Environmental Considerations in Competition Enforcement

The debate on environmental sustainability and the fight against climate change is moving quickly from more abstract political debates to focused conversations on policy choices and implementation options. The OECD is supporting this trend with its continued effort in exploring how competition authorities can support and incentivise sustainable and pro-competitive business practices.

In December 2020, the OECD held a discussion on Sustainability and Competition to explored the interplay between competition and sustainability goals. Building on that discussion, in December 2021 the OECD held a roundtable on the practical approaches that competition authorities can take when assessing cases with an environmental dimension. The discussion explored how to integrate economic and non-economic environmental effects into the competitive assessment from legal and economic perspectives.

The, in 2022, the topic was further addressed during the 2022 OECD Competition Open Day.

This page contains all related documentation regarding the December 2021 roundtable.

• Private actors play an important role in reaching internationally set net-zero targets, alongside public policy, public investments and regulation. Competition enforcement and competition policy are thus fundamental to ensure the efficient allocation of capital and contribute to enabling the technological breakthroughs needed to reach environmental goals and their dissemination at scale. 
• Sustainability outcomes will generally be best achieved if firms compete. It is therefore important to prevent sustainability initiatives from being abused to form illegal cartels or for greenwashing purposes. Nevertheless, private co-operation can, under certain circumstances, contribute to advancing sustainability objectives and efficiencies.
• The traditional analytical framework used by competition authorities is flexible enough to allow for environmental considerations, even if it may be challenging in some cases. Addressing such challenges may require some adjustments to the current analytical tools and to the investigation techniques used by competition authorities, including a more extensive use of environmental economics and closer co-operation with other policymakers. 
• Since many forms of sustainability co-operation do not negatively affect competition, guidance by competition authorities may be important to avoid chilling effects on investments and private initiatives. Given the cross-border nature of environmental impacts, increased internal co-operation between competition authorities will be important to reach consistent solutions.

OECD note | Note de l'OCDE

Detailed Summary of the discussion EN | FR

Executive Summary with key findings EN | FR

Paper by Nadine Watson EN | FR