Insights Blog

Globally, the effects of climate change are felt with rising temperatures, droughts, heatwaves, and more frequent and severe storm events impacting water quantity and quality. In response, water managers need to ensure that communities are resilient to water scarcity pressures and water excesses and that the natural system and its associated ecosystem services are protected and enhanced. For cities, the primary strategies available to enhance the resilience to climatic extremes include applying demand management, developing alternative water sources, and implementing blue-green infrastructure (BGI).

The impact of COVID-19 has put a strain on healthcare systems throughout the world. Investing in the sustainable use of energy and water, sound management of medical waste and advanced digital solutions would ease the burden and help improve the health of people and the planet.

This blog was originally published on OECD Environment Focus on 2 December 2020. By Andrew Prag and Guy Halpern, OECD Environment Directorate Almost all economic sectors have suffered due to the evolving COVID-19 crisis. For the oil and gas industry, already battered on one side by low prices due to an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and on the other by the push to decarbonise the global economy, the crisis hit at an especially challenging time.

Governments are in uncharted territory as they respond to the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic — but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn from the past. The most recent comparison is the global financial crisis that began in 2007. There are important lessons that emerged, especially from the forward-thinking governments that included sustainability projects as part of their economic stimulus packages.

Digital adoption has triggered qualitative changes for a green economy and renewable energy transition. However, for a transformation to happen, policymakers need to strategically address new business models that embrace the development and deployment of digital technologies for data generation, storage, transmission and analysis.

Every drop of water is precious in western Rajasthan. This sun-baked swathe of arid land is dotted with ‘dhanis’, or small settlements comprising of 50-100 people and a few thousand of their domesticated animals. Remote villages such as Kisangarh and Girduwala, located close to the India-Pakistan border are a part of the Thar desert ecosystem, characterized by sandy plain and dune landscape interspersed with grasses and hardy bushes such as ‘aakdo’ and ‘thor’. This region receives less than 100-200 mm rainfall in a good year and depends solely on groundwater for sustenance.

Women herding goats in Girduwala. Photo by Namrata Ginoya/WRI India

To achieve a sustainable future, the world clearly has two priorities that must come before all others. The first is to ensure that all citizens have access to the means of satisfying their basic needs. The second is to evolve practices that bring the environmental resource base on which their lives and future integrally depend, back to its full health and potential productivity.  To achieve these two primary goals requires urgent action on two fronts. We must immediately get the public, governments and the international community to commit to:

The ocean economy, which contributes upwards of $1.5 trillion in value added to the global economy, was particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a projected loss of $1.9 billion for international shipping carriers alone. Coastal communities were hardest hit, with an estimated $7.4 billion fall in GDP across Small Island Developing States due to the decline in tourism.

In 2018 GGKP set out an initial research programme on natural capital and green growth, grouped into three overarching themes of Data, Metrics and Policies. Under this programme five papers were commissioned. This note summarises the key insights of these papers.

At this summer’s Oxford University Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) Digital Dialogues , a conversation between top scientists in the field took a deeper dive into the opportunities and hazards of NbS to address climate change. This timely conversation highlighted how we as policy makers, corporate leaders, environmentalists and the general public gravitate towards simple solutions and prefer to adopt cures that require the least of us. The conversation also shone a light on the danger of assuming that climate change can be addressed with NbS and without decarbonization of the world’s economy. A video of the dialogue can be found here and the 90-minute investment of time is well worth it for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the issue, the possibilities and the challenges.