Green growth is about prosperous economies that are low-carbon, climate-resilient, resource- efficient, clean, biodiverse and sustainable.

The research programme focused on a number of important aspects of green growth, namely climate-resilient development, the economics of internalising the carbon externality via carbon pricing and the impact of green growth policies on jobs and innovation.

The policy implications of this research were explored in a series of policy briefs: ‘Climate change adaptation in dynamic economies: the cases of Colombia and West Bengal’ (Kocornik-Mina and Fankhauser, 2015), ‘Green agricultural policies and poverty reduction’ (Lovo et al., 2015), ‘Carbon pricing in good times... and bad’ (Doda, 2014), ‘Carbon pricing: how best to use the revenue?’ (Bowen, 2015), ‘Looking for green jobs: the impact of green growth on employment’ (Bowen and Kuralbayeva, 2015), ‘The impacts of environmental regulations on competitiveness’ (Dechezleprêtre and Sato, 2014), and ‘Climate change policy, innovation and growth’ (Dechezleprêtre et al., 2015).

This policy brief summarises the key findings from these studies.

Key findings for policy-makers include:

Environmental regulation, including climate change policies, are unlikely to harm economic growth and competitiveness unless there are large differences in policy stringency between countries.
Conversely, these policies drive innovation in new, high value, clean technologies that have broad application across economic sectors.
As a result, environmental regulations can be a source of economic growth and future prosperity.
Economic development plans should become more climate-aware.
Development planners and adaptation planners need to work more closely together.
In order to cushion the impact of economic fluctuations on the carbon price, it is preferable that the policy – whether it is a tax or cap-and-trade – covers as large a group of emitters as possible.
Efforts to establish common statistical standards for measuring the number of existing green jobs should be accelerated.
The likely labour market impacts of economy-wide green growth should be assessed using an appropriate macroeconomic framework.
Strategies for coping with employment losses in the sectors that will suffer from green growth policies need to be developed.

[Extract from author's introduction]

Publication date
Type of publication
Document
Objective
Mitigation
Collection
Eldis
CTCN Keyword Matches
Progressive water pricing
Colombia