Green economy has been proposed as a means for catalysing national policy development and international cooperation to respond to climate change related crises and support sustainable development. The concept has received significant international attention over the past few years, which has resulted in a rapidly expanding literature on the topic. Despite the growing international interest in green economy, negotiations among countries on the concept in the lead up to the Rio+20 conference were challenging, partly due to the lack of an internationally agreed definition or universal principles. This document provides an overview of recent literature on green economy and the related concepts of green growth and low carbon development. In most cases, a web link and citation have been included allowing the reader to easily access more information on the issue.
What kind of clean-energy support measures can be maintained under international trade rules and what cannot? Policy certainty reflected within a clear and coherent trade and energy governance regime is critical for boosting investor confidence and fostering clean energy investments. Ambiguity on clean energy support measures within WTO rules could cast a chilling effect on domestic efforts to scale up sustainable energy. One way of dispelling such ambiguity is through a possible sustainable energy trade agreement (SETA). This paper emphasises the importance of understanding what are the types of clean energy subsidies countries usually provide, why countries provide them, and how they fit into existing legal mechanisms. A SETA, by simultaneously addressing these questions and clarifying existing WTO subsidy rules, would add to the certainty and predictability of a country’s trade and investment climate.
Catalysing Ocean Finance takes stock of how effective these instruments have been in helping countries to address challenges facing the oceans and explore how they could be successfully scaled up.
This paper recommends a system of upstream taxes on fossil fuels, combined with refunds for downstream emissions capture, to reduce carbon and local pollution emissions. Motor fuel taxes should also account for congestion and other externalities associated with vehicle use, at least until mileage-based taxes are widely introduced. An examination of existing energy/environmental tax systems in Germany, Sweden, Turkey, and Vietnam suggests that there is substantial scope for policy reform. This includes harmonizing taxes for pollution content across different fuels and end-users, better aligning tax rates with values for externalities, and scaling back taxes on vehicle ownership and electricity use that are redundant (on environmental grounds) in the presence of more targeted taxes.
This paper summarizes the additional uncertainty that is created by climate change, and reviews the tools that are available to project climate change (including downscaling techniques) and to assess and quantify the corresponding uncertainty.
Assuming that climate change and other deep uncertainties cannot be eliminated over the short term (and probably even over the longer term), it then summarizes existing decision-making methodologies that are able to deal with climate-related uncertainty, namely cost-benefit analysis under uncertainty, cost-benefit analysis with real options, robust decision making, and climate informed decision analysis. It also provides examples of applications of these methodologies, highlighting their pros and cons and their domain of applicability. The paper concludes that it is impossible to define the “best” solution or to prescribe any particular methodology in general.
Instead, a menu of methodologies is required, together with some indications on which strategies are most appropriate in which contexts.
These presentations are covering a broad range of conceptual and practical issues related to evaluating policy measures for stimulating improvements in the environmental performance of agriculture.