Many governments are developing the broad and comprehensive policy packages needed for climate action. The second phase of the OECD’s horizontal project Building Climate and Economic Resilience: Net Zero+ has generated rich insights from multi-disciplinary analyses across the contributing OECD policy committees and bodies. However, it has also identified important questions and knowledge gaps, such as:
How effective are climate policy packages? Ex-post evidence on policy effectiveness is lacking. As governments implement increasingly comprehensive and stringent policy packages, more evidence is needed on their effectiveness, interactions, and what works best in what context.
How significant is government support? Notwithstanding some progress within the OECD, data on the magnitude and nature of government support to industries key to the green transition remains incomplete. Given the scale of industrial policy packages, better understanding their impacts, including on driving progress on climate goals, would greatly support policymakers in designing or enhancing such strategies.
To what extent is finance aligned with climate goals and targets? Improved assessment is needed across most financial sources. Given the crucial need to align financial flows with climate goals, developing better methodologies and data sources in this area is imperative.
How can data and capacity gaps in developing countries be closed? Developing countries often face challenges when projecting climate impacts or the impacts of the net-zero transition. Filling data gaps, increasing modelling and assessment capacity and finding innovative means to address challenges faced by developing countries is crucial. Localised approaches to impact assessments, making use of qualitative methods such as surveys and interviews, may be useful.
How resilient are economies and societies to climate impacts? Stronger evidence is needed to inform adaptation policies, including improved mainstreaming of climate risk assessments and enhanced monitoring and evaluation to better understand the effectiveness of adaptation efforts and whether they remain fit-for-purpose as climate impacts evolve.
What is the carbon footprint of everything? Knowing the carbon footprint of goods, processes and activities would make it possible for governments to design more effective policies and for consumer demand to create markets for low-carbon goods, both of which improve incentives for firms to decarbonise. Better information and incentives would in turn help firms unlock the financing needed for investments in decarbonisation. Improving carbon footprint information relies on proportional efforts balancing precision and resource requirements, innovation and competition, as well as interoperability across sectors, countries and initiatives.