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The Climate Action Monitor, part of the International Programme for Action of Climate (IPAC), provides a diagnostic policy framework for assessing country progress towards climate objectives. Its goal is to provide a digest of progress towards, and alignment with, Paris Agreement goals to support countries in making better-informed decisions and allow stakeholders to measure improvements more accurately. Alongside the IPAC Dashboard, it complements and supports the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement monitoring frameworks by: 1) reviewing key trends and developments and highlighting areas for further analysis and policy action; 2) promoting greater harmonisation of key indicators; 3) showcasing examples of good climate mitigation and adaptation practices and results; and 4) strengthening transparency over climate policies.

This paper reviews the literature on the distributional effects of environmental and climate policies, focusing on ex-post empirical evidence. It decomposes the distributional effects into the main dimensions to understand which policy packages are more likely to achieve a triple dividend of environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and equity. This paper also takes stock of the related literature on the political acceptability of environmental policies to assess proposals of compensation policy packages, including green recovery plans, environmental tax reforms and progressive subsidies to green technologies.

Finland has a strong reputation as a leader in environmental policy and sustainable development. It committed to become carbon neutral by 2035 and to pioneer the world’s first circular economy. However, it is not fully on track to meet its ambitious goals. Greenhouse gas emissions fell in the last decade, but they need to decline at a much faster pace to meet the target. Waste generation, material consumption and nutrient losses to water bodies have continued to rise. Agriculture and a large forestry sector exert pressures on the country’s biodiversity. Targeted policy measures are needed to provide adequate incentives, boost investment and innovation and steer the economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis towards the green transition. Finland should move from good strategy making to effective and coherent implementation. It needs to get the right policies in place, to secure sufficient resources and ensure continued and broad public consensus. This is the third Environmental Performance Review of Finland. It evaluates progress towards green growth and sustainable development, with a special chapter focusing on climate change mitigation and well-being.

Nitrogen management policies introduced in the past decades by some OECD countries have succeeded in reducing excess nitrogen use by farmers, but half of global mineral fertiliser use is still lost for crops. While about half of OECD countries have nutrient surpluses of between 25-50 kg N per hectare, a smaller number of countries are still having surpluses of more than 100 kg N per hectare. Since the production and use of mineral fertilisers have a large greenhouse gas footprint and to achieve the deep reductions in emissions as the Paris Agreement aims for, nitrogen management policies could be reinforced and pursued more systematically. The paper identifies significant reduction potential by eliminating the excess use of nitrogen fertilisers and improving efficiency in the use of manure-nitrogen, which could be obtained with a redesign of nitrogen management policies and schemes for public financial support. To underpin such measures a tax on the nitrogen surplus at farm level could play a vital role. Based on the available estimates of environmental externalities of nitrogen, the paper identifies an average rate of EUR 1-2 as a suitable starting point for a tax or penalty on the surplus application of nitrogen. The paper also explores the opportunities for sustainable nutrient management in agriculture with climate mitigation benefits relating to nitrous oxides in particular.

There is no guidance on how to deal with the effects of catastrophic events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, on stated preference survey responses, despite the possible impact such events can have on stated values and survey responses. This paper provides a concise analysis of the likely effects of extreme events on stated preference surveys, focusing on the validity and temporal stability of estimated values, and offers a set of recommendations. These recommendations can also be of use for designing other types of household and individual surveys, beyond economic valuation surveys.

On a daily basis, a deluge of academic studies, reports and news tell us that the Earth’s ecosystem is in danger. They further warn that we need more than just information to address the climate crisis, protect the environment, and promote a sustainable way of living. We need action. Education plays a pivotal role in raising awareness and sensitivity about the environment. It must provide the foundational knowledge and skills to identify and resolve environmental challenges, and shape attitudes and behaviours that lead to both individual and collective action.

This paper proposes a ranking of the countries where forest carbon sequestration is the most cost-efficient among 166 countries for which data are available. Taking into account the main cost factors leads to a more nuanced ranking of the countries to be favoured for cost-efficient forest carbon sequestration compared to the assumption that these would always be in tropical areas with high rainfall. The ranking reflects the differences in the opportunity cost of land use and labour cost (production costs), the quality of the business environment (transaction costs), natural conditions (forest productivity), wildfire risk and the avoided GHG emissions from alternative land use. Cost-efficiency also depends on the type of forest project (afforestation, reforestation or forest conservation) and how private (wood harvest) and non-private (environmental and social) co-benefits are counted. A sensitivity analysis is undertaken to examine the robustness of the results with respect to uncertainties in values of the cost and quantity factors of forest carbon sequestration. The results support the view that forests can be a cost-efficient way to offset GHG emissions and that significant cost reductions are possible by targeting the country and sub-national regions in which to locate forest carbon sequestration projects. The report also reviews the literature on the significance and cost of forest carbon sequestration and provides an overview of forest carbon offset schemes.

COVID-19 and Well-being: Life in the Pandemic explores the immediate implications of the pandemic for people’s lives and livelihoods in OECD countries. The report charts the course of well-being – from jobs and incomes through to social connections, health, work-life balance, safety and more – using data collected during the first 12-15 months of the pandemic. It also takes stock of what has happened to human, economic, social and natural capital that, beyond their effects on people’s lives today, shape living conditions for years to come. It shows how COVID-19 has had far-reaching consequences for how we live, work and connect with one another, and how experiences of the pandemic varied widely, depending on whether and where people work, their gender, age, race and ethnicity, education and income levels. The report also examines the role that well-being evidence can play in supporting governments’ pandemic recovery efforts. It argues that a well-being lens can prompt policy-makers to refocus on the outcomes that matter the most to people, to redesign policy content from a more multidimensional perspective, to realign policy practice across government silos, and to reconnect people with the public institutions that serve them.