Costs of Inaction on Key Environmental Challenges (OECD, 2008) highlights the economic and social costs of delaying action on climate change, air and water pollution, natural resource management, and natural disasters (www.oecd.org/env/costofinaction/publication), while the OECD Environmental Outlook to 2030 (OECD, 2008) showed that well-designed policies to address the key environmental challenge. [...] To ensure this, the environmental impacts of other measures in the stimulus packages should be assessed, with particular attention paid to those such as car-scrapping programmes, investments in new roads, and reductions in electricity and fuel charges. [...] A new OECD report on The Economics of Climate Change Mitigation: How to Build the Necessary Global Action in a Cost-Effective Manner? finds, amongst other things, that removing fossil fuel subsidies in emerging and developing countries alone could reduce global GHG emissions by 10% by 2050, while also increasing the efficiency of these economies. [...] The crisis is an opportunity to put in place cost-effective environmental policies The current economic crisis also provides an incentive to improve efficiency in the use of energy and materials and an opportunity to push through reforms that move us towards a greener world economy. [...] For a start, putting a price on carbon emissions and other pollutants will provide incentives and help create markets for the development and diffusion of green technologies such as solar and wind energy and carbon capture and storage.
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