In the context of the economies of the world becoming greener, this book provides a global and interdisciplinary overview of the condition of the world’s water resources and the infrastructure used to manage it. It focuses on current social and economic costs of water provision, needs and opportunities for investment and for improving its management. The book describes the large array of water policy challenges facing the world, including the Millennium Development Goals for clean water and sanitation, and shows how these might be met. There is a mixture of global overviews, reviews of specific issues and an array of case studies. It is shown how accelerated investment in water-dependent ecosystems, in water infrastructure and in water management can be expected to expedite the transition to a green economy. The book provides a key source of information for people interested in understanding emerging water issues and approaches that are consistent with a world that takes greater responsibility for the environment.
A key area of public policy is the question of how, and how much, to protect the environment. At the heart of this has been the heated debate over the nature of the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Is environmental sustainability economic growth or “green growth”, a contradiction in terms?
Avoiding the confusion that often surrounds these issues, Ekins provides rigorous expositions of the concept of sustainability, integrated environmental and economic accounting, the Environmental Kuznets Curve, the economics of climate change and environmental taxation. Individual chapters are organised as self-contained, state-of-the-art expositions of the core issues of environmental economics, with extensive cross-referencing from one chapter to another, in order to guide the student or policy-maker through these complex problems.
In recent years the manufacturing of renewable-energy technologies has become truly global. The associated rise in international investment and trade in goods and services related to renewable energy has been rapid, but it has not always been smooth. Already there have been challenges at the WTO, and the unilateral imposition of countervailing and anti-dumping duties, in response to some countries‘ policies on the grounds that they distort trade. Against this background, this paper surveys, through the lenses of market-pull and technology-push policies, the numerous domestic incentives used by governments to promote renewable energy, focusing on those that might have implications for trade — both those that are likely to increase opportunities for trade and those that may be inhibiting imports or promoting exports. Many OECD countries, and an increasing number of non-OECD countries, have established national targets for renewable energy. To help boost the rate of penetration of renewable energy in their economies, most of the same countries are providing additional incentives.
This report provides estimates of social and financial costs of environmental damage in India from three pollution damage categories: (i) urban air pollution, including particulate matter and lead; (ii) inadequate water supply, poor sanitation, and hygiene; (iii) indoor air pollution; and four natural resource damage categories: (a) agricultural damage from soil salinity, water logging, and soil erosion; (b) rangeland degradation; (c) deforestation; and (d) natural disasters. The estimates are based on a combination of Indian data from secondary sources and on the transfer of unit costs of pollution from a range of national and international studies. The quantification and monetary valuation of environmental damage involves many scientific disciplines including environmental, physical, and biological and health sciences, epidemiology, and environmental economics. Estimates of the costs of degradation are generally reported as a percent of conventional gross domestic product (GDP). This provides a useful estimate of the importance of environmental damages but it should not be interpreted that GDP will increase by a given percent if the degradation were to be reduced to zero.
The paper delves into the agreement to liberalise environmental goods and concludes that because applied tariffs on the defined list of goods are generally low, only a relatively small number of products will actually benefit from a tariff reduction. However, the paper notes that given the political importance of the achievement, the agreement may provide a positive experience to build on in other contexts. The APEC agreement marks the first time a group of major trading partners has managed to agree to a set of environmental products on which they will apply tariff reductions, in stark contrast with the stalled Doha negotiations on environmental goods and services.
Ethiopian society, economy and environment are so intimately interlinked that systematic attention is essential if clashes are to be resolved and synergies realised. For example, the majority of poor people are principally dependent on agriculture but, in turn, society is dependent on farmers managing land well to sustain water supplies, biodiversity and other environmental services. Such relationships are dynamic and increasingly intense: climate change, rising population, resource scarcities and price volatilities put them all under pressure. An integrated perspective that works operationally is needed – one that makes economic, social and environmental sense and that inspires stakeholders. The holistic approach that the Ethiopian Government has recently developed aims to tackle the problems inherent in growth paths that produce environmental problems, and to realise potentials from investing in Ethiopia’s natural assets.
The U.S. Congress charged the National Academies with conducting a review of the Internal Revenue Code to identify the types of and specific tax provisions that have the largest effects on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and to estimate the magnitude of those effects. To address such a broad charge, the National Academies appointed a committee composed of experts in tax policy, energy and environmental modeling, economics, environmental law, climate science, and related areas.
This volume examines the experiences of 21 developed and developing countries in adjusting their training provision to meet the new demands of a greener economy. Analysts started by identifying the drivers of transformation to a greener economy – changes in the physical environment itself and changes induced by government regulations, more efficient technologies and changes in consumer demand. Then they assessed the effect of these changes on employment, identifying areas of job growth and of job loss
Only then could researchers start to understand how skill requirements are changing and are expected to change in the future, and to examine how well national training systems are anticipating and responding to these new needs. Their analysis shows that skills development is critical to unlocking the employment potential of green growth, yet skills shortages are becoming an obstacle in realising this potential. The report recommends that countries devise strategies based on well-informed policy decisions, social dialogue, and coordination among ministries and between employers and training providers.
In June 2009, the OECD Council Meeting at Ministerial Level (MCM) adopted a Declaration on Green Growth (OECD 2009a). The declaration invited the OECD to develop a Green Growth Strategy to achieve economic recovery and environmentally and socially sustainable economic growth. The MCM Declaration broadly defines “green growth policies” as policies encouraging green investment in order to simultaneously contribute to economic recovery in the short term and help to build the environmentally friendly infrastructure required for a green economy in the long term. In terms of resource economics, such policies firstly need to guide industry to delink environmental degradation from economic or sales growth by reducing resource use per unit of value added (relative decoupling). At the same time, it would be essential to aim at further efforts towards achieving absolute reductions in the use of energy and materials to a sustainable level (absolute decoupling).