The Global Green Growth Institute, a Seoul-initiated international green growth body, has improved its budget transparency and remains committed to achieving its goal, the body’s new director-general said Friday.

In late 2012, South Korea’s state auditor said in a report that GGGI was found to have misused its budget and recommended the organization make efforts to boost transparency in its spending.

The 21-member entity was launched that year to promote sustainable economic growth.

“I think it is fair to say GGGI had a difficult childhood.

There was a Korean audit report sometime ago which came to a number of very negative results,” GGGI Director-General Yvo de Boer said in a news conference in Seoul.

The former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change started his four-year term at the helm of GGGI earlier this week.

“The important thing is that all of those recommendations have been acted on by the organization,” the GGGI chief said.

Following the report, Norway, one of GGGI’s financial supporters, had ended its financing of the body earlier this year before deciding to restore it recently, according to the GGGI chief.

“(The report) led to Norway and other (supporting) countries reviewing GGGI’s international projects, (but) since then, Norway has decided to restore its financial support to GGGI,” de Boer said.

“So, undeniably, GGGI had a troubled childhood but it is now becoming a quite respectable adolescent.”

Expressing his vision on the GGGI seat, he said, “My short-term goals are to help countries understand how they can give real meaning to a different model of economic growth, that allow them to be more sustainable and to enhance the well-being of people and at the same time, decrease pressure in terms of finite global resources.”

“I very much look forward to supporting countries to enable them to make the global transition to a green growth pathway,” he said. “The shift to a green economy will ultimately bring opportunities for countries to reduce environmental risk while heralding in the new light of prosperity.” (Yonhap)