APO Green Productivity 2.0: Roadmap
Post date: Thursday, Oct 24, 2024 | 10:33 - View count: 414
The Asian Productivity Organization (APO) launched the Green Productivity (GP) concept in 1994 under a special cash grant from the Government of Japan. GP development was inspired by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Agenda 21. For three decades, GP has guided APO member economies in enhancing economic prosperity, productivity growth, and environmental performance.
A training course on GP held since 2001 in Vietnam has developed a critical mass of GP specialists to act as trainers, consultants, and practitioners for enterprises across the Asia-Pacific. The accreditation of certification bodies on GP in Indonesia in 2023 and in Singapore and Thailand in 2024 reaffirmed the role of the APO as an institution builder and clearinghouse for productivity information at the regional level.
Sustainability is a worldwide goal. Global sustainability initiatives such the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2000, Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, and Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 call for evolution in terms of focuses, approaches, and targets. The APO, as part of its mission to contribute to the sustainable socioeconomic development of Asia and the Pacific and under its 2025 vision of “Inclusive, innovation-led productivity growth in the Asia-Pacific,” developed a roadmap to expand and deepen the GP concept under another special cash grant from the Government of Japan.
The publication, APO Green Productivity 2.0: The Road Ahead, reports activities carried out in developing the GP 2.0 Roadmap for future APO activities and initiatives. The identification of 30 key approaches with corresponding enablers and technologies; creation of a Project Bank covering the agriculture, consumption, manufacturing, and service sectors; and development of the GP 2.0 ecosystem will equip policymakers with informed decision-making tools. Implementation of activities under GP 2.0 Roadmap will also build capacity at individual level, strengthen triple bottom lines at organizational level, and facilitate informed decision-making at policy level through the development of systems, schemes, digital tools, and databanks with the involvement of sectorspecific technical experts, government institutions, academia, and think tanks.
The development of Green Productivity (GP) 2.0 is crucial to setting the APO’s GP initiative on a new trajectory aligned with the increasing global awareness and actions to achieve sustainability. This endeavor requires confronting the complexities presented by contemporary sustainability frameworks such as net-zero emission policies and the UN SDGs, making the project inherently challenging. GP plays a vital role in achieving sustainability, a shared global goal. Following more than a year of extensive discussions and brainstorming, GP 2.0 has been successfully conceptualized as an ecosystem with clearly defined focuses, projects, approaches, enablers, methodologies, and timelines.
Between late 2022 and early 2024, the TWG, comprising members from the Republic of China (ROC), the Islamic Republic of Iran (I.R. Iran), Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, was commissioned to develop GP2.0 approaches and a roadmap. Dr. Ha Minh Hiep, Acting Director General of the Commission for Standards, Metrology and Quality of Vietnam (STAMEQ), APO Director for Vietnam, represented Vietnam as member of the TWG. The TWG collaborated with GP experts to identify approaches, with corresponding enablers, technologies, and methodologies, for developing a roadmap of activities. This roadmap will serve as a reference for APO activities in the coming decades in endeavors to achieve overall socioeconomic growth at the regional level. GP 2.0 represents an evolution from previous GP initiatives, responding to global sustainability trends since the launch of GP.
APO GP 2.0: The Road Ahead: https://www.apo-tokyo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/APO-GREEN-PRODUCTIVITY-2.0_PUB.pdf
