Reports

As a European Green Capital 2023, Tallinn has a unique momentum to set the foundations for its transition from a linear to a circular economy. The newly created Circular Economy Department in the city administration is a signal of this transformation. The city conceives the circular economy as a means to advance environmental goals while generating opportunities for job creation and stimulating innovation through a systems approach. This report summarises the findings from a 20-month policy dialogue between the OECD, the city of Tallinn and stakeholders from public, private and non-profit sectors. It provides the main components of existing circular economy initiatives promoted in Estonia and in the city of Tallinn, key challenges and policy recommendations to help the city develop its long-term vision on the circular economy, setting targets for the future.

This report provides a global assessment and outlook on wildfire risk in the context of climate change. It discusses the drivers behind the growing incidence of extreme wildfires and the attribution effect of climate change. It outlines the environmental, social and economic impacts of wildfires by illustrating the losses and costs observed during recent extreme wildfire events. Building on this, the report presents the findings of a cross-country comparative analysis of how countries’ policies and practices have evolved in recent years in light of observed and projected changes in wildfire risk. The analysis draws on in-depth case studies conducted in Australia, Costa Rica, Greece, Portugal and the United States. The report underlines the urgent need for governments to scale up climate change adaptation efforts to limit future wildfire costs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant shift in the way people work, with an increasing number of individuals opting to work from home. Fewer commutes allow people to live further away from the city centre, where jobs typically concentrate. Against this background, this paper tests the hypothesis of a shift in housing demand away from the city centre towards the suburbs using a novel granular house price data set covering 16 OECD countries. The results indicate a flattening of the house price gradients in most large urban areas with profound consequences for housing policies and the city of the future.

The quality of Internet connections is increasingly important for people’s daily lives as work and access to services move to the digital sphere. Likewise, businesses and public agencies need to rely more and more on the digital networks for service delivery. However, the way individuals experience the Internet can vary substantially within countries, notably along the urban-rural continuum. Measuring such variation in a consistent way is important to understand where intervention is most needed to deliver better connections to everyone. This paper assesses within-country spatial disparities in connectivity across OECD and G20 countries, using publicly available data on the speed of connections from an Internet speed test provider, applying consistent spatial definitions – i.e. the OECD classification of regions and the Degree of Urbanisation. Using data from Denmark, it finds that the use of speed tests to assess the quality of internet connection is coherent with national sources. Results show that, in OECD countries, regions far from metropolitan areas can experience up to 24% slower Internet speeds than the national average. Overall, cities have 75% higher speed of connection than rural areas, on average.

German federal states and municipalities have engaged in decentralised development co-operation (DDC) since the 1950s. Germany provides over half of total official development assistance (ODA) in the world that is channelled as DDC. However, most of this support remains within German borders. To incentivise further international partnerships, the federal government has established dedicated programmes and financial support schemes for states and municipalities. This report presents key data on the DDC landscape in Germany and offers guidance on how to strengthen its role in enabling peer-to-peer learning and improve collaboration between German states and municipalities. It also showcases how to further raise awareness about the mutual benefits of DDC partnerships, including through better ODA data reporting and a harmonised approach to monitoring and evaluating its results across levels of government.

Decentralised development cooperation (DDC), or partnerships for sustainable development between cities and regions in developed and developing countries, can help drive major global agendas forward. Achieving a sustainable, equitable and resilient future requires action from subnational governments in many key SDGs and emerging areas, such as the response to the global health crisis, support for refugees and implementing net-zero pathways. The Global policy toolkit: Guidance for practitioners shows how DDC can promote mutual benefits and peer-to-peer learning, bring development co-operation closer to people and their daily lives, and deliver technical services and expertise. By providing a repository of good practices and guidance on implementation modalities, the toolkit seeks to promote policy dialogue and mutual learning across DDC actors and to enhance DDC effectiveness, efficiency and impact worldwide.

City-to-city partnerships and decentralised development co-operation (DDC) can play a key role in advancing the SDGs and in addressing global megatrends, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and other shocks. This report discusses the framework conditions for effective city-to-city partnerships and takes stock of existing monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. As a complement, it proposes a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework for city-to-city partnerships to localise the SDGs, combining self-assessment and SDG indicators. This framework aims to bridge the gap in terms of measuring the progress of cities engaged in partnerships on the 2030 Agenda and their compliance with the G20 Rome High-Level Principles on city-to-city partnerships for localising the SDGs. The report also presents lessons learned from a pilot-testing of this new framework and highlights policy implications and ways forward to enhance the sustainability, transparency and accountability of city-to-city partnerships, in a shared responsibility across levels of government and stakeholders.

This work leverages globally consistent data on parks from Google Maps, in combination with the computational power of Google Maps Directions API to quantify accessibility to parks across nearly 500 metropolitan areas in six countries: Estonia, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States. We combined high resolution population data from Worldpop with parks data and navigation estimates to measure: (1) Fraction of the population with access to parks within a 10-minute walk; and (2) the median walking time to the closest park. We find large differences in access to parks between countries, as well as large variability across cities and their respective commuting zones. To demonstrate how this framework can support cross country comparisons and efforts to track progress towards SDG11, we assessed access to parks by income group in selected countries, finding that the median walking time to a park is shorter for residents of low income neighbourhoods both in French and American metropolitan areas.