Working Towards Sustainable Development: Opportunities for Decent Work and Social Inclusion in a Green Economy

The present report has been prepared by the Green Jobs Initiative1 and the International Institute for Labour Studies at the ILO as a contribution to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development ‘Rio+20’ in June 2012. It contains a number of key findings to be considered by world leaders as they are setting out to chart new pathways to sustainable development. This report shows that the overuse of natural resources, such as forests, fish and clean water, and the rising levels of pollution, including emissions of greenhouse gases, are increasingly exceeding planetary boundaries. As a result, the natural processes and systems which are vital to the livelihoods of people are being disrupted. The damage to economies and to society caused by environmental degradation has the potential to undo many of the gains in development and poverty reduction achieved over the past decades.