Insufficient progress in climate change mitigation is driving the climate system into unchartered territory with severe projected consequences. The report builds on the OECD Well-being Framework and applies a new perspective, the well-being lens. This new perspectives analyses synergies and trade-offs and creates two-way alignment between climate change mitigation and broader well-being goals across five economic sectors (electricity, heavy industry, residential, surface transport, and agriculture) that are responsible for more than 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Three specific actions are identified as central to generating a two-way alignment between climate and other well-being goals. Namely, rethinking societal goals, refocusing measures of progress, and reframing climate policies through a well-being lens. This report is focused on the first two. While work focusing on the third action was originally planned as a second part of this report, the decision has been made to instead release a series of sector-specific policy papers. These will still draw on the work featured in this report and cover the same five sectors (i.e. residential, agriculture, surface transport, electricity and heavy industry).
An opening chapter “Increasing incentives for climate action using a well-being lens” is dedicated to discussing the general climate context and setting out the main rationale of the report. The rest of the report contains five sector-specific chapters that address the change in perspective, through:
Rethinking societal goals: For each sector, the report reassesses current policy priorities, discussing the need for these to effectively guide the sector towards climate and other well-being and sustainability goals.
Reframing the measurement system: A more comprehensive set of indicators can help monitor and set criteria to ensure progress on multiple policy priorities, making synergies and trade-offs between them systematically visible. A number of new and complementary indicators are introduced and discussed in relation to existing indicators, including those included in the SDGs and the OECD Well-being Framework.
As argued in chapter 1, these two actions are necessary and provide the basis for refocusing climate policies through a well-being lens: