Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will need a rapid acceleration of finance towards clean energy investments in emerging and developing economies. Blended finance is an important tool that can help mobilise commercial investment towards clean energy, whilst preserving scarce public resources for...

The use of materials globally has increased over the past century and it will continue to grow with sustained population and economic growth. Such growth also leads to increased environmental pressures, including climate change. While the Slovak Republic has made notable progress in decoupling...

Sweden was facing a serious soil acidification and water eutrophication problem caused partly by emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from combustion processes in transport, industry and power. In 1992, Sweden introduced a high tax on NOx emissions from large combustion sources (e.g. power plants,...

Strengthening linkages between climate change adaptation and mitigation policies can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of actions in support of a low-carbon, climate-resilient economic development. This policy paper provides an overview and a discussion of linkages, shedding light on the...

The international community has agreed to limit the average global temperature increase to no more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels. This will require a gradual phase-out of fossil fuel emissions by the second half of this century. This report brings together lessons learned from OECD...

In recent decades, Israel’s growing population and rising incomes have seen consumption increase substantially, bringing with it considerable pressure on the environment. One of the main environmental pressures is from the ever-increasing transport activity, especially the use of private...

Global demand for materials has been growing over the past century, driven by a steady economic growth in OECD countries, the industrialisation of emerging economies and a growing world population. At the global level, materials use more than doubled between 1990 and 2017, and it is projected to...

The investment choices we make in the coming years will either lock-in a climate-compatible, inclusive growth pathway, or a high-carbon, inefficient and unsustainable pathway for decades to come. Cities and regions, responsible for 60% of public investment in OECD countries, are significant...

Lake Taupo is New Zealand’s largest lake, and a national icon. Its pristine waters attract visitors from round the world for a multitude of water-based recreation and sight-seeing activities. It is also important to New Zealand’s indigenous peoples. In the late 1990s, scientific...

According to latest data from the OECD and the IEA, government support for the production and use of fossil fuels across 81 major economies totalled USD 351 billion in 2020, amounting to USD 183 billion across 50 OECD, G20, and Eastern Partnership economies. While the difficulty of reform is...