Environment at a Glance 2015 updates key environmental indicators and relevant socio-economic and sectoral indicators to track OECD country progress on major environmental issues and inform policy development and evaluation. This year's edition includes increased coverage of environmentally related taxation, ODA and R&D expenditure.
Mozambique faces a range of environmental challenges and risks, including deforestation; declining fish stocks; land, water and air pollution; and loss and degradation in wetlands and rivers ,which could all be compounded by climate change and a growing population.
The focus of this report is to identify policy options for Green Fiscal Reform (GFR) in Mozambique. These policy options include the use of taxation and pricing measures, which raise revenues or lower expenditures, while furthering environmental goals by addressing environmental externalities and incentivizing green investment.
In addition to these policies, a range of viable GFR policy options that the government could consider were identified through research on the government’s environmental challenges and fiscal policy landscape, a national validation workshop, as well as a literature review and expert consultations on global best practices. These policy options could facilitate Mozambique’s green economy transformation by shifting behaviour and investment decisions, while concurrently helping to create fiscal space that could be used to promote social and green economy investments.
This report is an exploration of the role of international trade in increasing resource efficiency, reducing environmental impact and promoting equitable and inclusive growth. The value of international trade has increased over six-fold and its volume more than doubled between 1980 and 2010. This report examines upstream resource requirements - the materials, energy, land and water used in the country of origin for producing traded goods, but left behind as wastes and emissions. It focuses more on environmental efficiency than on economic efficiency, and explains how trade could be resource efficient by allowing commodities to be obtained from countries/locations where their production requires fewer resources and generates fewer environmental impacts than in others. However, as the publication underlines, higher trade levels, declining ore grades and decreasing energy returns upon energy investment, higher food demand and diminishing land productivity further increase the upstream resource requirements of trade, which could negate the benefits of a potentially more resource efficient allocation of extraction and production activities via world trade.
This study assesses the potential contribution of public– private partnerships to Inclusive Green Growth, which is one of the main goals of Dutch development cooperation. Inclusive Green Growth – or ‘the economics of sustainable development’ – implies that growth should enhance welfare for both current (inclusive) and future (green) generations. This warrants attention for both ecological sustainability and the distribution of resource access. To analyse the potential of partnerships for reaching Inclusive Green Growth objectives, nine ongoing partnerships were selected and financed by the Dutch Directorate General for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation. Using the academic literature on a) the requirements for effective Inclusive Green Growth strategies and b) the potential of public–private partnerships, an analytical framework was developed to be used for data collection (e.g. partnership documentation, interviews) and analysis.