1887

OECD/IEA Climate Change Expert Group Papers

This series is designed to make available to a wider readership selected papers on climate change issues that have been prepared for the OECD/IEA Climate Change Expert Group (CCXG). The CCXG (formerly called the Annex I Expert Group) is a group of government delegates from OECD and other industrialised countries. The aim of the group is to promote dialogue and enhance understanding on technical issues in the international climate change negotiations. CCXG papers are developed in consultation with experts from a wide range of developed and developing countries, including those participating in CCXG Global Forums.

The full papers are generally available only in English.

The opinions expressed in these papers are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OECD, the IEA or their member countries, or the endorsement of any approach described therein.

English

Addressing the COVID-19 and climate crises

Potential economic recovery pathways and their implications for climate change mitigation, NDCs and broader socio-economic goals

This paper provides decision-makers with a framework for prioritising different economic, social and environmental goals and analysing the options available to achieve them. To this end, it develops three stylised COVID-19 recovery pathways (“Rebound”, “Decoupling” and “Wider well-being”) that differ in the extent to which they encompass greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions and the integration of mitigation and wider well-being outcomes or, broadly equivalently, SDGs. A number of real-world examples of COVID-19 recovery measures in the surface transport and residential sectors were identified, and the paper maps these measures onto these three stylised pathways. The paper finds a wide divergence in the environmental and social impacts of COVID-19 recovery measures developed to date, with several countries putting in place measures that correspond to all three pathways. The nature and pace of economic recovery in different countries and in aggregate will have important implications for existing, updated and new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, and the paper also highlights the possible impact of the COVID-19 recovery measures being put in place on NDCs– including on the ambition of both current and future NDCs. The paper concludes that it will be important for governments to improve their understanding of the impact of their recovery measures across multiple policy dimensions (economic, social, environmental) as well as across different time periods (short and long-term) and spatial scales.

English

Keywords: inequality, beyond growth, transport, residential, Climate change, net-zero economy, wider well-being, NDCs, sustainable recovery, SDGs
JEL: D62: Microeconomics / Welfare Economics / Externalities; H54: Public Economics / National Government Expenditures and Related Policies / National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: Infrastructures; Other Public Investment and Capital Stock; A13: General Economics and Teaching / General Economics / Relation of Economics to Social Values; Q54: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming; E61: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook / Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination; Q01: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / General / Sustainable Development; D63: Microeconomics / Welfare Economics / Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement; Q52: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error