This publication presents examples of the application of technical expertise, of workplace participation, and of tools that promote workers’ health and safety to problems that extend beyond the workplace into areas such as environmental protection, public health and the accountability of employers. It focuses on crucial issues ranging from climate change and energy, chemicals management, and corporate social responsibility and accountability to future involvement of workers and trade unions with the environment and with efforts to move towards sustainability.
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. Extending the use of environmentally sound technologies (ESTs) is a key component in mitigating and adapting to climate change. WIPO, along with industry partners, recently launched the pilot version of a new platform known as WIPO GREEN, which seeks to accelerate the adaptation, adoption and deployment of green technologies. WIPO GREEN is a sustainable technology exchange that promises to help facilitate the adaptation, adoption and deployment of climate-friendly technologies, particularly in developing countries and emerging economies.
The ocean is an essential part of the world economy for transport and for the resources it contains and activities it supports. Yet, the health of oceans is in decline and future opportunities are being lost through this degradation. The current system of governance and management of oceans is in need of urgent reform. This discussion paper provides a concrete framework for considering how this might be achieved.
The paper sets out a 5-part practical action framework to transform the way in which oceans are governed to create a more harmonised approach that supports long-term environment, social and economic goals.
In its flagship report, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) elaborates explicitly on the fact that the technological potential for comprehensive decarbonisation is available, outlines business and financing models for the transition, and points out that the political instruments needed for a climatefriendly transformation are widely known. The council also describes how the requisite transformation encompasses profound changes to infrastructures, production processes, regulation systems and lifestyles, and extends to a new kind of interaction between politics, society, science and the economy. Various multilevel path dependencies and obstacles must be overcome. Furthermore, the transformation can only succeed if nation states put global cooperation mechanisms before their own shortterm oriented interests, in order to make a trend reversal, particularly as far as the global economy is concerned, towards climatefriendliness and sustainability possible. And not least, from a global perspective, this is also about issues of fairness – issues that need resolving.
A Schumpeterian case can be made for boosting Green Growth in a global economic crisis. The best way to achieve this is a combination of R&D subsidies to redirect growth from polluting to clean economic activities and a credible, rising carbon tax to speed up the transition to the carbon-free era. If a carbon tax is infeasible, renewables subsidies might be a second-best alternative to reduce the duration of the fossil fuel era and curb cumulative carbon emissions despite some adverse, short-run Green Paradox effects.