Sustainable manufacturing and eco-innovation: towards a green economy

source: OECD policy brief
"This Policy Brief examines how innovation can result in new technological and systemic solutions to environmental challenges and contributes to a wider range of OECD work aimed at analysing the policies that can efficiently support the development and diffusion of eco-innovation. While industries are showing greater interest in sustainable production and are undertaking a number of corporate social responsibility initiatives, progress falls far short of meeting these pressing challenges. Moreover, improvements in efficiency in some regions have often been offset by increasing consumption in other regions, while efficiency gains in some areas are outpaced by scale effects. Without new policy action, recent OECD analysis suggests that global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to increase by 70% by 2050."

Corporate ecosystem evaluation: a scoping report

Source: World Business Council for Sustainable Development
"All businesses, regardless of their location on the value chain, both impact and depend on ecosystems and ecosystem services. This in turn presents both risks and opportunities, and securing the business license to operate in a world where we are exceeding biocapacity (or the capacity of the Earth to meet our needs), will require companies to develop clear strategies of how to measure, manage and mitigate their ecosystem impacts and dependence. The scoping study report reaches the conclusion that any attempt to advance corporate ecosystem valuation should focus on new ways of valuing ecosystem dependencies and impacts and incorporating these values within existing financial and business planning tools, drawing where relevant on the existing methods that have been developed specifically to value ecosystem services."

Retrogreening offices in Australia

source: Green Building Council of Australia
"Thousands of construction jobs could be created by "regreening" old office blocks across Aust, a consultant has told the Green Building Council of Aust (GBCA). Refurbishing office stock could create10,000 jobs in the construction sector alone, consultant Davis Langdon estimated in a report for the council."

Wasteful consumption in Australia

source: Australia Institute
"Landfill data and analysis by the Aust Institute suggested 3m tonnes of food worth $5bn was discarded annually in Aust. That wasted inputs eg water used to produce food. Discarding 1kg of beef wasted the 50,000 litres of water the CSIRO estimated it took to produce the meat and throwing out 1kg of rice wasted 2,385 litres. In addition, food dumped in landfills released methane into the atmosphere."

OECD economic outlook: interim report March 2009

Source: OECD
"This report takes account of the deepest and most widespread recession in the OECD and world economies for more than 50 years. It analyses recent developments and focuses on policy actions required to foster a sustained recovery. The report covers the outlook to end-2010, providing detailed economic projections for the major seven (G7) economies and the OECD area as a whole. Developments in major non-OECD economies are also evaluated. The Report also contains a chapter entitled “The Effectiveness and Scope of Fiscal Stimulus”, which provides cross-country comparable data on fiscal responses related to the crisis in OECD countries."

Who pays for climate policy? new estimates of the household burden and economic impact of a U.S. cap-and-trade system

Source: US Tax Foundation
"With climate change legislation becoming a top congressional priority in recent months, a new study shows that a cap-and-trade system curbing greenhouse gas emissions would place an annual burden of $144.8 billion on American households. The average annual household burden would be $1,218, which would be approximately 2% of the average household income."

The economic landscape in 2009

Source: Reserve Bank of Australia
"There’s no doubt that world economic conditions deteriorated sharply in the final months of last year. Governments and central banks around the world have taken actions to support growth in response to these events, and to assist their financial sectors. But these measures will take time to work, and 2009 is looking to be a very tough year for the global economy. Australia is being affected by these events. The international deterioration has been so abrupt that it won’t be possible to avoid some short-term weakness here. Nonetheless, Australia came into this period with better momentum than most, and with more scope than most to take expansionary policy measures. That scope is being used. The transmission channels are working, and we can expect the measures that have been taken will increasingly support demand as the year goes on."