ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of how the green economy might develop in future. As the green economy is now widely established as a policy objective, there is a need to be able to measure progress to assess whether policy goals are being met. Currently, economic activity is often associated with high emissions, heavily polluting, waste-generating, resource-intensive, and ecosystem-damaging activities. With the rapid development of the internet and telecommunications, decision-makers now possess a wide range of ways to involve civil society, for example through social networks and crowdsourcing. Barbier suggests that the international community must establish new financial mechanisms for long-term funding of the green economy, highlighting the substantial amounts that could potentially be raised through fuel and tobacco taxes, financial transaction taxes, and investments from dedicated bond and sovereign wealth funds. The foundation of any sustainable economic system is employment, and therefore a functional green economy will need to ensure that it provides jobs.
