from her groundbreaking concept of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), it is time for a holistic approach to economic development - one that prioritises both planetary boundaries and human well-being. Just like a tree, which grows until it can no longer provide nutrients to its outermost leaves, our pursuit of growth should be limited by the goal of distributing and circulating resources to sustain the health of the whole system.🌳 At Reset Connect 2024, we're embracing this call to action. We recognise the imperative of harmonising the 3Ps - people, planet, profit - for a sustainable future. That's why our event is focused on these themes, featuring esteemed speakers such as John Elkington, the pioneer behind the triple bottom line, and speakers from WWF-UK, National Trust and RSPB who are calling for us to Save our Wild Isle. 🔥 Don't miss our fireside chat: Doughnut Economics in Local Governments: Insights from Tomelilla (Sweden) and Ipoh (Malaysia) moderated by Leonora Grcheva, featuring esteemed speakers: 🌍 Datuk Rumaizi Baharin - Mayor of Ipoh City Council, Malaysia 🌍 Britt-Marie McQueen, CEO - Municipality of Tomelilla kommun, Sweden 🌍 Stefan Persson, Organisational Development Manager - Municipality of Tomelilla kommun, Sweden 🎟 Don’t forget to register now for FREE and be part of the change: https://bit.ly/3V2AIEc Read The Guardian's full article here: https://lnkd.in/ecntNAur #Sustainability #DoughnutEconomics #ResetConnect #rcl24 #Regeneration #TripleBottomLine #PeoplePlanetProfit #SaveOurWildIsles #Article #Economy

All the while global leaders gathered in New York for #ClimateWeekNYC and the UN General Assembly #UNGA to strengthen sustainability and limit climate change, we have been moving the concrete regional sustainability and climate efforts in Greater Copenhagen forward. In #Strømstad Sweden, our Climate Director, Nicolai Vædele shared our novel concepts for bio-solutions, energy innovation and climate mitigation with political leaders from the five Nordic countries and Nordregio. We were excited to share our alliances and multistakeholder initiatives. Under the Greater Copenhagen umbrella exciting green economy activities are taking place from Helsingborg and Malmo to Kalundborg and Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, Sofi Eriksson & Flemming Dengsø Nielsen, presented the first analytical deep dive into the green economy of the metropolitan area of Greater Copenhagen Region. A comparison with the seven leading metropolitan regions in continental Europe show that universities in Greater Copenhagen are the global benchmark for R&D in Greentech. Unfortunately, Stockholm and Berlin are still ahead when it comes to funding and growing the startups that will dominate the global market for Greentech in the coming years. As our work on bio-solutions, energy innovation and climate mitigation matures and gather further momentum, I am convinced that it will help close the gap to Stockholm and Berlin's red hot startup scene. If you are curious on Greentech data take a deep dive here (In Danish or Swedish): https://lnkd.in/eB9-uR-J Sophie Hæstorp Andersen Christian Orsing Heino Knudsen Karen Ellemann Anders Almgren Steen Christiansen Eric-Alan Rapp Rolf Kjærgaard Michal Drayman Ifat Zamir Nicolai Sederberg Rottbøll Berit Basse

The Netherlands has a clearly above-average resilient, innovative, and inclusive economy. But it scores much more poorly in the field of sustainability, the University of Amsterdam reports based on a new report from the World Economic Forum (#WEF), which the research institute contributed to. The report analyzes global economies based on these four pillars rather than hard growth figures.#uva #sustainability #climate #innovation https://lnkd.in/gFuvegfQ

Is continuous growth compatible with our sustainable development goals? Interesting article on Forbes from Nils Røkke (also member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the GSEU - Geological Service for Europe). Infinite growth in a finite world is unsustainable. 🌱 Understanding Degrowth: in a world focused on infinite growth, the concept of "degrowth" gains importance. It advocates for a deliberate, equitable reduction in production and consumption to achieve well-being within the planet's limits. 📚 Legacy of "Limits to Growth": highlights the planet's sustainable boundaries and the convergence of population, living standards, and resource utilization. 🌍 Happiness Over Consumption: Bhutan's "happiness economy" challenges the growth-centric model by prioritizing citizen happiness over economic expansion. 🎯 UN's Sustainable Development Goals: while the UN's SDGs emphasize economic growth, critics argue it might conflict with other goals. 🔄 Degrowth Principles: degrowth principles include sustainability, social well-being, equity, direct democracy, and localized economies. 🌟 Demand Reduction: demand reduction includes efficiency (doing more with less), sufficiency (reevaluating necessary consumption), and behavioral change (societal shift toward sustainability). 🧠 Mindset Shift: a shift away from GDP growth as the sole measure of success, emphasizing meeting human needs and questioning resource exploitation. 🌿 Challengers to Degrowth: critics question how to meet energy and food demands without growth, and how to ensure equitable distribution. 🌏 Planetary Boundaries: we've exceeded sustainable limits in critical areas, making discussions on degrowth and resource use essential. 🚢 Unsustainable Activities: unsustainable practices, like massive cruise ships, highlight the need for alternatives to infinite growth. 📈 Sustainability and Equity: the heart of the matter is not just stopping growth but ensuring models satisfy real needs in a fair and transparent manner. 💬 Global Debate Needed: A global debate on sustainability and equity in growth principles is overdue, especially as the commitment to GDP growth persists. It's time to explore alternative models for a sustainable and equitable future. 🌍 #Degrowth #Sustainability #EconomicModel Picture from: "Decoupling Debunked. Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability" by Timothée Parrique et al. (2019).

Last week I had the opportunity to listen and speak with Alessio Terzi, an economist at the European Commission, who gave a lecture at Sciences Po about his book “Growth for Good.” 📖 🌱 🏭 He is an unabashed green growth advocate, arguing that degrowth relies too heavily on altruism. He stated that resource sharing is easier to do when there is greater abundance. Thus, degrowth proposals that call for state-backed redistribution of wealth would not work. Arguing that, it’s easier to share food in a tribe when there is more than enough to go around. Perhaps this misunderstands degrowth’s claim that high income countries do, in fact, have enough to go around. 🤳🏽He also argued, using an anthropological perspective, that humans have survived thanks to our knack for technological innovation. He cited evolutionary biologists who state that humans basically have no survival skills besides sweating a lot and running. Thus, humans have had to rely on tools and technology. After his lecture, I spoke with him and a former professor of mine, Michele Fioretti about my research project regarding degrowth fashion businesses. The discussion was friendly, interesting, and influential in the conclusions of my research. 📉While there were some aspects of his approach I disagree with, I was glad to see that even for green growth advocates like Mr. Terzi, there is a clear recogniztion that our economic system as currently constructed is failing on multiple planes. For instance, he concedes the issue of using GDP as a sole indicator: that it doesn’t capture negative externalities, inequality, and doesn’t do well capturing services or the economic value added from free products, for example. 🤦🏻♂️ 🇺🇸 Regarding inequality, he showed the GINI index (a measurement of inequality), to demonstrate that inequality tended to decrease as GDP per capita increased. However, unsurprisingly and disappointingly, the United States is an outlier: where income per capita increases, inequality worsened. *sigh 🌋One point lacking from the presentation that I wish I could discuss with him is that the long-term historical perspective of how humans adapted to previous challenges doesn’t make sense in terms of climate change. We are facing a never-before-seen climate crisis on the geological timeline. The argument that we can rely on technological innovation as we have historically done to help us overcome the current climate challenges we face is unfounded in my eyes. We never have faced such a similar problem on such a large scale. Thus, rigorous and potentially radical solutions, rather than historical precedent, seem to make more sense in our situation. 🫱🏽🫲🏼Nevertheless, I enjoyed the lecture and his work, as it contributes to envisioning societies and economies that respect ecological limits while increasing human well-being.

A Sunday Thought (#82): ‘Sustain(DIS)ability’ - is it just continued Imperial Modernity? I was excited about sustainable development since reading the Brundtland Report in 1987. I focused my economic studies on how it could transform economic theory to reconstitute a balance with all life and create well’be’ing in Plato’s sense of ‘the one can only be well unless the whole is well.’ It felt necessary to get rid of this homo oeconomicus guy, and work on economics for all life. Some criticize that the Brundtland Report was too human-centric with its principles of intra- and intergenerational equity, but for me it was always the radical retrofit of the economic system that made the idea so irresistible. An economic system that relies on externalities is bound to fail, it must collapse in a closed system. But externalization does happen at a level of 50-100 trillion USD every year, a slow killing machine of our children’s future and that of further generations to come. We live in overshoot of most environmental ceilings and create continuous undershoot of all social floors, also called ‘phantom carrying capacity.’ Those that enthusiastically developed a new occupational profile, including myself at the time - the sustainability professional - must take stock and admit: we squarely failed! Altogether we changed nothing in the incentive structures of macroeconomics, homo oeconomicus is a tough guy. But why? There are three main reasons for that in my view: First, the lack of connecting micro-economic and macro-economic disciplines. How little do corporate sustainability managers or opportusultants know about multi-level transformation. They just do or advise to implement all the standards, policies or certification schemes that other experts with all sorts of particular business agendas have cobbled together for them. Incrementalism, a compliance mindset, but nothing to contribute achieving a regenerative economy. ‘Not my role’ I often hear them say, with only a few exceptions. Second, letting go of the vision to radically change the economic system towards a balanced, just and fair ending of colonialism. Honestly, sustainability got deteriorated to just find cozy niches in the existing exploitative economic system. As a consequence, and please listen to Global South representatives, they tell that sustainability is just continued colonization. And third, very little energy to redesigning education that would allow the sustainability profession to learn how to live up to its real challenges. I often see curricula, MBA programs, many courses and loads of conference agendas. They are all signposts of a reduced or purposefully limited understanding of what’s at stake and what needs to be done. Luckily this is slowly changing due to those prosultancies that no longer want to be part of the problem. Without drastic changes in these three areas sustainability professionals are prey to continued Imperial Modernity. See more in 1st comment!