The OECD Environmental Outlook to 2020

In April 1998, OECD Environment Ministers requested the OECD to develop a new Environmental Strategy for the next decade to be considered at their Ministerial Meeting in Spring 2001, in preparation for the “Earth Summit plus 10” in 2002. It was decided that the new Strategy should be underpinned by an Environmental Outlook to 2020. The reasoning behind the decision to develop an Environmental Outlook was that the new environmental strategy should be based on a solid assessment of past and future trends and on possible impacts of policy options, which could be recommended in the strategy. The objectives of the Environmental Outlook and Strategy are: (1) to generate an economy based vision of environmental conditions in 2020 (the Outlook) and, (2) to review and recommend practical policy options for moving the outlook in a more environmentally friendly direction (the Strategy). This paper describes current progress made by the Secretariat to develop the Environmental Outlook. Although work is already well advanced for some areas, there is still a lot of work to be done before the completion of the report. Thus this paper contains a brief summary of selected results from the sectors and issues covered in the report, but many of these results are still of a preliminary nature. More definitive results will become available at a later stage. It is expected that a draft of the Environmental Outlook report will be presented to the OECD Environment Policy Committee in November and that the final report will be published in early 2001.