With new and emerging technologies, shifts in employment and changes in the workforce are occurring across the world. Employment shifts driven by economic transformation occur at three different levels: (i) across sectors (or industries); (ii) across enterprises within the same or similar sector (industry); and (iii) within enterprises. The speed and the amplitude of job creation and loss across these three levels determine the effects on the number of jobs as well as income.
One of the key challenges facing policymakers in transforming their economies is creating decent and meaningful employment. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), over 600 million new jobs would be needed in the next 10 years. This paper highlights employment opportunities and key challenges in a transition to a green economy and suggests what policy measures need to be put in place to ensure that newly created jobs can become decent jobs.
The importance of cities in climate policy stems from the simple reality that they house the majority of the world's population, two-thirds of world energy use and over 70% of global energy use emissions. At the international level, global carbon markets have become an important new source of financing for mitigation projects and programmes. Yet to date, the participation of urban authorities and of urban mitigation projects in the global carbon market remains extremely limited. The under-representation of urban carbon projects can be linked both to the difficulties to implement urban mitigation projects and to the difficulties for cities to access the carbon market.
UNEP, in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), organized a Technical Workshop on Fiscal Policies Towards and Inclusive Green Economy in October 2012 in Geneva. The workshop brought together representatives from both finance and environment ministries to share and discuss their experiences and good practices for driving a green economy through fiscal policy reforms. This paper is one of the follow-ups of this joint endeavour.
- The role of environmental taxes in a green economy transition
- Reforming energy subsidies
- Implications of fiscal reforms and lessons learned
This report examines the current state of knowledge about green growth in cities and outlines the key research questions and protocols that will guide the OECD Green Cities programme. It builds the case for an urban green growth agenda by examining the economic and environmental conditions that have pushed the green growth agenda to the forefront of policy debate and assessing the critical role of cities in advancing green growth.
By identifying successful experiences of social dialogue on environmental policy, the report at hand presents practices, challenges and opportunities in developing and strengthening an efficient social dialogue on environmental issues at national, supranational, subnational and sectoral level. The report, produced with the support of Sustainlabour, intends to promote a stronger interaction among governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations in an increasingly challenging area for the world of work: environment, green economy and sustainable development.