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The global COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected Fiji, hitting at backbone economic sectors, such as international tourism and export fisheries. It has also brought to the fore the need to embark on a more sustainable model of development. This report examines Fiji’s economic and sustainability trends, as well as the governance and financing of its ocean economy before and during the COVID-19 crisis. It provides an initial mapping of promising initiatives and funding instruments that can be developed and scaled up to foster a sustainable blue recovery, focusing on four main areas: sustainable fisheries, sustainable tourism, green shipping and marine conservation.

The re-opening of Samoa’s borders in late-2022 kickstarted the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This offers an opportunity to rebuild sustainably its tourism, maritime transport, and fisheries sectors. Samoa’s ocean resources can also augment its resilience to future shocks such as climate change. Through an analysis of Samoa’s economic trends and environmental pressures, institutional set-up and policy tools, as well as financing landscape, this report identifies opportunities and challenges for Samoa’s ocean economy to drive sustainable and resilient development. The Samoa Ocean Strategy offers a blueprint for such a pursuit, but there remain gaps and impediments. To address them, the report provides several cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations to accelerate Samoa’s transition to a sustainable ocean economy.

The growing demand for raw materials in the Hungarian economy projected up to 2050 is expected to exert significant additional pressure on the environment, putting the country at risk of missing important environmental goals and opportunities to strengthen the competitiveness and resilience of its economy. Despite the notable progress in decoupling environmental pressures from economic activities over the past 20 years, several challenges remain. The transition to a circular economy has significant potential to address these challenges. To fully realise the circular potential of its economy, Hungary will need to adopt a comprehensive circular economy policy framework. This report outlines a set of key elements for the development of the Hungarian national circular economy strategy and action plan. It identifies priority areas that are deemed critical to the Hungarian circular economy transition, including: biomass and food, construction and plastics, as well as cross-cutting horizontal tools to facilitate an economy-wide circular transition. It also provides 45 policy recommendations and suggests specific implementation actions across the priority areas for the short, medium and long term.

The manner in which we produce and consume energy is of crucial importance to sustainable development, as energy has deep relationships with each of its three dimensions -- the economy, the environment and social welfare. These relationships develop in a fast-moving and complex situation characterised by increasing globalisation, growing market liberalisation and new technologies, as well as by growing concerns about climate change and energy-supply security. In order to make energy an integral part of sustainable development, new policies need to be developed. Such policies must strike a balance among the three dimensions of sustainable development. They must reduce our exposure to large-scale risk. The IEA has synthesised a number of experiences with policies aimed to promote sustainable development. These experiences are reported in seven subject chapters on energy supply security, market reform, improving energy efficiency, renewable energies, sustainable transport, flexibility mechanisms for greenhouse gas reductions and on non-Member countries.

International conventions designed to combat global environmental problems -- known as Multilateral Environmental Agreements or MEAs -- often use trade measures, among other instruments. But in fact the term trade measures covers a variety of provisions, ranging from simple reporting requirements of transboundary movements to the use of trade sanctions imposed to change a country’s environmental behaviour. MEA use of trade measures has not been without controversy in both trade policy and environment policy circles. In order to try and disentangle the various strands of this important set of trade and environment issues, the OECD Joint Session of Trade and Environment Experts focused on the actual experience with the use of trade measures in three universally subscribed MEAs -- CITES (on endangered species), the Montreal Protocol (on ozone layer depleting substances) and the Basel Convention (on hazardous wastes). Whilst the case studies unsurprisingly reveal varying experiences, common issues and main themes, as well as a series of lessons learned, could nonetheless be drawn together from the case study analyses and have been assembled in the concluding chapter of this volume.

The search for cost-effective environmental policy measures has led to an increase in the use of tradeable permit systems.  This publication offers valuable lessons for applying tradeable permits and provides links between policy evaluation and policy making general.  It is for government officials responsible for the implementation and reform of tradeable permit systems, researchers concerned with their analysis and evaluation, and other stakeholders interested in the more general issues associated with environmental policy design and evaluation.

Efforts that primarily focus on incremental change in systems that are unsustainable by design are one of the main barriers to scaling up climate action. This report applies the OECD well-being lens process to the transport sector. It builds on the report Accelerating Climate Action and encourages countries to focus climate action on delivering systems that - by design - improve well-being while requiring less energy and materials, and thus producing less emissions. The report identifies three dynamics at the source of car dependency and high emissions: induced demand, urban sprawl and the erosion of active and shared transport modes. The report also provides policy recommendations to reverse such dynamics and reduce emissions while improving well-being, from radical street redesign, to spatial planning aimed at increasing proximity, and policies to mainstream shared mobility. Analysis also shows why the effectiveness and public acceptability of carbon pricing and policies incentivising vehicle electrification can significantly increase after policy reprioritisation towards systems redesign.

This OECD Emission Scenario Document (ESD) provides information on the sources and release pathways of chemicals during their transport and storage in a wide range of industries, to help estimate releases of chemicals into the environment. This ESD covers the transport and storage of chemicals either as pure chemicals or as components of finished products. However, it does not consider the following: mixed waste streams, radioactive substances, biological and infectious materials and foodstuffs.
 

This report updates the data published in the 2015 OECD Compendium of Agri-environmental Indicators to present a summary of the environmental performance of agriculture in OECD countries as of end-2015. It also includes new and innovative material to further strengthen its relevance as a reference document. In particular, the four thematic chapters each cover a targeted set of indicators for which data coverage is generally more consistent across time in OECD countries and that capture the main pressures agriculture exerts on the environment. The thematic chapters cover the following areas: the interlinked issues of land use, pesticides and farmland birds; ammonia and greenhouse gas emissions, the main air pollutants from agricultural activities; nitrogen and phosphorus balances, two indicators that signal air and water pollution; and water use and irrigation in agriculture.

The role of nuclear energy in a sustainable development context has multiple facets, a significant number of which relate to the nuclear fuel cycle. This report provides a description of the developments and trends in the nuclear fuel cycle that may improve the competitiveness and sustainability of nuclear generating systems over the medium and long term. It also presents criteria and indicators for future nuclear energy systems. Prepared by experts from the nuclear industry, government agencies and research organisations, this report will be of interest to those involved in nuclear energy policy and decision making.