Connecting ambition to climate policy action

Policies to address climate change have been historically difficult to implement, partly because of a real or perceived lack of public support.

A recent survey on public attitudes towards climate policies showed that a key way to increase support for carbon taxes, for example, is by designing them in such a way that their revenue offsets the burden on low-income households. This can be done through lower income taxes or cash transfers.

Explore the digital report to learn about the complex factors that drive or diminish public support for ambitious climate policies.

While particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, agriculture is also a major contributor to the problem. Along with land use change, it represents 22% of total global GHG emissions. About half of this is directly linked to production, resulting in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, while the other half (mainly carbon dioxide) is strongly driven by deforestation and carbon losses in soils due to agricultural expansion.

The production emissions account for 42% of all global methane emissions and 70% of nitrous oxide emissions. These gases have a very strong global warming effect: methane from agriculture is 27 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 100-year timescale, and nitrous oxide is 273 times as potent.

Agriculture can also be part of the solution, by removing carbon from the atmosphere through carbon sequestration. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions can be reduced through improvements in productivity, practices and technologies, and the adoption of less emission-intensive food consumption patterns.

In many OECD and EU countries, regions and cities have jurisdiction over key policy areas with enormous climate action potential. These include housing development, land-use planning, transportation, wastewater treatment, and waste management.

In 2019, on average, subnational governments were responsible for 63% of total climate-significant public expenditure and 69% of climate-significant public investment, across 33 OECD and EU countries.

The OECD has developed three instruments to help governments better understand the tools available: a climate expenditure database, a compendium of fiscal instruments, and a green budgeting tool.