رشد استراتژی های سبز با طرح های کره ای

Korea has embarked on a far-reaching green growth strategy that promises to lay the foundations for a transition from a predominantly ‘brown’ to a green industrial system. In this paper the key features of the Korean approach to formulating and implementing a green growth strategy are outlined, and the progress achieved so far (2009–2012) is reviewed. Comparisons with China's green development strategy, as embodied in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011–2015), present themselves – in that both strategies are concerned with industrial restructuring and the building of new growth engines designed to create export platforms for the 21st century. Reductions in levels of carbon emissions flow from these industrial policy initiatives. The paper concludes that the Korean strategy is carefully crafted and implemented with full government commitment and leadership, demonstrating that such commitment is feasible in a democracy. What cannot be guaranteed is continuing commitment from successive political administrations.

The disappointment created by the failure of the UN's Kyoto process to develop effective global strategies to deal with both economic development and global warming issues is palpable. But the enthusiasm of delegates assembled at Copenhagen in December 2009 for the COP 15 event, who imagined that China and India might sign up for carbon emissions reduction targets that would halt their development in its tracks, was misguided – to put it mildly. If the international scene still shows little promise of effective climate action combined with effective action to alleviate poverty and accelerate development, then it is a different story when we look at the national level. Two countries have now adopted, and are implementing, five-year green growth plans, or strategies. These countries are China and South Korea (henceforth: Korea). Their green growth (or green development) strategies promise not just renewed industrial development and the creation of an export platform for the next decades, but also effective action to deal with carbon emissions at a national level. China's strategies are relatively well known, through the actions to adopt and implement the 12th Five year Plan (2011–2015) which devotes a large part of its attention, and future investments, to the greening of the Chinese economy. The Korean initiative dates from 2008, when the current President, Lee, Myung-bak, committed his government to a green growth strategy in a speech celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Republic. President Lee contrasted the first sixty years of the Republic of Korea's development, which saw spectacular improvements in per capita income fuelled by fossil fuels, and looked forward to the next sixty years with ‘low-carbon, green growth’ as the pillar of a new vision for the economy.1 Korea's green growth (GG) strategy was formulated initially as a 50 trillion won Green New Deal, to help the country get over the 2009 global financial crisis; more significantly it was then framed in terms of a five-year green growth plan (5YGGP) which has been vigorously promoted, over the years 2009–2013, as the centrepiece of the government's growth and development strategy [1]. The essential characteristic of both Korea's and China's approach is that they view climate change not as a cost but as an opportunity, and their strategies for dealing with it are couched as industrial policies, designed to stimulate the development of new green industries equipped with green technologies – conceived as new ‘growth engines’ for the economy. China, with its centralized authoritarian state, has not seen very much public debate devoted to its efforts to find a ‘green development’ strategy – as characterized by one of its leading economists, Dr Hu [2], [3] and [4]. Korea on the other hand is a vigorous democracy where there is noisy public debate, and where the Lee administration's policies have been subjected to widespread criticism. In this paper, I wish to analyse the content and achievements of the Korean GG strategy, to put these criticisms into some perspective.

There has been much (ill)-informed criticism in the foreign press (as well as the Korean press) of Korea's GG strategy as amounting to little more than a water engineering project [17]. This is because the Presidential Office, and the PCGG, have tended to give emphasis in their public statements to the Four Rivers Restoration project, a major water conservation effort under way in Korea. The Four Rivers Restoration (4RR) project is an ambitious re-engineering of four major rivers (including the Han River through Seoul) to provide for flood control and better water conservation. In related projects such as the Taehwa River in Ulsan, clean-up efforts have had dramatic effects in turning a once badly polluted waterway into an urban asset. In relation to the Han River the 4RR programme builds on the previous dramatic water engineering project that the incumbent president Lee Myung-bak oversaw when he was mayor of Seoul, namely the recovery and restoration of a waterway through the heart of Seoul, known as Cheonggyecheon. This project has reclaimed the centre of the city for citizens who now flock to walk along its banks both during the day and at night – but at continuing disapproval of politically motivated critics. It seems that President Lee can do nothing right in the eyes of some of his most vociferous critics, and the whole GG strategy has come to be identified with the 4RR project and become highly ‘political’ as a result. The danger in this is that it might be weakened or even disowned by the next government, to be installed after Presidential elections due to be held in December 2012 (on which, further discussion below). That said, it is clear that the GG strategy in Korea is about much more than the restoration of four rivers. If we take the three core areas of industrial transformation needed for any transition to a green economy, namely the substitution of renewable energy sources for conventional fossil fuels, the reduction of resource intensity and throughput through Circular economy eco-initiatives, and the targeting of green projects through eco-finance, then one would have to conclude that Korea is well on the way to achieving such a green transformation. It will have clear milestones completed by 2015 (such as the finalization of the smart grid pilot project on Jeju Island) and will be well on the way to the creation of new ‘green’ export-oriented industries (new growth engines) by the year 2020. The Korean GG strategy reveals that a strong role for government is needed if a country is to shift off its ‘business as usual’ pathway. Vested interests make it all but impossible to shift to new energy and resource pathways, in the absence of strong leadership being shown by government in the new directions. This is precisely the factor that has been present in the Korean case, and which can account for the remarkable success achieved so far. It is notable that Korea has formulated its GG strategy in terms of investments and their anticipated economic benefits (new engines of growth, job creation, exports) rather than in terms of costs – which is the traditional economic perspective. The debate in Korea on the GG strategy has focused on whether its benefits will be as real as envisaged – and not so much on its purported costs. A developmental focus emphasizes the benefits, while a traditional and mainstream economics focus emphasizes the costs. Many countries are being held back in their efforts to adopt green strategies because of the dominance of the economic perspective and its focus on costs rather than benefits. The debate in Korea has also focused on standards – for EVs, batteries, wind turbines, solar PV cells and a host of other green technologies. Standards in all these sectors are critical to future competitiveness. The emerging smart grid is central to these concerns: the competitive landscape involving technical standards for the smart grid is already taking shape, involving standards from the US, Europe, Japan and now China as well as international efforts. In April 2009, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a three-stage plan for developing comprehensive smart grid standards, calling on utilities, power equipment manufacturers, electrical energy users and standards bodies to come together in pursuit of such a goal; then in January 2010 NIST issued the first of no doubt many drafts in the form of its NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards [18]. Within the US, the professional engineers’ association IEEE is developing standards for smart grid interoperability, and by early 2011 already envisaged a suite of standards covering interoperability between power systems and terminal electrical apparatus. There are comparable smart grid standards efforts from the European Union (e.g. the European Committee for Electro-Technical Standardization (CEN-CENELEC-ETSI); Japanese standards developed under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) such as the ‘International standardization roadmap for smart grid’, announced in January 2010; and international open standards developed in Geneva by the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC). China too is getting in on the act. In August 2010, the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) – not yet a decade old as a stand-alone entity – issued its comprehensive ‘Framework and roadmap for strong & smart grid standards’. This comprehensive document reveals China's seriousness in building not just a smart grid but the technology that underpins it – and protecting this technology through Chinese standards and intellectual property. In this context, it would seem to be hazardous for Korea to seek to set national standards of its own. Korea's approach appears to be the safer (and wiser) course of promoting international cooperation to avoid proliferation of conflicting national standards (and as a fall-back, developing technology that can meet each of these competing standards). Either way, Korea clearly plans to be ready to adopt and specialize in any dominant smart-grid technology once one emerges (if ever).