Welcome Address

DR. EDUARDO T. GONZALEZ
President, Development Academy of the Philippines

Let me first extend our warmest greetings to our distinguished guests and companions from the Asian Productivity Organization; the United Nations Environment Programme; the Asian Development Bank; the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Office of the President of the Republic of the Philippines; our notable environment experts, participants coming from different countries, and also to our fellow Filipinos, welcome and mabuhay!

For those who are not yet familiar with this term mabuhay, it means long live.

It is our way of welcoming our foreign friends on the country.

In behalf of the Development Academy of the Philippines, I would like to express that we are greatly honored to host for the second time, this World Conference on Green Productivity, with the theme "Looking Beyond the Johannesburg Summit for Sustainable Development."

I must say, this endeavor is a significant part of historical developments in the global effort to sustain our environment. As the 1992 Earth Summit inspired the First World Conference on Green Productivity held in 1996, so has the Johannesburg World Summit, held just last September this year, inspired this Second World Conference on Green Productivity.

The Johannesburg Summit has directed actions towards meeting difficult challenges, including improving people's lives and conserving our natural resources in a world that is subject to what we call the "Second Law of Thermodynamics", entropy, or simply degeneration.

We have the depleting ozone layer, extinction of wild animals, worsening pollution in sea, air and land, poverty, drought, forest degradation and many more.

Taking action towards overcoming these difficulties are not easy at all. I won't say that Green Productivity is the "cure-all" technique. But we strongly believe, that GP is one solution to the root cause of environmental degradation. By enabling businesses to take environment cautions while engaging into their profitable ventures, our environment will become safer, therefore contributing to the welfare of humanity.

By this time, I believe, Green Productivity or GP is not anymore a new philosophy to us. The Manila Declaration on GP, yielded by the First World Conference, has generated various efforts to intensify the promotion of Green Productivity over the past six years in the Asia Pacific Region and in many other countries. Green Productivity, as a principle and strategy, has gained wider understanding, stronger support and eventually been applied in several areas such as management system, appropriate technology, occupational health and safety, energy, and many others.

With the support of the Asian Productivity Organization as well as other international organization, much effort has already been made to establish Green Productivity in the Philippines. Green Productivity has taken its roots especially among the Small and Medium Enterprises through the GP Demonstration, Dissemination Assistance and Promotion programs.

The Development Academy of the Philippines spearheaded the GP promotion among local businesses and tried to influence them to adopt cleaner technologies and environmental management systems. With the aim of producing high quality as well as environment-friendly goods and services, awareness and training programs were carried our for the Small and Medium Enterprises located in the different regions of the country.

Now, let me take you to discovering what is ahead, and what are the connections and or distinctions of this conference to the first one:

While the first conference pursued new strategies that would ensure productivity in harmony with the environment, this conference will review and evaluate these strategies and define the GP future directions in the wake of the Johannesburg Summit.

The first conference focused on cleaner technologies, financing, human resources development and technology transfer. This conference will tackle, in addition to the ones mentioned, the current and emerging concerns such as poverty reduction, water and energy issues, and policy matters at the macro level.

Like the first one, this conference shall also attempt to integrate the relevance of GP to various sectors such as the industries, SMEs, government, academe and communities.

Finally, as the conference theme suggests us to look beyond, I exhort everyone to go beyond what will happen in the next three days; that our sharing of insights and ideas, experiences and practices will not be an end itself, but this will serve as our inspiration and motivation to help transform this world into a nurturing and productive environment.