This report presents an effort by Statistics Netherlands, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Sustainability Consortium to collaborate and examine alignment of their respective national, company, and product level sustainable development metrics. The report argues that continued alignment is undoubtedly desirable and makes several suggestions for achieving it. It predicts that general movement towards alignment will accelerate in the short term, in line with the new post-2015 sustainable development process, but recognises that completion of a truly shared sustainable development metric must be viewed as a long term goal.
The authors highlight the huge enthusiasm for measuring, while emphasizing the importance of recognising the direct trade-off between ‘materiality’ and ‘comparability’ in a given measurement framework. They also find that products and companies are much more heterogeneous than nations. The report concludes that alignment and harmonisation between framework levels is crucial, but there is a limit.
As “green public procurement” (GPP) is playing an increasingly important role in stimulating the demand for environmentally friendly products and services, there is a strongly emerging need to analyse which factors drive the inclusion of environmental criteria in public tenders. Working on data from Italian municipalities, the authors confirmed that intensifying information and raising awareness on GPP techniques can strongly support the development of public green tenders. Moreover, their analysis reveals that good GPP performance cannot be achieved through the mere adoption of a certified Environmental Management System (EMS) by a public authority alone, but rather through the level of maturity of the certified EMS that provides a growing “value added” to GPP practices. Finally, findings of this study demonstrate that the relevant limitations linked to the small size of public authorities can be overcome by the progress in GPP brought by several European, national and local supporting initiatives.
This Discussion Paper presents a normative concept of green industrial policy, which is defined as encompassing any policy measure aimed at aligning the structure of a country’s economy with the needs of sustainable development within established planetary boundaries. The paper elaborates on the rationale of a green industrial policy, how it differs from conventional industrial policy, why it is faced with significantly bigger challenges, and how these can be met.
This paper provides a detailed explanation how the law of the World Trade Organization regulates environmental subsidies with a focus on renewable energy subsidies. The paper begins by discussing the economic justifications for such subsidies and the criticisms of them and then gives examples of categories of subsidies. The paper provides an overview of the relevant World Trade Organization rules and case law, including the recent Canada-Renewable Energy case. The paper also makes specific recommendations for how World Trade Organization law can be improved and discusses the literature on reform proposals. The study finds that because of a lack of clarity in World Trade Organizaion rules, for some clean energy subsidies, a government will not know in advance whether the subsidy is World Trade Organization-legal.