Environmental Performance Reviews

Belgium has made progress in decoupling several environmental pressures from economic growth, in improving wastewater treatment and in expanding protected areas. Regions have achieved high levels of recovery and recycling, and have pioneered circular economy policies. However, further efforts are needed to progress towards carbon neutrality, reduce air and water pollution, reverse biodiversity loss and consolidate results of circular economy initiatives.

Greece has undergone extensive reforms to cope with a deep recession over the past decade. It has made progress in decoupling air pollutant emissions from GDP and improving the conservation status of natural habitats. However, the country faces challenges in managing waste and water, and addressing air pollution.

This is the third Environmental Performance Review of Switzerland. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on water management and biodiversity conservation and sustainable use.

This report provides a cross-country review of waste, materials management and circular economy policies in selected OECD countries, drawing on OECD’s Environmental Performance Reviews during the period 2010-17. It presents the main achievements in the countries reviewed, along with common ...

Hungary has made significant progress in decoupling its output growth from main environmental pressures, largely due to implementing requirements of EU directives. However, greenhouse gas emissions have started to pick up with the recent rebound of economic activity. Local air quality has not ...

Looks at the issues of sustainability and environmental impact in the field of building design and architecture. This book addresses sustainability in building design through development of a series of examples presented as three dimensional models of well-integrated building systems.

This report is the first OECD review of Colombia's environmental performance. It evaluates progress towards sustainable development and green growth, with a focus on waste and chemicals management and policies that promote more effective and efficient protection and sustainable use of biodiversity.

An investigation into the policy effects of requiring firms to disclose information about their environmental performance. Coming Clean is the first book to investigate the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. This process, which requires that firms disclose information about their environmental performance, is part of an approach to environmental protection that eschews the conventional command-and-control regulatory apparatus, which sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors of Coming Clean examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving actual improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government's Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. The authors find that TRI—probably the best-known example of information disclosure—has had a substantial effect over time on the environmental performance of industry. But, drawing on case studies from across the nation, they show that the improvement is not uniform: some facilities have been leaders while others have been laggards. The authors argue that information disclosure has an important role to play in environmental policy—but only as part of an integrated set of policy tools that includes conventional regulation.

One of the most important issues in developing sustainable management strategies and incorporating ecodesigns in production, manufacturing and operations management is the assessment of the sustainability of business operations and organizations’ overall environmental performance. The book presents the results of recent studies on sustainability assessment. It provides a solid reference for researchers in academia and industrial practitioners on the state-of-the-art in sustainability appraisal including the development and application of sustainability indices, quantitative methods, models and frameworks for the evaluation of current and future welfare outcomes, recommendations on data collection and processing for the evaluation of organizations’ environmental performance, and eco-efficiency approaches leading to business process re-engineering.

"Environment has become a central issue in the present day world. Environmental sustainability has been advocated as a major goal to deal with growing problems of pollution that threaten the very existence of the human beings. The dismal picture of global warming brings to the attention the necessity of environmental performance so that the governments in the world can take positive steps toward sustainability. The book uses the data from the Yale Center for Environment and Policy. It uses Environmental Performance Index (EPI) prepared by the Yale Center. The book explores the relationship between environmental performance and democracy, ideology, leadership, good governance, participation in international agreements, economic factors, and globalization"--