The ITF is an intergovernmental organisation within the OECD to tackle mobility issues for the 21st century. The Forum acts as a platform to advance transport policy and practice, with a view to ensuring transport's contribution to economic growth, environmental protection, social inclusion and the preservation of human life and well-being. The ITF 2014 annual Summit is being held in Leipzig, Germany on 21-23 may 2014.

The policy forum officially launches the conceptual framework to the public and offers an opportunity for participants to discuss the key issues for emerging Asia: housing, buildings and energy, land use and transport, water and waste management, green goods and services.

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.

The Japan-OECD Policy Forum on Urban Development and Green Growth will address cities’ unique role in creating synergies between environmental and economic objectives to advance green growth. Asian cities in particular are at the centre of this challenge. This event is organised as a commemorative event for the 50th Anniversary of Japan's Accession to the OECD.

Let’s be honest, waste reduction doesn’t have much of a ring to it. To many, it’s a complex policy issue without much hope if consumers keep throwing their cans away in the street.

The Green Growth and Sustainable development Forum is an annual event, and the third Forum will take place on 13-14 November 2014. This blog highlights the importance of the Forum, and how, far from being "abstract", this year's Forum offers an invaluable opportunity to address the social implications of implementing green growth strategies.

Webinar presenting OECD’s and UNEP’s Compendium of Best Practices in Green Public Procurement

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.

The G20 needs to go structural, social, and green! With fiscal and monetary policy room nearly exhausted, structural reforms are the best choices, sometimes the only choice. The OECD battle cry in this regard has been unchanged since 2008: “go structural!”.

This Forum examined the distributional consequences of implementing green growth strategies and their impact on employment, skills and income.

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.

Third Annual Conference on the theme of "Fiscal Policies and the Green Economy Transition: Generating Knowledge – Creating Impact" held at the University of Venice from 29 through 30 January 2015. The press release is available.

Climate policy and competitiveness issues have created a new need for international co-ordination, beyond the scope of our current frameworks. There is no need to trade economic growth for environmental stringency. Environmentally stringent policies are an incentive for greater efficiencies which leading edge companies can easily achieve.

This will be “the mother of all years for summits on international development". International delegates will gather in Addis Ababa in July to discuss how poorer countries can fund their development. In September, attention will shift to New York, where the UN will sign off on the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In December, Paris will take centre stage to host the global climate change conference, COP21.

Embracing green growth can secure strong, stable and sustainable development. An increasing number of developing countries have formulated and/or implemented innovative policies to pursue green growth, notably in Africa. Zambia, in particular, is committed to drawing up an Inclusive Green Growth Strategy (IGGS) that builds upon a nationally-defined and comprehensive definition of green growth.

Natural resources provide essential raw materials and other commodities, and are an important source of income and jobs. They also support the provision of ecosystem services necessary to develop human and social capital.

Ever plodded through flood waters to get to a conference? In late January, the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) held their 3rd annual conference in Venice, Italy. The flooded city reminded attendees about the real world changes that are occurring and the need for continued action towards going green.

"Green growth" and transport combines several different concepts that are central to sustainable mobility, including sustainable economic activity, reduced environmental impact and sustained growth in high quality jobs.

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.

Knowledge sharing is critical in fostering urban green growth. Cities in dynamic Asia urgently need to adopt and strengthen green growth models that take into account rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, and motorisation.

This report develops an analytical framework that assesses the macroeconomic, environmental and distributional consequences of energy subsidy reforms. The framework is applied to the case of Indonesia to study the consequences in this country of a gradual phase out of all energy consumption subsidies between 2012 and 2020.

Consumers only occasionally choose to buy sustainable products. At the same time these consumers say in surveys that sustainability is important to them, and that the government should promote sustainable consumption. This study takes a closer look at public support for sustainable consumption and the associated dilemmas, with the help of a behavioural economics experiment of group decisions.

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.

A transition to a low carbon economy is achievable, but will require a concerted, more consistent effort across a range of policy areas, from tradeable permits to stringent norms.

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.

A new OECD publication highlights notable economic and environmental benefits of phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies in Indonesia. Interestingly, the study is based on the context that pertained until mid-2014, when international oil prices where high and before the recent phase-out of subsidies by the government.

Despite its importance, regular measurement of the value of natural resources at national level is still in its infancy and often disconnected from valuation approaches for other assets.

On 7 May 2015, the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) will hold a webinar on 'Trade and Green Growth: Measuring the impact of environmental policy on economic competitiveness' from 1-2 PM Geneva time.

In the coming months, the international community will gather three times and on three different continents, to build a sustainable development agenda for generations to come.

The international discussions under way in the course of this vital year–including July’s Finance for Development Meeting in Addis Ababa, the agreement of a new set of universal Sustainable Development Goals at the UN in September and the climate change summit in Paris at the end of 2015–represent a remarkable and unprecedented opportunity to establish what might be called a “Magna Carta for the earth” for our times.

This year’s OECD Ministerial Council Meeting, which we are honoured to chair, will address the issue of investment. The timing could not be better. Growth prospects have improved, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Investment has been hit especially hard since the crisis started and has yet to recover.

In his remarks to the Business & Climate Summit, the Secretary-General said that business lies at the heart of what we need to achieve on climate action. If Governments produce clear, credible and coherent national policies and clear messages and signals, the full transformative power of business, markets and human ingenuity will be unleashed.

The OECD hosted a workshop on green investment banks on 20 May 2015. It built upon discussions of green banks at the OECD Green Investment Financing Fora (May 2015 and June 2014) and continued international dialogue on the experiences of green banks. The workshop welcomed 9 different green banks, public financial institutions, NGOs, the private sector and over 20 countries interested in the green bank model.

“Neither economists nor market participants, nor indeed governments foresaw a financial crisis of the type and magnitude we have now. The collapse of trust and subsequent credit freeze in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse was a shock.”

The Annual Summit of the International Transport Forum is the unique platform for a global conversation on strategies for transport in the 21st century. It took place in Leipzig, Germany from 27-29 May 2015, under the Presidency of New Zealand under the theme "Transport, Trade and Tourism".

For many years one of the predominant conventional wisdoms in both business and policymaking circles was that cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions necessitates a sacrifice in economic growth.

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.

To mark the opening of the International Transport Forum’s Annual Summit, today’s post addresses three broad issues of the complex and multidimensional triangular relationship between transport, trade and tourism.

On 28 May 2015, the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) webinar will examine how proper planning can help lay the foundation for both a stable climate and good development path; explore how countries can create the right enabling environment so that the needed technology, infrastructure and financing are available; and discuss how countries can carefully manage the transition, given vital political economy considerations.

Ministers from OECD’s 34 member countries today welcomed the new OECD Principles on Water Governance, which set standards for more effective, efficient and inclusive design and implementation of water policies, and encouraged governments to put them into action.

The OECD’s Annual Meeting at Ministerial Level reinforced member governments’ support across a broad range of key OECD work.

The 2011 Green Growth Strategy provided initial guidance to governments on how to achieve economic growth and development, while preventing costly environmental damage and inefficient resource use. What progress have countries made in aligning economic and environmental priorities since 2011?

Governments are under-utilising taxation as a tool to curb the environmental consequences of energy use, foregoing revenue and weakening their attack on the principal source of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change and air pollution, according to new OECD analysis.

This major report produced in co-operation with the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Transport Forum (ITF) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) identifies the misalignments between climate change objectives and policy and regulatory frameworks across a range of policy domains (investment, taxation, innovation and skills, trade, and adaptation) and activities at the heart of climate policy.

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.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría today called on all countries to fully engage with the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and said advanced and emerging economies had a particular responsibility to translate the global goals into national policy and to support developing countries in doing the same.

Addressing climate change requires urgent policy action to drive a global infrastructure and technological transformation. The latest report 'Aligning Policies for a Low-carbon Economy' presents the first diagnosis of the alignments of policy and regulatory frameworks with climate policy goals. Join the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) for a webinar exploring these issues on 5 October 2015, 15:00-16:30 (Paris time).

Economic and social reforms over the past two decades have enabled Peru to significantly improve growth and well-being while raising incomes and reducing poverty.

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.