Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Useful overview of OECD's recent policy initiatives in climate and environment, helpful for tracking international governance trends.

🏢実務担当者:Corporates can anticipate future climate policy directions from OECD recommendations, particularly on carbon mitigation and green finance.

🏛政策担当者:Key reference for understanding OECD's contribution to climate negotiations, carbon mitigation platforms, and climate finance guidance.

The OECD was founded in 1961 as an international organisation to ‘build better policies for better lives.’ Its goals are to ‘foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all.’ Given its broad remit, the OECD’s work spans various economic, social, and environmental issues. As of this year, the OECD has thirty-eight member countries: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Accession discussions continue with six candidate countries: Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Peru, and Romania, while other nations, such as Indonesia, have also signaled an interest in joining. While economic issues remain the forefront of the OECD’s mandate, it is increasingly covering matters related to the environment. The OECD’s Environment Directorate has been active since 1971 and works to provide recommendations on a number of substantive areas of environmental policy-making. It also undertakes environmental policy reviews of OECD members and provides data and modelling for policy makers. The Directorate’s work includes a number of focus areas, including climate change and air quality; green growth and investment; circular economy and plastics; biodiversity; chemical safety and biosafety; agriculture, forestry, and land use; and the environment in emerging and transition economies. The following report canvasses the main developments at the OECD pertaining to international environmental law throughout the past year. A number of issue areas came to the forefront of the OECD’s work this year, mostly stratified by climate change. Of particular note is the launch of the Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA)—the OECD’s flagship initiative to help optimize the global impact of emissions reduction efforts around the world. Climate change remained a priority focus for the OECD in line with the Secretary General’s strategic whole-of-organization approach to climate change announced in 2021. A centrepiece of this work is the OECD International Programme for Action on Climate (IPAC), which supports progress towards net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and a more resilient economy by 2050. To bolster this work this year, the OECD developed the IFCMA—a platform to scale emissions reduction efforts around the world through better data and information, drawing on policy perspectives from a diverse range of countries. The IFCMA held its first meeting in February, and an update was subsequently presented to the G20 leaders by the OECD Secretary-General in September. A horizontal project entitled ‘Net Zero+: Climate and Economic Resilience in a Changing World’ also featured in the OECD’s 2023 agenda. The OECD continues to provide technical input into the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including through its OECD–International Energy Agency Climate Change Expert Group, which has been active since 1993. The OECD was active at the twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties (COP-28) of the UNFCCC, hosting a program of more than thirty events addressing a wide range of issues, from the environmental integrity of carbon markets to adaptation policies and transition finance. The OECD also produced a report entitled Towards an Impactful Mitigation Work Programme under the UNFCCC, which finds that it could help to raise awareness of available tools and solutions, build momentum behind relevant ongoing mitigation-related initiatives without being prescriptive, and deliver more effective, targeted mitigation efforts across all fronts in the near-term, resulting in scaled-up mitigation efforts and learning-by-doing. In terms of climate finance, the OECD produced a report entitled Climate Finance Provided and Mobilised by Developed Countries in 2013–21, which provides key recommendations for international providers to increase financing towards adaptation and more effectively mobilize private finance for climate action, which are both important policy priorities and current bottlenecks. The OECD provided a spotlight on climate change through the report, The Environment at a Glance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other work includes A Territorial Approach to Climate Action and Resilience, which illustrates the role of local government—a trend also evident in a separate report on promoting nature-based solutions in municipalities in Hungary. The OECD further released a report on the climate implications of government support in aluminium smelting and steelmaking, which found that government support has contributed to increased carbon emissions from aluminium and steelmaking activities through an increase in production outputs and by shifting production to more emissions-intensive plants. This year, the negotiation of a global agreement on plastics edged forward. The OECD supported this development through its research efforts. In November, it released Towards Eliminating Plastic Pollution by 2040, which reviews the costs and benefits of alternative policy packages with varying levels of international coordination and policy stringency across the world. The OECD also released research on circular economy issues. Its report entitled Trade Policies to Promote the Circular Economy: A Case Study of the Plastics Value Chain, for example, recommended reduced tariffs on environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic products; trade facilitation measures for reverse supply chains; or technical regulations, standards, labelling schemes, and conformity assessment procedures that promote product designs that minimize pollution throughout the entire plastics lifecycle. The OECD produced a report entitled How Green is Household Behaviour? Sustainable Choices in a Time of Interlocking Crises, which finds that cost and convenience are key to shifting behavioural patterns. In February, OECD ministers launched the Declaration on Promoting and Enabling Responsible Business Conduct in the Global Economy (OECD/LEGAL/0489), which, inter alia, reiterates the link between responsible business conduct and environment and climate goals. Green growth and investment remains one of the OECD’s principal areas of expertise. This year the OECD’s programming placed a particular emphasis on small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), with ministers launching the Declaration on Enhancing SMEs and Entrepreneurship Policies for Greater Resilience and Successful Green and Digital Transitions (OECD/LEGAL/0497) in June, which, inter alia, recognizes the essential role of SMEs and entrepreneurs in addressing the climate crisis. The OECD continued to play host to several meetings on this issue area. On 21–3 November, the OECD hosted a Green Growth and Sustainable Development Forum in Paris with the theme ‘Navigating the Twin Transitions: Going Green and Digital.’ The Forum focused on the convergence of the digital and green transitions and how to leverage the complementarities and minimize the trade-offs between them to maintain progress towards greener and fairer societies. The ninth Annual Forum on Green Finance and Investment was held virtually on 5–7 October with the theme ‘Moving from Commitments to Actions in the Decade for Delivery: Towards Impactful Green and Sustainable Finance.’ The Forum featured discussions on all aspects of aligning financial flows with the Paris Agreement across public and private sectors. The OECD also produced significant research on various elements pertaining to green growth and investment. Examples of this research include producing policy guidance in areas related to regulation for the green transition, renewable natural resources and ecosystem services, mitigating the risks of illicit financial flows in oil commodity trading, policy considerations for greener tourism, and net zero metrics for financial institutions. The OECD has developed growing policy expertise in biodiversity, including in the run-up to, and during, COP-15 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity held in Montreal on 7–19 December 2022. In the interregnum between the biodiversity COPs, the OECD produced several research outputs on biodiversity risks and dependencies and economics—for instance, a report entitled Biodiversity and Fragility: A Perspective On Fragile Contexts. The OECD continued work examining the agriculture, forestry, and land-use sectors. The OECD held a global forum on agriculture in April, which focused on carbon footprints for food systems. The OECD’s Annual Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation examines the practice of fifty-four countries to establish trends in agricultural support. It notes significant divergence across the OECD in terms of agricultural policy support, including an overall decrease in support through market price support and output-based payments. The OECD provides policy guidance to both OECD and non-OECD members to manage their water resources. The OECD actively participated in the UN Water Conference on 22–4 March in New York—the first such event in forty-seven years. In the run-up to it, in February, it hosted the ninth meeting of the Roundtable on Financing Water, which illustrated the need to: make water a higher priority in the international agenda; strengthen (international and national) legal frameworks around water; unpack the water value chain with (innovative) financing mechanisms; bring water issues into negotiations on the international financial architecture; address the double materiality of water-related risks; develops tools, metrics, and data on water-related risks; and address the issue of water, sanitation, and hygiene affordability. The OECD also continues to conduct research to assist emer

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1093/yiel/yvae026first seen 2026-08-02 18:47:45