To bypass sustainability would ignore international trends and measures that could place the country at the forefront of sustainable development. 

A new document by Growth South Africa is the key to halving poverty by 2014. Called the ‘Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative – South Africa (ASGI-SA)’, it notes that the growth rate averaged 3% between 1994 and 2003 and has averaged 4.5% since 2004. What ASGI-SA wants is an average 6% growth rate for the period 2010-2014. But in striving for these levels, what is key for economic policy makers is to realise is that if they want the South African economy to be globally competitive, they may need to take a careful look at what many of our competitors are doing to massively increase efficiencies, dematerialise their economies and integrate sustainability into mainstream economic thinking. Wouldn’t it be tragic if our national economic and infrastructure investment programmes built the kind of carbon intensive infrastructure that many other countries (including China) are trying to dismantle?