Growing concerns about the environmental unsustainability of past economic growth patterns and increased awareness of a potential future climate crisis have made it clear that the environment and the economy can no longer be considered in isolation. At the same time, the financial and economic crisis has provided the opportunity for policy interventions aimed at encouraging recovery and renewed growth on more environmentally and socially sustainable grounds. A strategic vision is necessary to ensure that, during the crisis exit and beyond, the policies that governments will implement are the most appropriate from an economic efficiency, environmental integrity and social equity point of view, as well as coherent both at a national and an international level.
Energy consumption is growing in developing countries at a great pace and improvements in energy efficiency (EE) could provide opportunity for economic growth while providing broader access to energy and related services even from limited energy resources. This report underlines that moving the developing world towards a low carbon economy requires a scaling up of financing for EE. It examines the current role of climate finance in funding EE projects and the potential to channel funds to relevant EE projects under the new Green Climate Fund. The report focuses primarily on public climate finance flows from North to South, probing the current use of funds from multilateral development banks, bilateral financial institutions and carbon markets for energy efficiency projects in developing countries. The report makes eight recommendations on the design of climate and sustainable energy finance programmes to ensure that EE projects are adequately funded by climate finance.
This summary was prepared by Eldis.
The New Growth Strategy aims to create demand and jobs through regulatory reform and fiscal measures. The Strategy focuses on key challenges, notably climate change and population ageing, which can be turned into sources of growth. Given Japan’s precarious fiscal position, it is essential to co-ordinate spending related to the Strategy with the medium-term fiscal plan, in part by increasing the emphasis on regulatory reform. Such measures should cover the entire economy, rather than being limited to the seven areas identified in the Strategy. Among those areas, effectively promoting green innovation will require market-based instruments to place a price on carbon, preferably through a mandatory and comprehensive emissions trading system, to promote private investment, accompanied by a range of other policies. Achieving deeper economic integration with Asia depends on reducing support for agriculture to facilitate more bilateral and regional trade agreements, while bringing down barriers to foreign direct investment and foreign workers. Policies to expand venture capital would help launch innovative firms.
This is the third review of Mexico's environmental performance. It analyses progress in achieving a range of national objectives and international commitments, and presents 29 recommendations on how performance could be improved. Progress towards a green, low carbon economy is part of the assessment.
Moving towards low-carbon, high-efficiency energy systems, mitigating climate change, securing energy supplies, and resolving the imbalance of payments caused by energy imports, are impending problems that nations worldwide are striving hard to resolve. This paper addresses three aspects of this problem:
- the role of markets, prices, and governments in this energy transformation
- identification of policy interventions that can become productive investments in the future
- the potential for low-carbon, high-efficiency energy to drive green growth
The paper notes that the policy choices for an energy system transformation largely relate to:
This report presents, for the first time a local ‘green growth’ indicator framework. This indicator framework was developed from the OECD ‘green growth’ strategy at the national level, but modified to highlight issues of transition that are most relevant for local areas. The Copenhagen report is the first trialling of this approach, along with an indicator visualisation tool – or dashboard. The dashboard allows easy assessment of the progress of a particular local area in a number of indicator variables.
This report suggests a conceptual framework for the new statistical field “ICT and the environment” based on an existing OECD framework for information society statistics. Sources of official data to populate the framework are investigated and some relevant work has been identified. Given the serious environmental problems facing the world, and the potential for ICT to both lessen and worsen those problems, it is suggested that this field should be of more interest to official statisticians. A number of actions are recommended and they include: conducting new or expanded household and business surveys, expanding statistical classifications to better reflect ICT and the environment, ensuring that sample sizes are sufficient to enable better identification of ICT and environment data, and producing time series data on the topic. This summary was prepared by Eldis.
Mitigation and adaptation climate change policy cuts across all sectors of the economy and broader national priorities, such as poverty alleviation, sustainable development and economic growth. This paper outlines the evolution of the low-emission development strategies (LEDS) concept in the climate policy discourse and explores the existing strategies, action plans and documents. It defines LEDS as forward-looking national development strategies that encompass climate-resilient economic growth and looks at how they can ensure that they are effective and efficient in delivering intended goals. The aim of the paper is to:
Why were participant countries in the Rio+20 conferences (2012) not able to find any common ground on the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as they sought to identify a path for achieving “green economy” in the decades ahead? The current policy brief seeks to answer this question by examining the evolution of the global debate on IPRs and green technologies from the Earth Summit in 1992 to Rio+20.
The document indicates that: