Sweden has shown a longstanding commitment to the environment, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and nitrogen leaching. Renewables supply more than a third of its energy needs. Sweden has set itself tough targets for the future, however, and must continue to innovate if it is to meet them, according to a new OECD report.

This Global Forum plays an important role as the tool for on-going dialogue on responsible business conduct. I am pleased to announce that today, Ministers from over 20 countries are coming together to discuss how to integrate responsibility considerations throughout government policies. Their work will contribute to protect internationally recognised fundamental rights and to ensure good governance, fair regulations, and transparency.

Iceland must balance growth in power and tourism industries with nature conservation, OECD says Iceland has one of the world’s most pristine natural environments and its glaciers, volcanoes and hot underground springs bring major economic benefits via renewable energy and tourism.

Reversing the damage is within our grasp, but it will hinge on a strong international climate agreement and policies that make polluters pay. Op Ed by Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General and Nick Stern, Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, The Guardian.

Angel Gurría and Michael R. Bloomberg reaffirmed today their commitment to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change — and called for national support to make this happen.

As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approach their expiry date, we must focus our efforts on ensuring a brighter, more inclusive and sustainable future for all. We face a plethora of common issues: growing inequalities; changing consumption patterns and population dynamics; increasing natural resource scarcity; and ongoing illicit financial flows.

What’s water security worth, and how much are we willing to pay for it given competing demands and constrained public budgets? asks Simon Upton, Environment Director at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Southeast Asia’s over-reliance on natural resources like oil, gas, minerals and wood for economic growth is unsustainable over the long term and is causing environmental damage that will hurt future prosperity if left unchecked, according to a new OECD report.

As environmental pressures continue to rise, governments throughout the OECD area have not been sitting back. If anything, the stringency of their policy measures has been increasing on the whole, not least to combat pollution and climate change. And as the evidence shows, stringent environmental policies can be introduced without hurting overall productivity.

In today’s hard times, policy-makers can find it difficult to sell their environmental policies. To many, these policies represent a burden on the economy.

Please join me in an ode to the giant tortoise, recently confirmed to be back from near extinction on the Galapagos Espanola Island after conservation work that began forty years ago. Whoever thought this waddly wild wonk would be a model for humans to improve environment through adept household behaviour?

The OECD’s latest Environmental Performance Review of Spain finds the country has decreased the energy and carbon intensity of its economy, reduced industrial pollution and cut per-capita waste generation since 2000.

When considering a by-product, can this material or waste be used in another industry or in another manufacturing process instead of putting it into the environment, moving “from waste to resources” as the OECD says?

Rapid population growth, ageing infrastructure and new weather risks are straining the ability of cities in OECD countries to provide clean water and to protect against floods and droughts, according to a new OECD report. Cities will need large-scale investment and more effective tariffs and taxes to pay for upgrades to water systems.

Water resources allocation determines who is able to use water resources, how, when and where. Capturing information from 27 OECD countries and key partner economies, the report presents key findings from the OECD Survey of Water Resources Allocation and case studies of successful allocation reform.

Concerns around potential losses of competitiveness as a result of unilateral action on carbon pricing are often central for policy makers contemplating the introduction of such instruments. This paper is a review of literature on ex post empirical evaluations of the impacts of carbon prices on indicators of competitiveness as employed in the literature, including employment, output or exports, at different levels of aggregation.

2015 is a critical year for humanity. Our civilisation has never faced such existential risks as those associated with global warming, biodiversity erosion and resource depletion. Our societies have never had such an opportunity to advance prosperity and eradicate poverty. We have the choice to either finally embark on the journey towards sustainability or to stick to our current destructive “business-as-usual” pathway.

Poland has combined robust economic growth with reducing some of the pressures on its environment since it joined the EU in 2004. It has also brought environmental laws closer to European norms. Poland now needs to lessen its economy’s reliance on fossil fuels and make growth greener, according to a new OECD report.

According to shocking new research by Oxfam, the world’s richest 1% would, on current trends, own more than half the world’s wealth by 2016.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called on OECD governments to ensure that a series of major summits this year result in a new era of sustainable development.

Developing countries are increasingly moving towards more strategic national policies and plans, the effectiveness of which will depend upon proper assessment of a given country’s vulnerability to climate change. This report draws upon emerging monitoring and evaluation practices across developed and developing countries to identify four tools that countries can draw upon in their own assessment frameworks.

OECD can work its hardest to raise awareness on the truths of climate change, but the world won’t see developments in green technology and infrastructure unless we have eager investors backing up investment and research and development in low-carbon technologies.

For the past decade or so, there has been a lot of debate in policy circles on how to get governments and the private sector to work together more collaboratively in order to catalyse the transition to green growth. The good news is that in that time many factors have come together to make this more of a reality.

Challenging free trade orthodoxy is a heavy lift in our political culture; anything that has been in place for that long takes on an air of inevitability. But, critical as these shifts are, they are not enough to lower emissions in time. To do that, we will need to confront a logic even more entrenched than free trade–the logic of indiscriminate economic growth.

Governments should rethink the role of coal in energy supply as the scale of new investments being made in unabated coal-fired electricity generation poses the most urgent threat to our climate, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said today.

Taxes are potentially among the most effective ways of cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but they are currently – with very few exceptions – underused; and even where used, they are frequently designed in a sub-optimal way.

The recent droughts in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states have exposed the need to shift from crisis management to effective risk governance of the country’s water resources, according to a new OECD report.

Raw materials are essential for the global economy and future development depends on their continued supply. Like fossil fuels, minerals are non-renewable. In general, their deposits in the Earth’s crust are also geographically clustered, making security of supply a potential risk. The purpose of this report is to perform for the first time an analysis of critical minerals for the OECD countries as a whole.

Government support to fossil fuel consumption and production in OECD countries and key emerging economies remains high, at USD 160-200 billion annually, according to a new OECD report. This support is hampering global efforts to curb emissions and combat climate change.

The current Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal highlights the difficult reality of making the transition to a low-carbon economy. It also highlights the growing need for governments to make smart policies, based on actual costs.

Advanced and emerging economies have made progress in addressing climate change, yet most are on a trajectory that would see them fall short of their mitigation goals. Governments need to significantly accelerate their efforts and strengthen their climate change policies.

Brazil has made remarkable social and economic progress in the past two decades, but must now overcome important challenges if it is to put its economy on a stronger, fairer, greener growth trajectory, according to two new reports from the OECD.

To increase transparency and improve understanding of different countries’ situations, the OECD has developed an interactive map that brings to life key climate change mitigation statistics and policy settings. The webinar on Monday 16 November 2015, 15h00-16h30 (Paris time) consisted of a summary of the main messages of the report "Climate Change Mitigation: Policies and Progress" and a demonstration of the interactive tool.

This report on climate change disclosure in G20 countries takes stock of mandatory climate change reporting schemes in G20 countries and identifies commonalities and divergences between the various schemes.

Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits have agreed new rules on official support for coal-fired power plants, including restrictions on official export credits for the least efficient coal-fired power plants, the OECD announced today.

Tackling climate change will require action in three key areas. First, we must strengthen carbon pricing and remove fossil fuel subsidies. Second, we must remove barriers to green investment. And third, we must align policies across the economy to leave fossil fuels behind and improve transparency on climate finance.

An early leader in environmental policy, the Netherlands has decoupled greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth and virtually eliminated landfilling over the past decade. Yet a very fossil fuel-intensive energy mix and looming pressures from traffic congestion and intensive farming are creating new challenges, according to a new OECD report.

OECD urges efforts to better price carbon as new analysis finds that 90% of CO2-emissions are priced below EUR 30 per tonne, a low-end estimate of climate damage, and 60% are not priced at all. Effective Carbon Rates in the OECD and Selected Partner Economies calculates effective carbon rates (ECR) on CO2-emissions from energy use for 41 countries which together use 80% of global emissions.

In order to help address climate finance-related information needs under the UNFCCC, this paper explores the extent to which currently-available secondary data make it possible to estimate private finance mobilised by developed countries for climate action in developing countries.

Urgent research is needed to assess the possible risks to human health and ecosystems from the ever-increasing amounts of engineered nanomaterials going into household waste and ending up in the environment, according to a new OECD report.

Countries that implement stringent environmental policies do not lose export competitiveness when compared against countries with more moderate regulations, according to a new OECD study that examines trade in manufactured goods between advanced and emerging economies.

Clearly a revolution in the global economy is needed for a heavy reduction of GHG emissions. You may have heard of Carbon Capture and Storage or CCS. This technology prevents CO2 from fossil fuel combustion from accumulating in the atmosphere.

This report provides a brief review of how national government policies and guidelines apply to or regulate the use of environmental labelling and information schemes (ELIS) in selected OECD countries. The report reviews definitions relevant to environmental claims and identifies four types of potentially false or misleading environmental claims.

The initials ‘CCS’ usually stand for Carbon Capture and Storage. However, I was with the team in Paris during COP21 promoting the Cap Global Carbon proposal; the mechanism embodied in Cap Global Carbon is Cap & Share, and it occurred to us that the name ‘Carbon Cap & Share’ has the same initials, CCS. Are these two types of CCS complementary or antagonistic? Are they friends or enemies?

Advanced economies have reduced their consumption of raw materials and improved waste management, but more should be done to design and produce goods in a way that uses fewer natural resources and produces less waste, according to a new OECD report.

Outdoor air pollution could cause 6 to 9 million premature deaths a year by 2060 and cost 1% of global GDP – around USD 2.6 trillion annually – as a result of sick days, medical bills and reduced agricultural output, unless action is taken, according to a new OECD report.

France has improved its environmental performance over the last decade, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, reducing some air pollutants and cutting its use of fresh water. Further effort will be needed, however, to reduce pollution by nitrates and pesticides and meet ambitious renewable energy targets, according to a new OECD report.

France has improved its environmental performance over the last decade, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, reducing some air pollutants and cutting its use of fresh water. Further effort will be needed, however, to reduce pollution by nitrates and pesticides and meet ambitious renewable energy targets, according to a new OECD report.

Chile has taken steps to address the rising environmental pressures from its rapid economic growth, strengthening its environmental institutions and introducing new instruments, including a carbon tax. It now needs to move ahead and thoroughly implement policy measures to stem the threat to its land, air and water, according to a new OECD report.

This brief is a contribution to the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22) and a submission of recommendations for the renewal of the Lima Work Programme on Gender. It provides an overview of how well members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) are integrating gender equality into their bilateral aid to climate change.