Low-carbon, 'green' economic growth is necessary to simultaneously improve human welfare and avoid the worst impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. Infrastructure choices underpin both the growth and the carbon intensity of the economy. This Perspective explores the barriers to investing in low-carbon infrastructure and some of the policy levers available to overcome them. The barriers to decarbonizing infrastructure 'nest' within a set of barriers to infrastructure development more generally that cause spending on infrastructure—low-carbon or not—to fall more than 70% short of optimal levels. Developing countries face additional barriers such as currency and political risks that increase the investment gap. Low-carbon alternatives face further barriers, such as commercialization risk and financial and public institutions designed for different investment needs. While the broader barriers to infrastructure investment are discussed in other streams of literature, they are often disregarded in literature on renewable energy diffusion or climate finance, which tends to focus narrowly on the project costs of low- versus high-carbon options.
Green growth is increasingly being seen as a means of simultaneously meeting current and future climate change obligations and reducing unemployment. This paper uses detailed industry-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Green Goods and Services survey to examine how the provision of so-called green goods and services has affected various aspects of the US economy. The authors' descriptive results reveal that those states and industries that were relatively green in 2010 became even greener in 2011. To investigate further the authors include green goods and services in a production function. The results show that between 2010 and 2011 industries that have increased their share of green employment have reduced their productivity although this negative correlation was only for the manufacture of green goods and not for the supply of green services.
The concept of a green economy has been advocated globally ever since it was first proposed. In China, green economy has been adopted as the national strategy for future economic development. In this paper, the authors applied statistical description, grey correlation, proportion and elastic coefficient analysis to assess contributions of green industry to the national development from 2008 to 2012. They find that: (1) The average green degree of China's economic industry, 45%, was relatively low. The relative green degrees from high to low were 65% for service industry, 55% for agriculture industry, and 24% for manufacturing industry, respectively. (2) The share that added values of green industry took up gross domestic product (GDP) was between 41% and 48%. Green industry growth was highly correlated to the national economic growth evidenced by their grey correlation coefficient of 0.8532. (3) Both categories and quantities of green products were increasing annually and the growth rate of exported green products exceeded 50% during the study period. The gross domestic product grew by 0.04% owing to the increase of 1% in green product exports.
The adoption of the Paris Agreement at the end of 2015 and the EU’s intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) have confirmed the EU’s commitment to achieve decarbonisation by 2050. Transport accounts for about a quarter of EU greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, representing the second-largest source of GHG emissions in Europe after the energy sector. The transport sector will play a significant role in the EU’s efforts to decarbonise its economy in line with its international commitments.
The purpose of this report is to examine different EU policy options to address transport emissions, with a special emphasis on passenger cars. It ‘thinks through’ the options that are currently assessed in the EU and considers how they could be put together in a comprehensive framework. The report concludes with a number of measures to lead EU transport decarbonisation policy. A distinction is made between i) no-regret options and ii) measures for consideration.
This technical analysis for the Nordic Green to Scale report was commissioned to CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo), which is Norway’s foremost institute for interdisciplinary climate research. The report illustrates the scaling potential of 15 proven Nordic low-carbon solutions and presents an analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions of these solutions and their scalability internationally.