Browse by: "2016"

The outcome of COP21 urged developed countries to scale up their level of financial support, over and above their initial finance pledges, with a concrete roadmap to achieve their USD 100 billion a year commitment by 2020. This note provides analytical support to country preparation of such a roadmap, assessing the scale of future climate finance as well as identifying and discussing some key uncertainties. It sets out the resulting projections for climate finance in 2020 along with the underlying assumptions and methodologies.

This report addresses the fundamental challenges that climate change poses to infrastructure owners, who face two major challenges. First, they must ensure continued asset performance under sometimes significantly modified climate conditions that may decrease the present value of their networks or increase maintenance and refurbishment costs. Second, they must build new assets in the context of changing and uncertain climate variables. This creates a risk of over- or under-specification of infrastructure design standards, potentially resulting in non-productive investments or network service degradation. This report investigates strategies that can help transport authorities contain network performance risks inherent in changing patterns of extreme weather.

This report examines the key design and implementation features that need to be considered to ensure that biodiversity offset programmes are environmentally effective, economically efficient, and distributionally equitable. Biodiversity offsets are being increasingly used in a wide range of sectors as a mechanism to help compensate for the adverse effects caused by development projects in a variety of ecosystems. In this report, insights and lessons learned are drawn from more than 40 case studies from around the world, with an additional 3 in-depth country case studies from the United States, Germany and Mexico.

To tackle climate change, CO2 emissions need to be cut. Pricing carbon is one of the most effective and lowest-cost ways of inducing such cuts. This report presents the first full analysis of the use of carbon pricing on energy in 41 OECD and G20 economies, covering 80% of global energy use and of CO2 emissions. The analysis takes a comprehensive view of carbon prices, including specific taxes on energy use, carbon taxes and tradable emission permit prices. It shows the entire distribution of effective carbon rates by country and the composition of effective carbon rates by six economic sectors within each country. Carbon prices are seen to be often very low, but some countries price significant shares of their carbon emissions. The ‘carbon pricing gap’, a synthetic indicator showing the extent to which effective carbon rates fall short of pricing emissions at EUR 30 per tonne, the low-end estimate of the cost of carbon used in this study, sheds light on potential ways of strengthening carbon pricing.

This report presents an overview of existing environmental credit lines in the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), which are mostly supported by International Finance Institutions and donors and disbursed by local commercial banks. Lessons learned from this type of credit-line implementation provide useful insights for spurring the banking sector into financing green investments.

This report updates the 2001 Guidance Manual for Governments on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which provided a broad overview of the key issues, general considerations, and the potential benefits and costs associated with producer responsibility for managing the waste generated by their products put on the market. Since then, EPR policies to help improve recycling and reduce landfilling have been widely adopted in most OECD countries; product coverage has been expanded in key sectors such as packaging, electronics, batteries and vehicles; and EPR schemes are spreading in emerging economies in Asia, Africa and South America, making it relevant to address the differing policy contexts in developing countries.
 
In light of all of the changes in the broader global context, this updated review of the guidelines looks at some of the new design and implementation challenges and opportunities of EPR policies, takes into account recent efforts undertaken by governments to better assess the cost and environmental effectiveness of EPR and its overall impact on the market, and addresses some of the specific issues in emerging market economies.

This report looks at farm management practices with green growth potential, from farmer-led innovations (such as those directly linked to soil and water, Integrated Pest Management, organic farming) to science-led technologies (such as biotechnology and precision agriculture). Global food demand can only be met in a sustainable way if new forms of agricultural production and innovative technologies can be unlocked to increase the productivity, stability, and resilience of production systems with goals beyond just raising yields, including saving water and energy, reducing risk, improving product quality, protecting the environment and climate change mitigation.

This document provides guidance on how to conduct terrestrial field dissipation studies to demonstrate the transformation, transport and fate of pesticides under representative actual use conditions when a pesticide product is used according to the label. These field studies can help to substantiate the physicochemical, mobility and transformation data from laboratory studies, and indeed, may be a standard regulatory requirement in some jurisdictions.

This document provides additional detailed guidance on crop field trials conducted according to OECD TG 509 (Testing of Chemicals on Crop Field Trial) and helps in planning the trials and in interpreting the results. The publication is organised in two parts: the core document on guidance for conducting crop field trials and the three Annexes containing additional information.

This document provides guidance to both industry and regulatory authorities on storage stability for different types of microbial pesticide formulations. It includes guidance on the physical and chemical parameters to be assessed for different formulation types before and/or after the storage period, and also describes specific and adequate criteria for the determination of storage stability.

The document provides guidance to both industry and regulatory authorities in the context of pre-submission consultations prior to submission of applications for the registration of microbial biological control agents. This document describes the procedure and the information which should be submitted at a pre-submission consultation.

A major challenge facing the Republic of Buryatia, subject of the Russian Federation, is how to balance the task of protecting Lake Baikal – a unique water object and ecological system included in the UNESCO list of World Natural Heritage Areas – with the need for dynamic and sustainable socio-economic development of the republic.  This requires streamlining and improving water policy jointly with economic, administrative, information and other policy instruments. The recommendations in this report aim to help achieve this objective. They include the introduction of abstraction charges for irrigation water as a  natural resource; enhancement of state support to the water sector; and improvement of economic instruments for managing risks of water-related hazards (such as compulsory insurance and differentiated land tax rates in flood prone areas). A few innovative instruments are also recommended for pilot testing such as establishing limits for discharges of certain hazardous substances in a pilot area (e.g. Selenga river basin) and progressive development of market for tradable quotas for discharges of the “capped” pollutants; and introducing a charge (tax) on toxic agricultural chemicals (pesticides, herbicides, etc.) and synthetic detergents so that to create incentives for the reduction of diffuse water pollution.

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, notably of droughts and floods to which the agriculture sector is particularly exposed. While agricultural productivity growth and policy development have allowed to better cope with these risks and reduce overall impacts on the sector and commodity markets, there is substantial room to improve policy responses and co-ordinate across policy domains, including with respect to water rights and allocation, weather and hydrological information, innovation and education, and insurance and compensation schemes. Indeed, drought and flood risks are likely to become a major policy concern as increasing population will increase the demand for food, feed, fibre, and energy, not to mention the competition for water resources, and urbanisation will increase the demand for flood protection and mitigation, raising the issue of the allocation of flood risks across sectors and areas.

The Jordan Clean Energy Investment Policy Review is a country-specific application of the OECD Policy Guidance for Investment in Clean Energy Infrastructure. It aims to help Jordanian policy makers strengthen the enabling conditions for investment in renewable electricity generation in Jordan. The Policy Guidance is a non-prescriptive tool to help governments identify ways to mobilise private sector investment in clean energy infrastructure, especially in renewable electricity generation. The Policy Guidance was jointly developed by the OECD Working Party on Climate, Investment and Development (WPCID) of the Environment Policy Committee (EPOC) and the OECD Investment Committee, jointly with the Global Relations Secretariat (GRS). It benefited from significant inputs of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Policy Guidance was annexed to the Communiqué of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors at their meeting on 10-11 October 2013.

This report responds to the request by G7 Leaders at the Schloss Elmau Summit in June 2015, for the OECD to develop policy guidance on resource efficiency. Establishing a resource efficient economy is a major environmental, development and macroeconomic challenge today. Improving resource efficiency by putting in place policies that implement the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle (the 3Rs) is crucial to improving resource use, security and competitiveness while diminishing the associated environmental impacts.