If everyone lived the global middle class lifestyle of London or Shanghai it would require three planets to support us. And yet the average citizen of Bangladesh consumes the equivalent of just a third of a planet. What is needed is one planet living where people can live happy healthy lives within a fair share of the world’s resources having left sufficient space for wildlife and wilderness. Sustainable communities and businesses around the world show how one planet living is attractive and achievable. A simple approach and framework makes it easy to deliver it. This paper proposes that world leaders make a statement that recognises the planetary boundaries in a world with a large, growing human population and commit to take action through a multilateral framework to enable the world to define and deliver a safe operating space within the timeframe that science and morality deems necessary.
Three perspectives frame this challenge paper: 1) energy is at the very core of sustainable development, and not just a sector among others; 2) the combined challenges of inadequate access to energy among the world’s poor, the imperative to avoid climate catastrophe and the need to deal with rising and volatile energy prices require an unprecedented, fundamental transformation of the world’s energy system, and 3) that there are technological solutions that already exist that can effectively tackle these challenges over the course of 10-15 years.
The natural world has a lot to teach us. Above all, it teaches about systems and cycles; that altering one component of a system, however small, can have wider implications within and beyond a given cycle. Human society, the planet and the economy are all systems and are all bound together in intricate relationships. Only when we begin to understand this bigger picture can we tackle the systemic problems facing us. This paper takes a short journey through planetary science to grasp some of the dimensions of those relationships, and poses a series of solutions for affecting the kind of systemic transformation that are urgently needed to ensure the health of the planet and of people. Economic theory (and common sense) explains that when something is valuable, and it is free, its use tends to approach infinity - this explains why trees, biodiversity, freshwater and atmospheric space for carbon are all being used ‘like there is no tomorrow’. It also assumes that when something is exhausted (or too expensive), a substitute is almost certain to be found.
Outsourced emissions are a major loophole in current efforts to tackle climate change and build a green economy. International flows of carbon embedded in trade have grown considerably since the 1992 Rio summit, with developed northern nations benefiting unjustly from effectively outsourcing pollution to developing southern states. The world needs to agree to the principle of Clean Trade Agreements. These arrangements, negotiated between states and regions, would come to replace Free Trade Areas and build mutually-agreed carbon constraints into the terms of trade. Clean Trade Agreements would aim to halt the ‘race to the bottom’ witnessed as globalisation has unfolded – where industry invariably migrates to regions with the least stringent environmental regulations – and reverse the growth in outsourced emissions.
This publication is concerned with all policies that directly support the production or consumption of fossil fuels in OECD countries and in a selection of partner economies. It provides a useful complement to the online OECD database that identifies and estimates direct budgetary transfers and tax expenditures benefitting fossil fuels, and from which it derives summary results and indicators on support to fossil fuels, as well as policy recommendations. This report emphasises the problems that fossil-fuel subsidies cause in the context of broader policy efforts for mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions, and reviews the various reform initiatives that have already been taken at the international level (G-20, APEC, etc.). In addition, it presents the coverage, method and data sources used for constructing the online database, and further discusses caveats and data interpretation.