Environment

Colombia has prioritised the use of renewable energy to expand and improve electricity services for its population in zones non-interconnected to the national grid. Recent policies and regulations have supported this ambition with successive measures to strengthen investment conditions for distributed renewable energy, like standalone solar photovoltaic (PV) solutions and hybrid solar PV mini-grids. Still, the distributed renewable energy market in non-interconnected zones is relatively immature, reflected by the high costs for connecting new users. New business and financing models will be critical to bringing down the cost of renewable energy technologies, accessing private equity and debt in larger volumes, and ultimately progressing towards replacing existing inefficient and polluting diesel generation systems. Building on international experiences, this paper discusses approaches to strengthening investment conditions, looking at support mechanisms and de-risking instruments used elsewhere, which can help bridge the financing gap in Colombia.

The paper is the first in a series of two papers mapping young people’s environmental sustainability competence in EU and OECD countries that were prepared as background for the forthcoming OECD Skills Outlook 2023 publication. The papers are the results of a collaboration between the OECD Centre for Skills and the European Commission - Joint Research Centre (Unit B4) on students’ environmental sustainability competence. The second paper is titled: ‘The environmental sustainability competence toolbox: From leaving a better planet to our children to leaving better children for our planet’.

The paper is the second in a series of two papers mapping young people’s environmental sustainability competence in EU and OECD countries that were prepared as background for the forthcoming OECD Skills Outlook 2023 publication. The papers are the results of a collaboration between the OECD Centre for Skills and the European Commission - Joint Research Centre (Unit B4) on students’ environmental sustainability competence. The first paper is titled ‘Young people’s environmental sustainability competence: Emotional, cognitive, behavioural and attitudinal dimensions in EU and OECD countries.

This report compiles comparable tax revenue statistics over the period 1990-2020 for 27 Latin American and Caribbean economies. Based on the OECD Revenue Statistics database, it applies the OECD methodology to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to enable comparison of tax levels and tax structures on a consistent basis, both among the economies of the region and with other economies. This publication is jointly undertaken by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

To realise Colombia’s clean energy ambitions and enable the necessary mobilisation of finance and investment, the government has set forth a number of important policy strategies, including the 2018 Green Growth Policy, the 2019 National Circular Economy Strategy and the forthcoming 2022 Energy Transition Policy. These high-level policies all note the role clean energy solutions like sustainable bioenergy and waste-to-energy can play in supporting decarbonisation objectives. These solutions can also achieve a number of other socioeconomic ambitions, including improved reliability of energy supply, improved access to affordable and reliable energy in areas that are not connected to the national electricity grid, and reduced amounts of waste going to capacity-limited landfills. This report aims to support Colombia’s renewable energy ambitions, focusing on current clean energy trends, opportunities for bioenergy and measures that can increase finance and investment in those solutions. Through five case studies from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India and Turkey, the report also considers the enabling environment and lessons learnt from bioenergy developments in different countries.

Many Latin American countries have experienced improvements in income over recent decades, with several of them now classified as high-income or upper middle-income in terms of conventional metrics. But has this change been mirrored in improvements across the different areas of people’s lives? How’s Life in Latin America? Measuring Well-being for Policy Making addresses this question by presenting comparative evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with a focus on 11 LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay). Spanning material conditions, quality of life, resources for future well-being, and inequalities, the report presents available evidence on well-being both before and since the onset of the pandemic, based on the OECD Well-being Framework. It also identifies priorities for addressing well-being gaps and describes how well-being frameworks are used in policy within Latin America and elsewhere around the world, providing lessons for governments on what is needed to put people’s well-being at the centre of their action. The report is part of the EU Regional Facility for Development in Transition for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Climate-related disasters have inflicted increasingly high losses on developing countries, and with climate change, these losses are likely to worsen. Improving country resilience against climate risks is therefore vital for achieving poverty reduction and economic development goals. This report discusses the current state of knowledge on how to build climate resilience in developing countries. It argues that climate-resilient development requires moving beyond the climate-proofing of existing development pathways, to consider economic development objectives and resilience priorities in parallel. Achieving this will require political vision and a clear understanding of the relation between climate and development, as well as an adapted institutional set-up, financing arrangements, and progress monitoring and evaluation. The report also discusses two priorities for climate-resilient development: disaster risk management and the involvement of the private sector. The report builds on a growing volume of country experiences on building climate resilience into national development planning. Two country case studies, Ethiopia and Colombia, are discussed in detail.