The OECD’s 34 member countries today affirmed their common resolve to work towards a deal on combating climate change at the COP21 talks in Paris in 2015. OECD accession countries Colombia and Latvia joined the statement issued at the Organisation’s annual Ministerial Council Meeting, attended by finance, economy, trade and other ministers.

In many areas today, there is no such thing as a “natural” landscape. Thousands of years of farming have selected and encouraged some species, marginalised or eliminated others. The land itself has been altered by ploughing, enclosure, herding and other human interventions. We may feel that we have tamed Nature. Reports like this new one from the OECD remind us of our ignorance and warn us about our arrogance.

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.

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.

Despite large and growing investments in knowledge and innovation, productivity growth in many countries has slowed in recent years. At the same time, the urgent need for more rapid innovation (including its uptake and diffusion) in several key areas, such as in environment. This joint OECD-NBER workshop on 25-26 September 2014 will bring together academic experts to consider these challenges.

When you think of biodiversity conservation, you probably think of the classic images: the polar bear, the lion, the elephant, the giraffe. The ecological community likes to call them charismatic megafauna, with only a hint of satire.

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!”.

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.

This study uses a unique dataset of investment flows to analyse the role of two categories of public interventions (finance and policies) in mobilising flows of private climate finance worldwide and in the more specific context of flows to and in developing countries. The objectives are threefold. Find out more.

It’s time for governments to ramp up the development of alternative energies and to nail a price onto every tonne of CO2 emitted. With COP21 taking place in Paris in November, sending the right message on climate change means gradually increasing the cost of CO2 emissions, and creating a strong economic incentive to reduce the carbon entanglement and to move towards a zero-carbon world.

Climate change and, more generally, environmental damage have quantifiable economic and health costs, which weigh on long-term growth and well-being. If left unchecked, climate change is projected to decrease global GDP by 0.7 to 2.5 % by 2060. At the same time, the costs to society of air pollution already appear substantial–equivalent to some 4% of GDP across OECD countries and even higher in some rapidly developing economies.

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.

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.

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

We could spend World Environment Day warning of the doom and gloom of future Earth, but considering how much we have done that already, that’s not going to get us very far as we approach this year’s COP21 in Paris. Instead, we are going to give you a taste on what we do here at the OECD headquarters to help save the environment, taking our own medicine on what we prescribe to governments.

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.

Given the years of preparation – and for some OECD colleagues, a life’s work – my hope was for an enduring, ambitious text, helping us to avoid climate catastrophe. My expectation was far less grand, more closely aligned to the reality of getting 195 countries to adopt an agreement with legal force.

The natural environment provides crucial inputs and services for economic development, but its role for productivity growth is insufficiently explored. Environmental scarcities can pose a drag on productivity growth and a risk for its sustainability.

Water is linked to many economic activities, and there are complex channels through which water affects economic growth. The purpose of this report is to provide background information useful for a quantitative global assessment of the impact of water scarcity on growth using a multi-region, recursive-dynamic, Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model.

This Global Forum, held on 24-25 October 2016, aimed to shed light on the links between environment and economic growth, and the toolkits to quantify these links. It provided a platform to explore how a well-managed natural environment can contribute to economic growth and how an effective and efficient regulatory system can best be designed?

Estonia needs to move faster to reduce its dependence on oil shale so it can advance towards a greener economy and reduce air pollution and waste generation, according to a new OECD report.

Korea has improved access to environmental services and become a world leader in climate change mitigation technology.

Integrating measures to tackle climate change into regular economic policy will have a positive impact on economic growth over the medium and long term, according to a new OECD report prepared in the context of the German Presidency of the G20.

OECD overview report on Employment Implications of Green Growth: Linking jobs, growth and green policies to the G7 Environment Ministers held on 11-12 June 2017 in Bologna.

“National governments must take the lead and do so with a recognition that they are part of a global effort.” Speaking last week at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría urged countries not to retreat behind their national borders in dealing with climate change. Read the full blog.

One focus of tomorrow’s One Planet Summit, organised by President Macron, is “to determine how those working in public and private finance can innovate to support and accelerate our common efforts to fight climate change.”

Our response to the climate challenge will define our collective future for generations to come. We must act. We must act swiftly, collectively, and decisively.

This Policy Paper summarises key messages about the economic case for water investment, the barriers to investment and the financing gap. It charts a course for action to better value water and to facilitate water investment at scale. The Roundtable on Water Financing, a joint initiative of the OECD, the World Water Council and the Netherlands, will continue to deepen the evidence base and broaden engagement on these issues.

The OECD proposes to conduct a first-of-its-kind review of Indonesia’s green growth policies, with the co-operation of four Ministries.

Hungary has made progress in greening its economy and cutting emissions, but it needs to speed up efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, improve energy efficiency in buildings and promote sustainable transport, according to a new OECD Review.

The Czech economy is thriving, with robust employment, expanding exports and falling government debt. Efforts should now focus on boosting workforce skills and innovation to improve labour supply and productivity, further reduce poverty and inequality, and green the economy, according to two new OECD reports.

Three years on from the commitments made at COP21 in Paris, the overwhelming majority of governments have not taken the necessary action to contain growing risks to the climate. With emissions on the rise again, OECD governments need to get serious about shifting their economies to a low-carbon model and stop investing in carbon-intensive infrastructure.

This summer, we witnessed record-breaking heat and extreme weather events across the globe. To address the urgent climate challenge, and meet our broader development goals, trillions of dollars need to be invested in low-emissions and resilient infrastructure.

This paper explores the consequences on the labour markets of structural changes induced by decarbonisation policies. These policies are likely going to have consequences on labour-income distribution given i) existing rigidities in the labour markets, and ii) their different impacts on sectors and on job categories.

This report investigates the effects of select climate policies, non-climate policies, as well as political economy factors on the decarbonisation of electricity in OECD countries from 2000 to 2015. Effects are analysed on the three phases of decarbonisation: (1) increasing the share of renewables installed, (2) increasing the use of renewables in generation, and (3) reducing the emissions from electricity.

The OECD, UN Environment and World Bank Group today called on leaders of G20 countries to do more to enable a radical shift of investment into low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure as a way to limit the impact of climate change.

Meeting the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement requires a transformational change in our infrastructure systems. This working paper aims to shed light on the extent to which current electricity generation projects under construction at the global level - the "pipeline" - are consistent with what a low-carbon transition requires.

On 10 December in Katowice, the 9th annual High-Level Breakfast on Institutional Investors and the Low-carbon Transition, co-hosted by the OECD and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), highlighted significant progress in mobilising green institutional investment, as well as important remaining challenges.

At a time when nationalism is rising and individual countries are facing a growing array of threats, it is critical that we recognize a shared and unprecedented global challenge: We need to double our infrastructure in the next decade to meet global development needs, while achieving a systematic shift away from business-as-usual, carbon-intensive options to low-emissions, resilient infrastructure, to avoid catastrophic climate change.

On 19 April, 2019, the OECD held a workshop on mining and green growth in the Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia (EECCA) region. The workshop is part of a larger project on mining and environmental sustainability in the EECCA region, following the production of a background paper on the same topic.

The Latvian economy is thriving, with strong job growth driving convergence with more advanced economies. Efforts should now focus on reducing inequality, responding to the challenges posed by population ageing and making growth stronger, inclusive and greener, according to two new OECD reports.

This paper focuses on how national and sub-national governments can align subnational financial flows to transition towards low-carbon, resilient and inclusive cities. The paper is a contribution from the OECD Champion Mayors for Inclusive Growth initiative and to the OECD Programme on Subnational Finance and Investment.

Taxing polluting sources of energy is an effective way to curb emissions that harm the planet and human health, and the income generated can be used to ease the low-carbon transition for vulnerable households. Yet 70% of energy-related CO2 emissions from advanced and emerging economies are entirely untaxed, offering little incentive to move to cleaner energy, according to a new OECD report.

Is this the beginning of a paradigm shift in the financial system towards environmentally sustainable finance? And if not, what can we do to accelerate this shift? The OECD stands ready to support efforts to build political leadership and address outstanding barriers to sustainable finance.

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