Oct. 14, 2008 - A silver lining to the credit crunch: Governments can now retool their financial systems in support of green growth industries, says Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N.'s Climate Change Secretariat. (via Reuters)

"The credit crisis can be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for global green economic growth," de Boer told reporters at a news conference. "Governments now have an opportunity to create and enforce policy which stimulates private competition to fund clean industry."

The hitch, says de Boer, is that governments would have to take much of the money earmarked for a financial bailout and channel it toward developing nations to help them solve ecological problems instead.

Officials are set to meet next year to negotiate the follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. De Boer warned that "if available global capital is used primarily to refloat the financial world, we literally will sink the futures of the poorest of the poor. He did say, however, that a successful outcome to these negotiations would create new markets, investment opportunities and job creation.

A recent U.N. study found that global efforts to tackle climate change could create of millions of new green jobs in the coming decades.