 It's mostly the fact that with green growth you need to integrate social economic and environmental factors or drivers of change and development. So in my work and studies as well, I was always fascinated by how these different factors interact. I studied system dynamics after I've done economics. So I found economics to be a bit restrictive to be only focusing on monetary flows. And system dynamics was really a methodology to understand how different parts of a system interact with each other. Green growth is exactly the field in which you have to look at everything at once. So you need to do a simultaneous analysis of what happens, what changes and why and what are the impacts across the board. So that's why I have lots of interest in the field. Practically speaking, looking at how sustainable development analysis has been done over the years, there was an emphasis on economic performance, GDP, let's say. But that was disconnected from what happens with population or what happens with the environment. So practically speaking, in a very simple way, with the work that I do, I'm looking at the impact of the economy on the environment as well as on society and impact on the environment as a feedback onto the economy and population. So I'm considering, for instance, the fact that if population grows, there will be more capital investment as well as labor that support economic growth. On the other hand, economic growth requires resources. When resources are depleted, prices increases. They potentially go up as, let's say, commodities will go up. And this is an impact on the economy. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Then you have all the so-called externalities. So the consumption of natural resources or the reduction of forest has a negative impact on ecosystem services, which when they replace, they cost money. This is an impact on the economy as well as on livelihoods. So this is reality in a way, simplified but not as much simplified as what economists would normally do and look at. I would see two main items to discuss here. The first one is climate change. With the formal approval of climate change as being driven by human activity, say one instance was the endorsement by the Bush administration in the United States. That actually led economists to find other ways of analyzing and interpreting the economic performance. So the neoclassical economic theory or approach that looked at capital, labor and technology, productivity as being the three factors of production GDP growth sort of collapsed when climate change and the concept of feedback really became mainstream. So that led to the investigation of new approaches, some of which were of course known for a long time, but were not mainstream. Then the other factor is that we don't have to necessarily move away from GDP. We can find ways to better estimate GDP by taking into account that energy prices, water availability, climate change impacts, among many other things, affect productivity. While economists for a long time assumed that productivity was pretty much one number, one rate of improvement of technology that could not be changed. In fact, productivity is being changed and modified and affected by a variety of factors all the time. In fact, we see that the attempts to come up with something really new, and GDP have failed in a way that there is no general agreement on what that is or should be or that should be measured, which from my point of view it's a good thing because GDP is a universal measure to see how the economy performs for every single country. That's the beauty of GDP. It's simple to look at, analyze and so on. It's good for doing benchmarking, but when it comes to analyzing the development of a country, thinking sustainable development, not economic development, every country is unique. So it's very difficult to find one indicator or one set of indicators that works for everyone. So personally I'm actually glad that the green GDP discussion did not really play out as planned, but that we are moving towards a series of goals and targets, potentially at the country level, that can be customized. Now the SDG discussions, the Sustainable Development Goals, are still moving in that direction, going to one framework that every country can use. When I do work with countries and I work on green economy in more than 20 countries, the first thing they tell me is, well, we are different from our neighbors and we have a different social context. We have culture and we have natural resources that are quite different from what other countries have. So the approach that has been taken there within the context of green economy is to give them the methodology and the approach for them to be able to select and use green economy indicators that match their specific needs. Three main groups of indicators. Normally, and this is work that I've done with UNEP in designing the approach and developing a manual for them, but they're also aligned across several agencies. So the first one is indicators for issue identification. These we have used for a long time. There are the headline indicators by the UACD. There are the stock taking indicators from GGGI. They're all fairly similar. So depending on the trends, deforestation, for instance, is one of the indicators of a problem or the lack reduction of ecosystem services. So water availability in rivers, the amount of water in streams, the potential for fisheries, local fisheries to grow. These are indicators of a problem. Within the green economy discussion, these indicators do not have to be about the environment necessarily. They can be economic indicators or social indicators. It is very important to understand, though, whether the environment is driving this problem, these social economic problems, or whether it is being affected by these problems. So here we have a broad set of issue identification type of indicators. The second group is indicators for policy formulation. And the third one is for policy assessment. At the policy formulation level, we don't have a lot of information because these are new indicators. So in a way, we want to begin tracking right now the indicators that identify the policies that we want to implement. Fossil fuel subsidies is a good example. We know they are being implemented. Many countries use them. But somehow it's very difficult to understand these policies because they are not being accounted for from the very beginning, but they're being spread across a number of different budgetary items in the budget of the government that makes it very cumbersome to identify them. So we are looking at options where we may want to track ecosystem services and the payment for ecosystem services, or incentive for energy efficiency and renewable energy, these type of things. So that when we implement a policy, we don't blame the policy if it doesn't work, but we're able to target that we managed to raise the right amount of money because the provision we implement may be the perfect one, but it wasn't just successful because it didn't raise enough money. And this goes in a way in the direction of informing decision-making because often, especially when there is a transition with the government, if GDP or some of these outcome indicators are not good enough, the next government will change the policy completely, even if in practice it was a good policy. It's just that we couldn't get the results quite yet. Then the third group, as I said, is policy assessment. This is where we apply really the green economy approach, where we assess the impact of a policy for social, for economic, and environmental indicators. So in this case, we certainly want to track indicators for problem identification because a policy has to solve the problem, otherwise it's ineffective. Then we want to see whether we managed to raise enough money, implement investment as an enabling condition, and finally we want to see whether the society at large is profiting from that. So we'll have impact on employment, we have access to resources, for instance. We'll have all these impacts that in a way help improving quality of life and what being. So practically speaking, we are comparing investments, the avoided costs that have been driven by the implementation of the policy, and the added benefits, all across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Every policy has impacts across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. If we take sustainable forest management, for instance, or ecological agriculture, as they work together with agroforestry, for instance, we'll see that in the case of central Calimantan, for work we have done with UNEP, UNDP, and WWF, the trends, so indicators for the issue of identification, are that deforestation is increasing. Not only because of the practices that have been used, but also because with deforestation there is an increase of sedimentation, so sediments accumulating in rivers, which makes so that barges to transport coal and other products cannot be used full-time, not every day around the year. So roads are being created by mining companies. This requires an investment, an extra cost. So the issue is identified by the fact that the profitability of these companies is declining, that rivers cannot be used, not only for businesses, but also for personnel used by villagers in general. And there are some avoided costs that would be achieved if we changed the course of things, like for instance the cost of creating the road, which could be avoided if we were to use the forest in a more sustainable way, which would allow us to use the rivers again. Positive impacts may be more employment specifically because normally sustainable agriculture practices, agroforestry and so on, require more labor-intensive practices, but at the same time, potentially they could lead to markup, so higher prices for sustainable products if they can reach a market, which would lead to higher profitability. So we have potential problems that have to do with the profitability of companies, which if they go bad then will lose also jobs for the local population. We have a policy that could be the amount of incentive or the payment for ecosystem services that is being paid or transferred, maybe from downstream to an upstream community, for instance, and then we have positive impacts that can be measured for social, for economic and environmental impacts. None of them is a critical challenge from my point of view, because we have examples of success. The first one I think is knowledge. Knowledge of a green economy is one. I've worked with over 20 countries on green economy and every time we need to use a different definition, which is good and a bad thing. It is bad because there are always misunderstandings and misconceptions about what the green economy is. It is good because when we go through the process, it forces stakeholders to think about what the green economy is to them. So it improves the understanding of the benefits that can come out of using a green economy approach. So knowledge is the first barrier. The second one is the tools that are being used. We can think about national governments, what happens here in Jakarta and what happens in Central Kalimantan. Of course, the type of models that have been used in Jakarta are a lot more sophisticated than what has been used in Central Kalimantan. There are commonalities, though, that most of the planning that has been done is economic planning. It's not related to land use. It's about environmental performance, management of stocks and flows of natural resources. So these tools, like policies normally done in a silo, there is a ministry doing economic policy, another one doing agricultural policy and energy policy and so on, the models and tools that are being used are also sectoral. So that is a challenge. So the tools that we have been using for years, not only here but most governments, do not support communication and exchange of information with sectoral policy, meaning that often we end up with an optimal sectoral policy because the models tell us that this is what we should do to get the results that we want. But it just turns out, in most of the cases, that the optimal sectoral policy is not that good when we take a systemic view. So knowledge of the green economy and how it works, what it means is one problem. The second problem is the tools we use in understanding what the green economy is and what benefits we have. Then of course there is the political will that's another potential issue with all considerations about governance, about complexity of managing a system that has found a way to self-regulate itself over the years. There are a few. I move away from Indonesia only. But when I work here, when I work in Africa, normally green economy is trees. It's green, so green economy means forestry. Governments tend to forget or not consider that the green economy has two main axes when it comes to sectors. We have those that rely on natural resources, like forestry for instance, and water and agriculture and so on, but we also have other sectors like industry, manufacturing, energy and so on and so forth that rely on technology meaning that they want to improve the way resources have been managed to support productivity. When I work in Latin America, often green economy is being seen as a way to influence governments not to produce the natural resources. So the mining sector becomes very relevant there, which of course is important here as well, but it's a different approach. So in that case, it's been seen as the UN or the UACD or other international organizations to influence the season making at the country level. In other cases instead, it's being seen as a holistic approach that has nothing to do with practical implementation. So the green economy is this high level discussion about sustainability. It's not that different from sustainable development and hence it's somewhat useless. So it really changes. It really changes depending on the context. What I see that helps is large events like Rio, Rio plus 20 the conference, it's about every government that was serious about green economy prepared the report. Even if the materials were not very sophisticated, it led them to think about what the green economy means at the country level and help just that process understanding better what the opportunities are. Very common, yes. There are multiple reasons for that. There are several ones. One is institutions. Governments are set up quite a while across the board but they're not really used to working together all the time. Another one is the professional language that experts will speak. And this is because an economist uses different terminology that an expert on social issues would use or an expert on natural resources would use. So it's very difficult for them to communicate. One example is the government of Malaysia when they developed their last 10-year plan, experts in the main sectors that they wanted to analyze to Kuala Lumpur and to Putrajaya where the government is located for a week to have meetings and define the best possible roadmap for the country. All these experts were sitting in different rooms and never talked to each other. So at the end of the process they had excellent sectoral plans but when they started reviewing them all at once they didn't really make a lot of sense. So this is a very common issue for systemic approaches. We need system models, as I said at the very beginning that consider the interactions of different parts of the system. We have examples for instance the International Energy Agency has been working on energy only estimating the cost of climate in a way rather than considering investment and that is mostly because they project energy demand with a fixed GDP growth rate 3.5% a year and they estimate that the cost of reducing climate change, so lowering emissions to 400-450 parts per million is about 1% of GDP. This is repeated 40 times in their annual outlook the World Energy Outlook. In only a few instances they mentioned that reducing energy to that extent allows households or the private sector to save about $800 billion a year in energy costs and it ends there. So my question really is and with the models I developed is what happens with these $800 billion? How are they going to be reinvested? How can they support the economy? So it turns out that potentially it becomes more challenging to solve the climate issue because the more we save the more we spend and what we spend has an impact on energy consumption, on natural resource use and so on and so forth. But unless we take a systemic approach we will not be able to understand that there are these feedbacks that represents a one-to-one relationship. So if anything, if you're ready because we know that something might happen we reduce the risks, we improve the environment for investments so there will be more certainty about the impacts and the benefits. So taking a systemic approach is really important. I think just to conclude that there are many opportunities. There are similarities with the work that was done on sustainable development. This is not in competition with sustainable development it's a way to operationalize that the green economy is a vehicle for reaching sustainable development and all the expertise that we can get is needed to truly take a systemic approach which means really integrating knowledge we're not doing anything new. We're integrating knowledge to make sure that we can make the best of it rather than reinventing the wheel another time. So it is very important that we come together and work at different levels could be government, private sector and so on because some of the green economy investments may not make sense from an economic point of view only the private sector goes for that or only the public sector decides to go for it but if we combine both words in a way, we'll see that we can share the cost and we can also then share the benefits in the minimum and longer term.