The financial crisis and interrelated climate and food crises have become defining parameters for policy-making today. The Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010 asserts that these crises offer a window of opportunity to embark on a path of more resilient and sustainable economic growth, including in low-income and least developed countries.

The Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010: Promoting Poles of Clean Growth to Foster the Transition to a more Sustainable Economy places particular emphasis on the transition to a more sustainable economy in the 140-plus low-income and least developed countries, which - although they did not cause the economic, financial, climate and food crises (for instance, they account for less than 10 per cent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions of all developing countries) - have to bear the brunt of these crises.

How can they mitigate these interrelated crises while transiting to a qualitatively and structurally different growth and development model?

Based on an in-depth analysis of the root causes of the current systemic economic and financial crisis, the Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010 highlights the need for a proactive mitigation strategy that addresses ecological, social and financial reform in an interrelated way, tying new green growth poles to job- and income-generating activities and financial reform.

The Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010 singles out three clean growth "poles" (i.e. enhancing energy/material/resource efficiency; mainstreaming sustainable agriculture; and harnessing renewable energy for sustainable rural development) that can effectively "magnetize" key parts of the economy of these developing countries and thus lead to relatively quick clean growth impulses that, in the short and medium term, have negative costs and short payback periods. In this regard, the Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010 counters the myth that currently only a limited number of low-cost mitigation opportunities exist, and that more effective mitigation could be achieved only with new technologies.

The analysis confirms that many of the required technologies already exist, but that creating the necessary economic incentives and structures will be the most significant political challenge.

The Trade and Environment Review 2009/2010 highlights the importance of far more proactive government roles in particular in stimulating structural change and related technological progress so that the structural and technological effects lead to a qualitatively different growth and development path that compensates for the negative ecological impact of the scale effect of economic growth.

This will require a far more pronounced use of active industrial policies reversing the trend of governmental passiveness advocated under the neoliberal growth paradigm. Such a shift to active industrial policies may require bigger policy space under current rules of the multilateral trading system.