OECD Environmental Performance Reviews provide independent assessments of countries’ progress towards their environmental policy objectives. Reviews promote peer learning, enhance government accountability, and provide targeted recommendations aimed at improving countries’ environmental performance, individually and collectively. They are supported by a broad range of economic and environmental data and evidence-based analysis. Each cycle of Environmental Performance Reviews covers all OECD member countries and selected partner countries.
This report is the third Environmental Performance Review of France. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on energy transition and biodiversity.
OECD Environmental Performance Reviews provide independent assessments of countries’ progress towards their environmental policy objectives. Reviews promote peer learning, enhance government accountability, and provide targeted recommendations aimed at improving environmental performance, individually and collectively. They are supported by a broad range of economic and environmental data, and evidence-based analysis. Each cycle of Environmental Performance Reviews covers all OECD countries and selected partner economies.
This report is the first Environmental Performance Review of Estonia. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on waste and materials management, and mining and the environment.
OECD Environmental Performance Reviews provide independent assessments of countries’ progress towards their environmental policy objectives. Reviews promote peer learning, enhance government accountability, and provide targeted recommendations aimed at improving environmental performance, individually and collectively. They are supported by a broad range of economic and environmental data, and evidence-based analysis. Each cycle of Environmental Performance Reviews covers all OECD countries and selected partner economies.
This report is the third Environmental Performance Review of Korea. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on waste and materials management, and environmental justice.
OECD Environmental Performance Reviews provide independent assessments of countries’ progress towards their environmental policy objectives. Reviews promote peer learning, enhance government accountability, and provide targeted recommendations aimed at improving environmental performance, individually and collectively. They are supported by a broad range of economic and environmental data, and evidence-based analysis. Each cycle of Environmental Performance Reviews covers all OECD countries and selected partner economies. The most recent reviews include Chile and France (2016).
This report is the third Environmental Performance Review of New Zealand. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on water resources management and sustainable urban development.
New Zealanders enjoy a high environmental quality of life and access to pristine wilderness. However, New Zealand’s growth model, based largely on exploiting natural resources, is starting to show its environmental limits with increasing greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution.
The manufacture of clean energy goods and provision of clean energy services, vital to climate change mitigation efforts, increasingly takes place through globally dispersed supply chains. In these supply chains, parts and components often cross borders multiple times before feeding into a clean energy power plant that is set up with the help of foreign or domestic firms that provide services such as design, engineering and construction as well as operations and maintenance. Non-tariff measures such as standards have the potential to impact trade much more than tariffs and nowhere is this truer than for solar-photovoltaic (PV). Policymakers in the trade as well as energy spheres thus need to be aware of the type of standards that are being set along various segments of the value chain for solar-PV for both goods and services as well as the standards development organisations that are involved.
The Environmental Goods Agreement (EGA), initiated in 2014, is intended to reduce tariffs on a list of goods by the signatories, after which concessions will be extended to all WTO members based on the most-favoured-nation principle. While the main objective for reducing tariffs on environmental goods in an accelerated manner is environmental concerns, including the need to address climate change, it also makes good economic sense. Among the benefits are reduced consumer prices for environmental goods. Moreover, EGA tariff elimination can spur the uptake of energy efficient goods, in turn resulting in energy savings.
This paper looks into the case of possible consumer benefits of the EGA in the United States. The authors find that total household savings from the price effect of EGA tariffs cuts overall would amount to roughly $845 million per year, disproportionally benefitting lower-income households. Moreover, the paper estimates that an increased use of energy-efficient light bulbs could save 238 million kilowatt hours, which is equivalent to 124,000 tons of coal each year, or 120% of the greenhouse gas emissions from coal in the state of Maine.