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The document highlights that SMEs, particularly in emerging economies, are essential for a fair economic transition due to their ability to integrate social and environmental purposes into local economies. While SMEs drive innovation and job creation, they face significant barriers, including a 'missing middle' financing gap where approximately 70% of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets lack access to credit. The brief recommends a shift from general support to tailored, needs-based approaches, including the creation of simple legal forms for social enterprises, support for informal self-organisation, and the alignment of local, national, and international policy frameworks to provide clarity for small businesses.

The briefing argues that the COVID-19 crisis exposed systemic fragilities and provides an opportunity to build resilience against climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality. It outlines ten priority options, including the adoption of green economy principles, the use of 'Green Deals', the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, and the implementation of gender-responsive recovery plans. The authors emphasize that recovery spending must align with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, particularly in the global South where public debt may limit fiscal space.

This report by the Green Economy Coalition reviews the first ten years of the SEED Awards (2005-2015), an initiative founded by UNEP, UNDP, and IUCN to support social and environmental enterprises. It analyzes the survival and impact of 202 SEED Winners across 37 countries, highlighting the role of multi-stakeholder partnerships and tailored support in fostering green and inclusive growth at the grassroots level.

The report highlights the transformative potential of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that operate with a 'triple bottom line' approach to benefit local environments and communities. It identifies systemic barriers to growth, including a lack of formal definitions for 'green enterprises,' prohibitive collateral requirements for loans, and a lack of financial literacy among entrepreneurs. Through case studies in India, Mongolia, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda, the document demonstrates how LGEs—ranging from organic farming and waste recycling to sustainable fisheries—are often excluded from public and private investment. The report concludes with recommendations for public finance institutions, private investors, and national policymakers to implement global taxonomies, support clustering models, and develop specific financial products for informal and micro-scale green businesses.

The policy brief contends that existing social contracts are broken due to rising inequality and distrust in institutions, which undermines climate resilience. It proposes building an intersectional alliance of climate and inequality champions to redefine a social contract that integrates climate justice, decent work, and human rights to facilitate a fair green transition. The document highlights various global examples of this shift, including citizen assemblies in France and legal challenges in South Africa.

The Green Economy Coalition and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance are seeking a UK-based expert in media, marketing, and communications to help develop a public narrative for economic transformation. The project aims to move beyond the crisis-focused language of NGOs and scientists to create a vision of a 'wellbeing economy' that is desirable to the average citizen. Initially piloting in the UK, the initiative seeks to build a 'network of the willing' among high-profile communicators—including advertisers, filmmakers, and journalists—to design campaigns that connect climate change to the need for systemic economic change. The goal is to shift public sentiment from fear to hope and eventually scale the model to other locations, such as Germany.

The briefing highlights the interconnectedness of economic and environmental systems exposed by COVID-19, urging governments to use recovery packages to shift toward a 'nature-positive' economy. While tools for valuing nature exist, the author notes that investment remains marginal due to a lack of political will and fiscal strain. The document proposes seven strategies for transformative change, including green fiscal reforms, full-cost accounting of natural capital, and the use of nature bonds to unlock private capital.

The Economics for Nature (E4N) partnership developed tools, networks, and best practices to embed the value of natural capital into government, business, and financial decision-making. Key achievements include the Green Economy Tracker, the '3-returns' investment framework, and the mainstreaming of natural capital into the EU Green Deal and African Development Bank programmes. The document identifies a divergence between OECD countries and debt-stressed nations in adopting these approaches and outlines four 'frontiers' for future progress: centering people and Indigenous knowledge, standardizing valuation frameworks, implementing systemic economic reform, and scaling nature-based solutions.

The Green Economy Coalition advocates for a systemic shift from narrow economic metrics like GDP toward a 'green economy' that prioritizes human wellbeing and ecological health. The report identifies five key action areas: redefining progress through new metrics, reforming financial flows to reduce short-termism, greening high-impact sectors (energy, food, housing, transport), investing in people to ensure inclusive growth, and managing natural systems to protect essential ecosystem services. It concludes with nine guiding principles for a fair and inclusive transition, emphasizing the need for multi-stakeholder engagement and a move away from resource-intensive growth.

The report argues that inequality and sustainability are deeply interlinked, with the wealthiest individuals contributing most to environmental degradation while the poorest bear the brunt of its impacts. Through case studies in the UK, India, and Kenya, and analysis of the energy, transport, waste, and food sectors, it identifies recurring patterns of 'double injustice' where marginalised groups are most vulnerable to climate change and pollution. The document highlights 'win-win' examples—such as distributed solar power in Bangladesh, Bus Rapid Transit in Bogotá, and insect farming in Thailand—to show that sustainable development can be designed to reduce inequality.

The document advocates for the adoption of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a 'shared language' to harmonise fragmented sustainability data across governments, businesses, and investors. It identifies three primary barriers to this alignment: the proliferation of disconnected datasets, tenuous links between data suppliers and users, and data inequalities affecting the poorest populations. To overcome these, the report proposes five principles: setting direction through benchmarking, connecting stakeholders, sharing open data, integrating goals into institutional DNA, and communicating progress through integrated reporting. The text highlights the systemic risk of ignoring these goals, using the 2011 Thailand floods as an example of how environmental shocks create global economic disruptions.

The report finds that most green economy plans lack meaningful participation from marginalised groups, fail to specifically target the poorest to reduce inequality, and do not sufficiently address the limits to growth or the urgency of the low-carbon transition.

The report evaluates South Africa's sustainability transition, arguing that the green economy is often treated as a sector rather than an economy-wide transformation. It critiques the 2011 Green Economy Accord as a 'public relations exercise' due to a lack of enforcement and monitoring, while praising the Socio-Economic Impact Assessment System (SEIAS) for improving the inter-disciplinary nature of policymaking despite internal capacity constraints.

The report introduces a framework for 'Inclusive Green Economies' (IGE) designed to decouple economic growth from resource consumption while ensuring social equity. It outlines five guiding principles—Wellbeing, Justice, Planetary Boundaries, Efficiency and Sufficiency, and Good Governance—and suggests ten catalytic activities to accelerate this transition. The document emphasizes that the transition is an adaptive process likely taking 10-20 years, requiring collaboration between governments, businesses, and civil society to move from awareness and pressure to policy decisions and behavioral change.

The document argues that the International <IR> Framework's multi-capital approach and emphasis on integrated thinking can help businesses identify and manage the risks and opportunities associated with the SDGs. It proposes a five-step process—understanding the external environment, identifying material issues, developing strategy, enhancing governance, and preparing an integrated report—to ensure that corporate value creation is aligned with sustainable development. The report emphasizes that the SDGs are interdependent and that businesses must manage trade-offs between different capitals to contribute effectively to the 2030 Agenda.

The report examines the relationship between natural capital and human prosperity, arguing that current economic systems fail to accurately measure, value, and manage nature. It highlights that while human wealth has increased, renewable natural capital is being depleted due to a lack of appropriate price signals and a flawed assumption that nature is easily substitutable by man-made capital. The authors propose integrating natural capital into comprehensive national wealth accounts and using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for protecting critical natural capital. Key recommendations include establishing Natural Capital Committees, using non-market valuation techniques, and supporting R&D for technologies that reduce pressure on nature.