Credible and consistent carbon pricing must be the cornerstone of government actions to tackle climate change, according to a new OECD report.

The 2013 Forum was held on 5-6 December and discussed how governments can improve their investment policy framework to reduce the risk and attract long-term private finance in support of green growth.

This LEED project aims to to define key indicators of area-based transition to a low-carbon economy. The objective is to define measurable indicators at regional/local level that can inform over time of transition to low-carbon economic and industrial activities.

New international rules on state financing of rail exports will boost the development of cleaner transportation infrastructure and help countries meet green growth objectives, the OECD said.

The last decade has seen considerable policy attention to the social economy and its contribution to employment, in particular as regards the inclusion and empowerment of vulnerable workers and the provision of appropriate working conditions.

OECD Secretary-General, Mr. Angel Gurría, gives his views in this blog from the World Economic Forum in Davos on the huge risk that carbon dioxide emissions pose to the economy and the environment.

LEED and Cedefop organise the second edition of the Green Skills Forum which will bring together experts in innovation, employability and skills development and lessons from work conducted by the OECD, Cedefop, and other organisations on the implications of the green economy for skills development and training policies.

The Ministerial Green Growth Group (GGG) is an informal grouping of like-minded energy, environment and climate Ministers from across 13 EU member states who have come together to work towards a pro-growth and pro-climate EU agenda. The group meets regularly to discuss and co-ordinate positions on EU low carbon matters and to promote, with businesses and investors, an ambitious EU decarbonisation growth agenda.

Risk finance is essential for new ventures to commercialise new ideas and grow, especially in emerging sectors. Yet very little is known about the drivers and characteristics of risk finance in the green sector. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed description of risk finance in the green sector across 29 countries and identifying the role that policies might have in shaping high-growth investments.

The OECD’s 34 member countries today affirmed their common resolve to work towards a deal on combating climate change at the COP21 talks in Paris in 2015. OECD accession countries Colombia and Latvia joined the statement issued at the Organisation’s annual Ministerial Council Meeting, attended by finance, economy, trade and other ministers.

The ITF is an intergovernmental organisation within the OECD to tackle mobility issues for the 21st century. The Forum acts as a platform to advance transport policy and practice, with a view to ensuring transport's contribution to economic growth, environmental protection, social inclusion and the preservation of human life and well-being. The ITF 2014 annual Summit is being held in Leipzig, Germany on 21-23 may 2014.

The policy forum officially launches the conceptual framework to the public and offers an opportunity for participants to discuss the key issues for emerging Asia: housing, buildings and energy, land use and transport, water and waste management, green goods and services.

The report presents the potential of new nanomaterials and highlights the remaining challenges for their safe and sustainable introduction in the tyre industry.

As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approach their expiry date, we must focus our efforts on ensuring a brighter, more inclusive and sustainable future for all. We face a plethora of common issues: growing inequalities; changing consumption patterns and population dynamics; increasing natural resource scarcity; and ongoing illicit financial flows.

The Japan-OECD Policy Forum on Urban Development and Green Growth will address cities’ unique role in creating synergies between environmental and economic objectives to advance green growth. Asian cities in particular are at the centre of this challenge. This event is organised as a commemorative event for the 50th Anniversary of Japan's Accession to the OECD.

The Green Growth and Sustainable development Forum is an annual event, and the third Forum will take place on 13-14 November 2014. This blog highlights the importance of the Forum, and how, far from being "abstract", this year's Forum offers an invaluable opportunity to address the social implications of implementing green growth strategies.

This Forum examined the distributional consequences of implementing green growth strategies and their impact on employment, skills and income.

Water security is one of the greatest challenges we face today, yet the situation has never looked more perilous. By 2050 the OECD Environmental Outlook projects that nearly 4 billion people will live in river basins under severe water stress, and global nitrogen effluents from wastewater are projected to grow by 180%. Whilst, over the same period, global demand for water is expected to grow by 55%.

As environmental pressures continue to rise, governments throughout the OECD area have not been sitting back. If anything, the stringency of their policy measures has been increasing on the whole, not least to combat pollution and climate change. And as the evidence shows, stringent environmental policies can be introduced without hurting overall productivity.

Third Annual Conference on the theme of "Fiscal Policies and the Green Economy Transition: Generating Knowledge – Creating Impact" held at the University of Venice from 29 through 30 January 2015. The press release is available.

Climate policy and competitiveness issues have created a new need for international co-ordination, beyond the scope of our current frameworks. There is no need to trade economic growth for environmental stringency. Environmentally stringent policies are an incentive for greater efficiencies which leading edge companies can easily achieve.

This will be “the mother of all years for summits on international development". International delegates will gather in Addis Ababa in July to discuss how poorer countries can fund their development. In September, attention will shift to New York, where the UN will sign off on the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In December, Paris will take centre stage to host the global climate change conference, COP21.

"Green growth" and transport combines several different concepts that are central to sustainable mobility, including sustainable economic activity, reduced environmental impact and sustained growth in high quality jobs.

The OECD’s latest Environmental Performance Review of Spain finds the country has decreased the energy and carbon intensity of its economy, reduced industrial pollution and cut per-capita waste generation since 2000.

This report develops an analytical framework that assesses the macroeconomic, environmental and distributional consequences of energy subsidy reforms. The framework is applied to the case of Indonesia to study the consequences in this country of a gradual phase out of all energy consumption subsidies between 2012 and 2020.

The fates of humanity and of the environment are two sides of the same coin. That is why we must focus increasingly on not just development but sustainable development. To do that, we need to form global coalitions to work for progress on a range of challenges.

Consumers only occasionally choose to buy sustainable products. At the same time these consumers say in surveys that sustainability is important to them, and that the government should promote sustainable consumption. This study takes a closer look at public support for sustainable consumption and the associated dilemmas, with the help of a behavioural economics experiment of group decisions.

Climate change and, more generally, environmental damage have quantifiable economic and health costs, which weigh on long-term growth and well-being. If left unchecked, climate change is projected to decrease global GDP by 0.7 to 2.5 % by 2060. At the same time, the costs to society of air pollution already appear substantial–equivalent to some 4% of GDP across OECD countries and even higher in some rapidly developing economies.

Poland has combined robust economic growth with reducing some of the pressures on its environment since it joined the EU in 2004. It has also brought environmental laws closer to European norms. Poland now needs to lessen its economy’s reliance on fossil fuels and make growth greener, according to a new OECD report.

A new OECD publication highlights notable economic and environmental benefits of phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies in Indonesia. Interestingly, the study is based on the context that pertained until mid-2014, when international oil prices where high and before the recent phase-out of subsidies by the government.

In the coming months, the international community will gather three times and on three different continents, to build a sustainable development agenda for generations to come.

The international discussions under way in the course of this vital year–including July’s Finance for Development Meeting in Addis Ababa, the agreement of a new set of universal Sustainable Development Goals at the UN in September and the climate change summit in Paris at the end of 2015–represent a remarkable and unprecedented opportunity to establish what might be called a “Magna Carta for the earth” for our times.

This year’s OECD Ministerial Council Meeting, which we are honoured to chair, will address the issue of investment. The timing could not be better. Growth prospects have improved, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Investment has been hit especially hard since the crisis started and has yet to recover.

In his remarks to the Business & Climate Summit, the Secretary-General said that business lies at the heart of what we need to achieve on climate action. If Governments produce clear, credible and coherent national policies and clear messages and signals, the full transformative power of business, markets and human ingenuity will be unleashed.

The OECD hosted a workshop on green investment banks on 20 May 2015. It built upon discussions of green banks at the OECD Green Investment Financing Fora (May 2015 and June 2014) and continued international dialogue on the experiences of green banks. The workshop welcomed 9 different green banks, public financial institutions, NGOs, the private sector and over 20 countries interested in the green bank model.

The Annual Summit of the International Transport Forum is the unique platform for a global conversation on strategies for transport in the 21st century. It took place in Leipzig, Germany from 27-29 May 2015, under the Presidency of New Zealand under the theme "Transport, Trade and Tourism".

To mark the opening of the International Transport Forum’s Annual Summit, today’s post addresses three broad issues of the complex and multidimensional triangular relationship between transport, trade and tourism.

The OECD’s Annual Meeting at Ministerial Level reinforced member governments’ support across a broad range of key OECD work.

This major report produced in co-operation with the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Transport Forum (ITF) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) identifies the misalignments between climate change objectives and policy and regulatory frameworks across a range of policy domains (investment, taxation, innovation and skills, trade, and adaptation) and activities at the heart of climate policy.

Mainstreaming greening in employment and skills strategies requires a strong partnerships between public, private and not-for-profit organisations in order to maximise innovation and to manage smoothly labour market transitions from brown to green energy and employment. In this timely report, CEDEFOP and the OECD provide evidence and policy analysis to foster an equitable shift to greener economies and more sustainable societies.

Government support to fossil fuel consumption and production in OECD countries and key emerging economies remains high, at USD 160-200 billion annually, according to a new OECD report. This support is hampering global efforts to curb emissions and combat climate change.

Addressing climate change requires urgent policy action to drive a global infrastructure and technological transformation. The latest report 'Aligning Policies for a Low-carbon Economy' presents the first diagnosis of the alignments of policy and regulatory frameworks with climate policy goals. Join the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) for a webinar exploring these issues on 5 October 2015, 15:00-16:30 (Paris time).

The OECD and the Ministry of Finance of Indonesia (Fiscal Policy Agency) held an expert seminar on 4-5 November, 2015 in Bogor, Indonesia. The event brought together representatives from the ASEAN line ministries, research organisations and other key international organisations to share their knowledge and expertise on the topic. This event was supported by the OECD Knowledge Sharing Alliance.

So, for those interested in considering how to foster a green industrial revolution, it will be worthwhile to plan a trip to the OECD Green Growth and Sustainable Development Forum* in Paris this December.

Achieving green growth requires ambitious transition management policies in key sectors such as energy, transport, water and agriculture. Provided that the pace of innovation in a number of these key areas is growing faster than ever before, the Forum examined how to foster the "next industrial revolution" by harnessing the potential of systems innovation policies to support green growth.

The OECD defines policy coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) as an approach and policy tool to integrate the economic, social, environmental, and governance dimensions of sustainable development at all stages of domestic and international policy making. This blog details the OECD's PCSD framework and its goals.

Read the latest OECD Insights blog written by Mrs. Gabriela Ramos, Special Counsellor to the OECD Secretary-General, Chief of Staff and G20 Sherpa.

Read the latest blog by Patrick Paul Walsh, Professor of International Development Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland and Senior Advisor, UN SDSN, Earth Institute, on the Implications of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda for the OECD.

The Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) is pleased to announce its Fourth Annual Conference on the theme of Transforming Development through Inclusive Green Growth from 6-7 September 2016 at the International Conventional Centre in Jeju Island in the Republic of Korea. The GGKP welcomes the submission of abstracts on policy- and practitioner-relevant research findings on pro-poor and inclusive green growth.

At one time, I might have said that sustainable development is in the OECD’s blood, but biological metaphors have made enormous progress over the past few years and now I’d say it’s in the Organisation’s DNA... Blog by Ron Gass, founding Director of the OECD Directorate of Social Affairs, Manpower and Education and the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Education (CERI).