APEC Bulletin 12 October 2022
Charting new pathways inspired by the Bio-Circular-Green EconomyBy Sylwyn Calizo Jr.
Thailand, APEC’s host in 2022, has put forward the bio-circular-green economy as a cross-cutting, interconnected, and collaborative way of approaching environmental challenges.
Climate change is worsening. We can feel this in the recent onslaught of Typhoons Hinnamnor and Noru when they devastated communities and disrupted industries in Asia, or of Hurricane Ian when it flooded cities across America. We can sense this in the rising seawater, slowly encroaching on our coastal communities. In fact, about 167 million people in the APEC region are at risk of being displaced.
Indeed, climate change is a common concern, and rightly so, because many of our other challenges are connected to climate change—rising cost of living, creeping hunger, or deepening inequalities, among others. This tells us at least one thing: our solutions cannot be siloed. We need them to be cross-cutting, interconnected, and collaborative.
One way of developing such solutions is through the bio-circular-green (BCG) economy. It integrates policies across the bioeconomy, the circular economy, and the green economy and, by doing so, BCG economy solutions synergize the individual strengths of all three. To illustrate, economies produce waste as a consequence of economic activity, but the impact of these residuals on the environment can be mitigated or eliminated by using cleaner inputs (bioeconomy), reusing or recycling (circular economy), or incorporating ecosystem services into the production system itself (green economy).