Sri Mulyani Indrawati Quotes

I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

Cities can be the engine of social equity and economic opportunity. They can help us reduce our carbon footprint and protect the global environment. That is why it is so important that we work together to build the capacity of mayors and all those concerned in planning and running sustainable cities.

In the end, I think the majority of Romanian society will understand that if we respect environmental protection standards, if we have benefits in taxes, royalties, jobs, we should do what all the modern countries in Europe and beyond are doing to take advantage of their natural resources.

Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

Energy is necessary for economic growth, for a better quality of life, and for human progress.

We need a comprehensive focus on infrastructure that supports not just transportation but also broadband, education, healthcare, and our environment.

Technology is vital. We have to have development in new technology if we're going to solve these environmental problems without throwing humanity back in poverty.

Environmental protection and economic development are not in conflict. Environmental protection is not a burden but a source for innovation. It can increase competition, create jobs, and lifts the economy.

Every few decades, we have an opportunity to make a drastic change to the way we live our lives. We get a chance to design the building blocks of our daily routines, the infrastructure that will support and accompany us for the years to come - from the trains and trams we ride, the offices we work in, to the energy that powers our homes.

The growth that we want is one that brings real benefits to the people, raises quality and efficiency of development, and contributes to energy conservation and environmental protection.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

China should cut heavy industries' share in gross domestic output by 9 percentage points between 2013 and 2030 to meet its pollution cuts target.

In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that's an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

We're becoming a planet of a thousand new major cities. The economy of the 21st century is a city-building economy. It's within our power to make it a carbon zero one, too; and to be blunt, civilization depends on our success.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

After working in cities for nearly 40 years, I am telling you that every city can improve its quality of life in less than three years, no matter the scale or the financial conditions.

We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.

Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century.

I want to see a connected and progressive future for Australia, where we harness our greatest natural resources: sun, wind, and brain power.

What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.