Browse by: "M"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
The need to mainstream biodiversity into economic growth and development is being increasingly recognised and is now also firmly embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. Drawing on experiences and insights from 16 predominantly megadiverse countries, this report examines how biodiversity is being mainstreamed in four key areas: 1) at the national level, including national development plans and other strategies, institutional co-ordination and national budgets; 2) the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors; 3) in development co-operation; and 4) the monitoring and evaluation of biodiversity mainstreaming and how this could be improved.
Agri-environmental payment schemes which operate as voluntary programmes that pay farmers to achieve certain environmental criteria have gained increasing interest and popularity amongst policy makers and farmers. There is growing evidence, however, that the majority of such schemes that have been implemented have had little environmental effectiveness. Building on past OECD work, this report identifies and discusses “best practice” design principles for cost-effective agri-environmental payment schemes. To this end, the report reviews the literature, develops a Policy Spectrum Framework that classifies payment types based on key design features for achieving cost-effective outcomes, and presents policy simulations undertaken to assess the cost-effectiveness of different payment designs and a multi-country choice experiment conducted with farmers to explore their preferences for different types of payments, ranging from practice-based to results-based payments.
Food systems around the world face a triple challenge: providing food security and nutrition for a growing global population; supporting livelihoods for those working along the food supply chain; and contributing to environmental sustainability. Better policies hold tremendous promise for making progress in these domains. This report focuses on three questions. What has been the performance of food systems to date, and what role did policies play? How can policy makers design coherent policies across the triple challenge? And how can policy makers deal with frictions related to facts, interests, and values, which often complicate the task of achieving better policies? Better policies will require breaking down silos between agriculture, health, and environmental policies, and overcoming knowledge gaps, resistance from interest groups, and differing values. Robust, inclusive, evidence-based processes are thus essential to making better policies for food systems.
This book contains the proceedings of the first International Meeting on Mammalian Embryo Genomics, held in Quebec City, Canada, on July 20, 2002, which brought together a group of internationally recognised scientists in the genomics field. The objective was to coordinate activities in the area of embryo genomics and create a number of collaborations dedicated to organizing the huge amount of information being generated in this emerging field of research. This information is and will continue to be crucial for most biotechnological applications in the field of animal reproduction.
Many of the recent concerns about food security relate to perceived threats to current levels of food security, such as those due to price shocks or natural disasters. These threats concern the risk of food insecurity. This publication develops a risk-management tool to examine the robustness of policy responses to managing risks and uncertainty across a variety of different threats to food security, and applies the framework to an Indonesia case study.
Five risk scenarios were selected as major threats to food security in Indonesia, following a consultation process among stakeholders and policy makers, and assessed in terms of existing and alternative agricultural and social policies. The risk assessment shows that domestic economic and natural disaster scenarios are more important than global price hikes and that a policy strategy that concentrates on addressing a single source of risk, such as a price spike in international markets, may increase vulnerability to other sources of risk such as domestic crop failure. The analysis yields a number of specific policy recommendations, including targeting of social assistance programme using food vouchers or cash transfers.
This book examines the current magnitude and characteristics of risk-related policies in agriculture and what is known about the quantitative size of agricultural risks. It looks at the on-farm, off-farm, and market instruments available to manage risk, and it explains how the holistic approach helps clarify the role of governments.
Southeast Asia’s exposure to increasingly frequent and intense weather-related disasters is a growing concern for agricultural producers of the region. This study reviews policy approaches to droughts, floods and typhoons in Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam in an effort to identify good practices and strengthen the resilience of the agricultural sector. The study assesses the risk exposure of this sector to weather-related disasters and reviews risk management policies using an OECD policy framework on the mitigation of droughts and floods in agriculture as a benchmark.
The analysis reveals several priority areas to strengthen the resilience of the agricultural sectors in these four Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, including: 1) improving the prevention and mitigation components of disaster risk management by aligning policy incentives and by integrating risk-reduction measures into infrastructure planning and extension systems; 2) implementing and enforcing water allocation and water use restriction instruments to steer farmers towards more efficient water use; 3) enhancing the co-ordination of government and partner institutions' activities to enable a more timely response to disasters; and 4) improving the timely distribution of inputs, equipment and social protection measures like disaster-linked cash transfers to strengthen the capacity of farmers to recover from disasters.
This report assesses the key bottlenecks within the water-energy-land-food nexus in Korea, and proposes policy recommendations and governance arrangements to future-proof environmental integrity and enhance sustainable growth. The increasing pressure caused by urbanisation, industrialisation, population growth and climate change in Korea has led to more land consumption and augmented water supply, at the expense of the environment and at a high cost for public finance. Korea has engaged with the OECD via a national policy dialogue to explore best practices from the wider international community to better manage the nexus at the river basin scale.
This brochure is published within the framework of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables established by OECD in 1962. It comprises explanatory notes and illustrations to facilitate the uniform interpretation of the current mango standard. This updated brochure illustrates the revised standard text on mangoes. It demonstrates the quality parameters on high quality photographs. Thus it is a valuable tool for the inspection authorities, professional bodies and traders interested in international trade in mangoes. The brochure is available in electronic format only.
This brochure is published within the framework of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables established by OECD in 1962. It comprises explanatory notes and illustrations to facilitate the uniform interpretation of the current mango standard. This updated brochure illustrates the revised standard text on mangoes. It demonstrates the quality parameters on high quality photographs. Thus it is a valuable tool for the inspection authorities, professional bodies and traders interested in international trade in mangoes. The brochure is available in electronic format only.
This brochure is published within the framework of the activities of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables set up by OECD in 1962. It comprises comments and illustrations to facilitate the common interpretation of standards in force and is therefore a valuable tool for both the Inspection Authorities and professional bodies responsible for the application of standards or interested in the international trade in these products.
Intense exploitation of our oceans and seas is degrading marine biodiversity and ecosystems at an alarming rate. This report presents good practice insights for effectively managing marine protected areas (MPAs), one of the policy instruments available for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity and ecosystems. While global coverage of MPAs has been increasing over the past two decades, further efforts are required to meet the target under the Sustainable Development Goals and to ensure they are effective.
Drawing on the literature and numerous examples from developed and developing countries, this book highlights how the environmental and cost effectiveness of MPAs can be enhanced. It covers issues including the benefits and costs of MPAs, the need for more strategic siting of MPAs, monitoring and compliance, sustainable finance for MPAs, and the need to embed these in a wider policy mix so as to address the multiple pressures on marine ecosystems.
Governments in many OECD countries intervene in agricultural markets to boost crop producer returns by applying tariffs to the prices of imported cereals and oilseeds and/or subsidising prices paid by foreign buyers. Historically, market price support attributable to such interventions comprised the lion’s share of total financial support afforded crop producers in OECD countries. In recent years, however, the share of crop producer support due to trade policy measures has declined, while that due to payments made directly from government budgets has increased. This publication compares the market impacts of market price support and several kinds of budgetary direct payments using indicators of economic efficiency and trade distortion. The main finding is a numerical ranking of the support measures studied showing a close inverse relationship between trade distortion and transfer efficiency. That is to say, those support measures found to be most efficient in transferring income to farmers are least distorting to trade.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set a broad and ambitious programme for the world to achieve by 2030. With 17 Goals, underpinned by 169 Targets, the complex and integrated nature of the 2030 Agenda presents national governments with huge challenges for implementation. To assist countries, the OECD has developed a unique methodology allowing comparison of progress across SDG goals and targets. Based on the UN Global List of 244 indicators, this study evaluates the distance that OECD countries need to travel to meet SDG targets for which data is currently available. This 2019 edition of the study presents the latest results for OECD countries, both on average and individually, as well as new exploratory approaches to assessing progress over time and transboundary aspects of the SDGs. By providing a high-level overview of countries’ strengths and weaknesses in performance across the SDGs, this study aims to support member countries in navigating the SDGs and in setting their own priorities for action within the broad 2030 Agenda.
Measuring Innovation: A New Perspective presents new measures and new ways of looking at traditional indicators. It builds on 50 years of indicator development by OECD and goes beyond R&D to describe the broader context in which innovation occurs. It includes some experimental indicators that provide insight into new areas of policy interest. It highlights measurement gaps and proposes directions for advancing the measurement agenda.
This publication begins by describing innovation today. It looks at what is driving innovation in firms, and how the scientific and research landscape is being reconfigured by convergence, interdisciplinarity and the new geography of innovation hot spots. It presents broader measures of innovation, for example using new indicators of investment in intangible assets and trademarks.
Human capital is the basic input of innovation, and a series of indicators looks at how well education systems are contributing to the knowledge and research bases. Further series examine how firms transform skills and knowledge, and shed light on the different roles of public and private investment in fostering innovation and reaping its rewards, with concrete examples from major global challenges such as health and climate change.
Measuring Innovation is a major step towards evidence-based innovation policy making. It complements traditional “positioning”-type indicators with ones that show how innovation is, or could be, linked to policy. It also recognises that much more remains to be done, and points to the measurement challenges statisticians, researchers and policy makers alike need to address.
Against the background of increased attention to the sustainability of the agriculture sector, the OECD has developed indicators of the environmental performance of agriculture. Covering the OECD as a whole and all individual OECD countries over the period 1990-2018, the data in this report show that, while most OECD countries increased their agricultural production in the last decade, the environmental performance of the agriculture sector registered mixed results. Progress was achieved reducing phosphorus balances, ammonia emissions, nitrogen balances, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensities. However, a lack of progress was observed in reducing GHG emissions and, for those countries where relevant, improving biodiversity as measured by the presence of farmland birds. The OECD agri-environmental indicators presented in this report provide a reliable and robust source of data that can be used to benchmark environmental performance and inform policy action.
This publication investigates key aspects surrounding the sustainability of bioeconomy development: the use of biomass as feedstock for future production; the design and building of biorefineries for the manufacture of a range of fuels, chemicals and materials, and also for electricity generation; and the use of biotechnologies such as synthetic biology, metabolic engineering and gene editing.
Today more than 50 countries have a dedicated bioeconomy strategy or related policies. While the bioeconomy is consistent with sustainability policy (examples are the circular economy, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, green growth, re-industrialisation, rural regeneration, climate change mitigation), synergies must be ensured to avoid over-exploitation of natural resources and conflicting global needs.
This brochure is published within the framework of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables established by OECD in 1962. It comprises explanatory notes and illustrations to facilitate the uniform interpretation of the current melons standard. This new brochure illustrates the standard text and demonstrates the quality parameters on high quality photographs. Thus, it is a valuable tool for the inspection authorities, professional bodies and traders interested in international trade in melons. The electronic version of this brochure is available on the OECD website.
This book provides comments and illustrations to facilitate the common interpretation of the standard in force for grading melons in international trade under the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables set up by the OECD in 1962. It is therefore a valuable tool for both the Inspection Authorities and professional bodies responsible for the application of standards or those interested in international trade of melons.