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This report explores how institutional investors can apply risk-based due diligence as recommended by the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct and help them prevent and mitigate adverse climate impacts associated with their investee companies on society and the environment. It provides practical recommendations on how to conduct due diligence as a way to connect climate commitments at portfolio level with real-economy impacts and draws on other frameworks and tools for assessing, managing or disclosing climate impacts associated with investments.

Water-related risks are intrinsically linked to both climate and nature challenges and can be closely tied to socio-economic challenges, such as poverty, food security, and domestic and international conflicts. There is increasing evidence that water-related risks are financially material across actors in the financial system, and further still, that there may be important implications for financial stability. However, a review of current practices indicates that these risks are not fully captured by current approaches to assessing risk. This working paper explores how the financial sector understands the concept of financial materiality as a lever for decision making on water-related climate and nature risks. The paper also looks at how regulatory and supervisory guidance considers water in the context of climate and nature risks, and finally how sustainable finance tools and initiatives can support market participants in gaining an improved understanding of water-related risks.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, governments and economic actors have increasingly been setting greenhouse gas emissions reduction or net zero targets. Amidst risks of delayed action and greenwashing, there is need to understand whether climate related targets and transition plans are consistent with the Paris Agreement. Climate change mitigation scenarios can be used as inputs to design such targets and plans, and as benchmarks to assess progress towards them. In this context, this paper proposes criteria for selecting global climate change mitigation scenarios that can be considered consistent with the Paris Agreement temperature goal and emissions objectives, based on state-of-the-art literature on climate science and mitigation scenarios.

Climate change mitigation scenarios are a key forward-looking input for a range of financial sector analyses and assessments. The inaccurate use of mitigation scenarios can, however, contribute to unintended incentives, environmental integrity concerns, and greenwashing risks. This paper aims to inform climate change mitigation scenario providers, financial sector participants and stakeholders, and climate policymakers on how they may contribute to improved use of scenarios for the purposes of target setting and alignment assessments in the financial sector. To do so, the paper analyses climate change mitigation scenarios currently used for these purposes, based on the following analytical dimensions: consistency with the Paris Agreement, practicality, and underlying assumptions.

Carbon lock-in occurs when high-emission infrastructure or assets continue to be used, despite the possibility of substituting them with low-emission alternatives, thereby delaying or preventing the transition to near-zero or zero-emission alternatives. Transition finance, which focuses on the dynamic transformation and decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors, frequently faces the issue of carbon lock-in, particularly in considerations of investment feasibility and eligibility. Despite most transition finance approaches incorporating lock-in avoidance as a core principle, existing transition instruments and approaches put in place varying or limited mechanisms to prevent lock-in. Building on the OECD Guidance on Transition Finance, this report takes stock of how carbon lock-in risk is addressed in existing transition finance approaches (such as taxonomies, roadmaps, or guidance), financial instruments, and relevant public and private investment frameworks and methodologies. The report provides good practices on the integration of credible mechanisms to prevent carbon lock-in, address greenwashing risks and build confidence in the market. It can inform both public and private actors in the development of transition finance approaches, standards for green, transition and sustainability-linked debt, frameworks for corporate transition plans, or broader climate-related disclosure frameworks.

The Inclusive Forum on Carbon Mitigation Approaches (IFCMA) is the OECD’s flagship initiative to help optimise the global impact of emissions reduction efforts around the world. This report presents developments since the first meeting of the initiative in February 2023, including the latest updates in terms of country membership and technical work, and outlines next steps.

The frequency and severity of extreme wildfires are on the rise in Portugal, causing unprecedented disruption and increasingly challenging the country’s capacity to contain losses and damages. These challenges are set to keep growing in the context of climate change, highlighting the need to scale up wildfire prevention and climate change adaptation. This paper provides an overview of Portugal’s wildfire policies and practices and assesses the extent to which wildfire management in the country is evolving to adapt to growing wildfire risk under climate change.

The shipping industry is essential for international trade, but it is also an important source of CO2 emissions. To make progress towards climate targets, countries need to monitor CO2 emissions from vessels owned by their ship operator companies. However, most shipping activity takes place outside national borders, making it more difficult to monitor than activity taking place within countries. The OECD’s experimental database on OECD.stat provides a new source of data for CO2 emissions from global shipping, which is available monthly in near real time. This data will help national statistics producers to compile their Air Emission Accounts (AEAs) for the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). This Working Paper presents some initial results from the new data source and describes how they were produced. The method is based on granular and timely ship-level data provided by the United Nations Global Platform, and it uses a bottom-up estimation approach to produce results broken down by country and type of ship.

This Policy Guidance is a product of the Development Assistance Committee’s multi-year programme of work on Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) in oil commodity trading. It proposes a set of relevant, feasible actions for providers of official development assistance (ODA) to respond to IFFs in oil commodity trading. The aim is to enhance the mobilisation of domestic resources for the benefit of populations living in oil-producing developing countries, and enable integrity in their energy transition, particularly in carbon trade.