Moving towards low-carbon, high-efficiency energy systems, mitigating climate change, securing energy supplies, and resolving the imbalance of payments caused by energy imports, are impending problems that nations worldwide are striving hard to resolve. This paper addresses three aspects of this problem:
- the role of markets, prices, and governments in this energy transformation
- identification of policy interventions that can become productive investments in the future
- the potential for low-carbon, high-efficiency energy to drive green growth
The paper notes that the policy choices for an energy system transformation largely relate to:
This report presents, for the first time a local ‘green growth’ indicator framework. This indicator framework was developed from the OECD ‘green growth’ strategy at the national level, but modified to highlight issues of transition that are most relevant for local areas. The Copenhagen report is the first trialling of this approach, along with an indicator visualisation tool – or dashboard. The dashboard allows easy assessment of the progress of a particular local area in a number of indicator variables.
This report suggests a conceptual framework for the new statistical field “ICT and the environment” based on an existing OECD framework for information society statistics. Sources of official data to populate the framework are investigated and some relevant work has been identified. Given the serious environmental problems facing the world, and the potential for ICT to both lessen and worsen those problems, it is suggested that this field should be of more interest to official statisticians. A number of actions are recommended and they include: conducting new or expanded household and business surveys, expanding statistical classifications to better reflect ICT and the environment, ensuring that sample sizes are sufficient to enable better identification of ICT and environment data, and producing time series data on the topic. This summary was prepared by Eldis.
Mitigation and adaptation climate change policy cuts across all sectors of the economy and broader national priorities, such as poverty alleviation, sustainable development and economic growth. This paper outlines the evolution of the low-emission development strategies (LEDS) concept in the climate policy discourse and explores the existing strategies, action plans and documents. It defines LEDS as forward-looking national development strategies that encompass climate-resilient economic growth and looks at how they can ensure that they are effective and efficient in delivering intended goals. The aim of the paper is to:
Why were participant countries in the Rio+20 conferences (2012) not able to find any common ground on the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as they sought to identify a path for achieving “green economy” in the decades ahead? The current policy brief seeks to answer this question by examining the evolution of the global debate on IPRs and green technologies from the Earth Summit in 1992 to Rio+20.
The document indicates that: