This OCI report reveals the disconnect between Canada’s promises on climate change and the actions of its official export credit agency, Export Development Canada (EDC), in propping up the oil and gas industry.

Oil Change International in partnership with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Environmental Defence Canada, Equiterre, Above Ground and Climate Action Network Canada.

Disclosures and analysis of transaction-level data reveals that EDC provides, on average, over $10 billion in government-backed support for oil and gas companies every year. Between 2012 and 2017, EDC provided twelve times more support for oil and gas than it did for clean technologies. In the first two years of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, EDC provided more support for oil and gas (22.4 billion) than was provided during the last two years of the government of his predecessor, Stephen Harper (20.9 billion). 

The report’s release comes in the midst of two ongoing reviews of EDC’s governance. International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr has asked EDC to thoroughly review its internal practices at the same time the government is also reviewing EDC’s governing legislation.The report shows how Canada can align EDC’s mandate with best-in-class policies and with global goals that Canada has committed to, including the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Description provided by Oil Change International.

Energy subsidies and tax revenues, investments by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as well as credit support through state-owned banks and international finance institutions represent flows of public money that can either undermine or encourage sustainable development and decarbonization.

Some G20 governments have made progress in shifting at least some support away from fossil fuels and increasing their taxation. This working paper has brought together examples illustrating how reforms can be enabled and implemented to align the flows of public money with the Paris Agreement and SDGs:

• Story 1 provides the example of Indonesia as a country that saved USD 15.6 billion by reforming untargeted subsidies for gasoline and diesel in 2015.
• Stories 2 and 3 highlight recent reforms removing subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, development and production in Canada and Argentina (Spanish version).
• Story 4 features reforms in the European Union, including progress in its accountability on fossil fuel subsidies and the phase-out of subsidies for hard coal mining by the end of 2018.
• Story 5 unpacks the progress on shifting credit support from public financial institutions, including multilateral development banks, away from fossil fuels.
• Story 6 deals with the examples of SOEs in coal mining and fossil fuel power diversification in clean energy in China, India and Sweden.
• Stories 7 and 8 discuss a related issue of not just removing government support from fossil fuels, but also increasing taxation on their consumption and production, for instance in China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and India.

This nascent positive shift of public money from fossil fuels to clean energy must occur at a much faster rate for the G20 to get on track to meeting the SDGs and climate goals. The working paper concludes with recommendations to the G20 countries for learning from each others' efforts undertaking reforms while protecting vulnerable groups and ensuring a just transition for workers and communities currently dependent on fossil fuels. 

In order to promote the uptake of clean cooking, the Government of India has historically provided significant price subsidies for household liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), worth over INR 20,000 crore (USD 2.9 billion) in FY 2017/18.

This digital story takes an in-depth look at some of the most recent developments.

Yes, yes, we’ve heard all the jokes—we know our lakes don’t look a day over 35.

It may come as a surprise to you that the world’s most influential 58 lakes (and their watersheds)—IISD Experimental Lakes Area—turn 50 this year. Or rather, for 50 years, these ordinary yet highly impactful lakes in a remote corner of northwestern Ontario, Canada have been the only ones in the world dedicated to long-term whole-ecosystem experimentation.

In these pages, we explore the impact that IISD-ELA’s research has had on the world’s fresh water over the last 50 years, what the future holds, and how we are celebrating our half century.

In a world of mobile capital and profits, many developing countries use tax incentives in the hope of attracting domestic and foreign investment. Their effectiveness, however, has often been disputed, not least in relation to the mining sector, which involves location-specific resources that cannot be moved. Tax incentives are also costly, leading many countries to forgo vital revenues in exchange for often illusive benefits. 

Nonetheless, governments may determine that they would still benefit from introducing tax incentives for the mining sector because of some specificities in their jurisdiction. For example, changing tax arrangements may appear easier to deliver than other investment-promoting actions such as infrastructure. In such cases, tax incentives need to be carefully designed to be effective (that is, to achieve their policy objective) and efficient (the policy goal is achieved at the minimum cost to government revenue).

Comprehensive wealth measures the country’s produced, natural, human, financial and social capital.

• Produced capital is made up of the buildings, machinery and infrastructure owned by households, businesses and governments.
• Natural capital includes the forests, lakes, minerals, fossil fuels, land and other elements that make up the natural environment.
• Human capital is the value of the skills and knowledge bound up in the people that make up the workforce as represented by lifetime earning potential.
• Financial capital includes stocks, bonds, bank deposits and other financial assets owned by households, businesses and governments.
• Social capital measures the degree of civic engagement and trust/cooperation among the members of society.

Unlike GDP and other short-term indicators used to assess national progress, comprehensive wealth measures the assets that are the foundation of well-being in the long run. Examining data from Statistics Canada from 1980 to 2015, this report raises a number of red flags on the sustainability of Canadians' levels of prosperity, namely:

• Unprecedented Canadian household debt.
• The average lifetime earning potential of a Canadian has gone down—$496,000 in 2015 compared to $498,000 in 1980.
• Reliance on foreign lenders for nearly three quarters of investment flows after 2012.
• Concentration of business investment in produced capital in just two areas: housing and oil and gas extraction infrastructure.
• An 86 per cent drop in the market value of Canada’s most valuable natural asset: the oil sands.
• Vulnerability of Canada’s comprehensive wealth portfolio to climate change impacts.

These concerns don't emerge when examining Canada's relatively good GDP performance over the same time period, prompting the report's author to call on governments to report comprehensive wealth measures alongside GDP.

When a mining company arrives in an area, the promise of local employment is central to public debate in least-developed, developing and developed countries alike.

For local communities, decent mining company jobs that are safe, stable and fairly compensated allow employees and their families to plan ahead to improve livelihoods and financial security. For host governments, local employment in the mining sector supports national priorities and political promises for job creation, human capital development and inclusive economic growth. For mining companies, employing local people drives cost efficiencies and helps in the ongoing process of gaining and maintaining a social licence to operate.

Recognizing these opportunities for social and economic development, governments use a wide range of policies and strategies to promote direct local employment in the mining sector. This paper reviews these policies and strategies as part of a broader set of inputs on enhancing local content in the mining sector prepared in collaboration with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) for the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF).

Many resource-rich countries have not succeeded in sufficiently using their mining sector as a stepping stone for broader economic transformation.

As a result, although the industry is a significant revenue contributor, its linkages with the rest of the economy remain rather weak. To address this, and under mounting pressure to deliver more inclusive outcomes, governments are increasingly taking regulatory measures with the objective to increase the use of domestic factors of production in the mining sectors, and provide more prospects for the local economy to benefit from the mining industry. Local content policies are one such strategy.

This document is meant to provide some clarity on the key characteristics and challenges of local content policies. It does not attempt to propose one definition of local content. It is meant to provide a better understanding of the various types of instruments used, as currently contained in existing legal and institutional frameworks and based on country specific experiences. The purpose is to highlight the prerequisites necessary to inform a decision whether or not to design local content policies, and guide readers to what types of policies could best be adopted, given the specific policy environment in place in their respective countries.

There is a strong belief in many resource-rich developing countries that in order to achieve industrial development raw materials should be processed domestically rather than being exported in their unprocessed form.

Driven by this objective of fostering industrialization, some governments have undertaken measures to either prescribe or incentivize downstream beneficiation.

This paper summarizes key policy options generally adopted by governments to encourage downstream activities, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses of each type of policy. These include various forms of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives; prescriptive measures such as export duties; bans or legal obligations to engage in beneficiation; the use of bargaining power in negotiations; beneficiation conditions linked to bidding processes; and government-led investments. The paper concludes with policy recommendations.

The discussion is built on a selection of geographically and economically diverse case studies and several commodities, namely copper, diamonds, iron ore, nickel and oil. Five of the case studies—Australia, Botswana, Nigeria, Indonesia and Singapore—have been published as stand-alone notes on the IGF local content guidance webpage. The paper is part of a set of expert documents to substantiate the IGF Guidance for Governments on local content policies, released in July 2018.

The flow of data on freshwater health is becoming difficult to manage. Many organizations around the world, however, have developed innovative ways of harnessing and processing that data to better understand ecosystems, engage citizen scientists and make better decisions.

In this report, we highlight eight case studies—from Stockholm to outer space—where new technologies—from blockchain to Artifical Intelligence—are empowering governments, businesses and citizens to make informed decisions about their water resources.