This year to mark World Environment Day Miriam Kennet Green Economics Institute Director spoke in Brussels as part ofthe European Commissions Green Week, and as a guest of Friends of Europe on a platform with Tony Long International Director of WWF, and also with the Head of the European Environment Agency, Professor Jaqueline McGlade and Willemien Bax head of the European Consumer Council as well as the commissioners for Innovation and Enterprise at the European Commission. She also supported a talk with Professor Mayer Hillman on carbon rationing and carbon off setting,with Tanguay de Monceau of Carbon Logic.

There is a new initiative on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity which will be similar to the economics of climate change by Nicholas Stern, which the Institute will contribute to in the months to follow.

Pictures from the events will be posted in the website shorty.

The Green Economics Institute is also supporting an initiative from Geo sciences, Planet Earth, which seeks to integrate these complementary ideas of green economics and geo sciences, ignoring the facts of life and the facts of the earth in our economics is starting to cause real and lasting and irrevocable damage, and Planet Earth will be taking a stall at our forthcoming conference in July at Oxford University.

In Green Week in Europe is it most important to consider what this all means and the following article is from yahoo and reminds us how social and environmental justice are both completly connected- and that you cant have one without the other:

pa.press.net

Thursday, 05 June 2008

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sinking country in climate warningSinking country in climate warning

The leader of a country slowly being submerged by the Pacific Ocean says for his nation climate change is an issue of survival, not economic development.

Kiribati President Note Tong told an environment conference in New Zealand that efforts to control man's impact on the global climate, such as World Environment Day's Kick the Carbon Habit campaign, came too late for his nation.

The nation's highest point is now just two yards above sea level.

He said: "We may already be at the point of no return."

Climate change, he said, "is not an issue of economic development, it's an issue of human survival".

Mr Tong was speaking at a World Environment Day forum, presented by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Miriam Kennet June 2008