News
Role of Fiscal Policies in a Green COVID-19 Recovery: Experience, Best Practice and Next Steps in the Asia-Pacific Region
This workshop, organized by GFPN and UNESCAP, explored the potential role of green fiscal policies in greening the Covid-19 recovery with the aim of supporting public health efforts, reducing environmental and climate change risks, and strengthening resilience to future crises by embedding inclusive and sustainable socio-economic considerations in national economic planning.
Budgeting for Sustainable Development – GFPN – University of Oxford COP26 side-event
How can fiscal policy support socio-economic development, and the environment? Join H.E. Minister Lee White of Gabon to explore new practical methods for understanding potential
Land grab: How agri-subsidies encourage Irish farmers to cut back on nature
Irish farmers continue to see annual payments penalised for maintaining biodiversity hotspots despite concerns raised by the State over the climate and biodiversity crises.
‘Greta was right’: Trio of reports warns world at risk of squandering green recovery opportunity
Greta Thunberg’s accusation that world leaders are guilty of ‘blah, blah, blah’ in the face of the escalating climate crisis is ‘spot on’, according to a trio of new reports released today, which warn the opportunity provided by the coronavirus crisis to introduce sweeping fossil fuel subsidy reform and ambitious green stimulus packages is being squandered.
Consider a single carbon tax to make net zero work, economists say
Moving the economy to net zero – emitting less carbon dioxide than it consumes – will be messy and expensive unless the government has a radical rethink about how to simplify its approach to taxing greenhouse gas production.
Taxing new plastic is the cheapest way to address its environmental impact
The market is able to ignore the greater environmental burden of virgin plastics. Economists have known that the most efficient way to address this is to level the playing field by making users of virgin plastics pay for the added costs the virgin plastic adds to the globe.
‘Please put a price on carbon’, says Europe’s biggest utility
Countries need to put a price on carbon to help the world cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit climate warming to agreed targets, the head of Europe’s biggest utility said on Tuesday.
Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11m a minute, IMF finds
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs.
Britain’s confused approach to carbon pricing
A reluctance to raise the cost of natural gas is understandable, given that poorer households spend more of their income on heating their homes. But it only further underscores the importance of joined-up, coherent thinking about how Britain can hit its net zero emissions target by 2050.
