August 2012: The Green Economy Coalition (GEC) has published the August edition of its monthly newsletter, which contains updates on the Coalition’s plans and activities, specifically in light of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20).

The GEC Convenor notes that Rio+20 exposed various concerns about the term “green economy,” but that these different perspectives are united by a call for economic reform for sustainable development. He highlights the GEC’s “Green Economy Pocketbook,” a publication detailing the GEC’s vision of a green economy and showing how investing in natural systems improves livelihoods and creates jobs. He also outlines three “pressure points” in the existing economy – growth, fairness, and finance – and describes the new phase GEC is entering in order to “explicitly tackle how to bring about economic reform for sustainable development.”

The newsletter also highlights three articles published on the GEC website. The first is about the green economy in the context of the Heart of Borneo (HoB) Declaration, a commitment signed in 2007 between Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia to conserve and sustainably develop 220,000 square kilometers of endangered habitat and species. The second article is about civil society efforts in the Caribbean to build a new, greener economy. The third is about “green grabbing” as a potential “dark side” of a green economy. [Publication: August Update]