The multiple crises – the financial crash, hunger, climate change and resource scarcity – demonstrate emphatically that neoliberal market globalization cannot fulfill its promises: namely to bring about the optimal allocation of resources on the entire planet and thus be a win-win game for all. This also implies the failure of the concept of sustainability put forward at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. That concept was optimistic about the compatibility of economic growth, resource protection and social justice. The United Nations has proposed a Global Green New Deal based on a Green Economy, as the new guiding principle for the Rio+20 Conference. This is its effort to salvage the concept of sustainability, which has lost credibility. The Green Economy seeks to point a way out of the financial, climate and energy crisis and simultaneously make the connection to the Millennium Development Goals and poverty alleviation.

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