The Commission's 10 recommendations divide into two main classes of policy action. Recommendations 1 to 6 define the necessary conditions for better, low-carbon, climate-resilient investment and growth; recommendations 7 to 10 focus on the potential for sectoral change which drives future growth and lower climate risk, specifically in urban, land use and energy systems.
The Commission recommends that national, sub-national and city governments, businesses, investors, financial institutions and civil society organisations:
All governments, major businesses, investors, development, commercial and investment banks, international organisations and leading cities should work to integrate climate risks and opportunities into their economic and business strategies.
Climate and other environmental risks should be integrated into core dercision-making tools and practices, such as economic and business models, policy and project assessment methods, performance indicators, discounting approaches used to estimate the present value of longer-run costs and benefits, risk metrics and models, resilience tests, and reporting requirements.
Businesses, working through associations such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and with government regulators, should adopt and implement a standardised Integrated Reporting Framework for financial and non-financial performance that includes the assessment of climate risk and risk reduction strategies. Investors and stock exchanges should require companies to disclose this information.
Investors, working together with government financial regulators, should develop an approach to report transparently on the carbon exposure of their assets, and the potential risk of stranded fossil fuel assets. Banks should deepen their assessment of environmental and carbon risk in transactions.
The G20 should make climate risk assessment and reduction a standing agenda item in its meetings. Major international organisations concerned with the management of the global economy, such as the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the multilateral development banks, should reflect climate risk assessment and reduction in their surveillance processes and policy assessments as relevant to their mandates.
All governments should set clear, ambitious medium-term (e.g. 2025) national greenhouse gas emission targets or actions which reflect their common but differentiated responsibilities as part of the global agreement. They should agree a global goal which would achieve annual greenhouse gas emissions of near zero or below in the second half of the century. The agreement should include a mechanism for regular strengthening of national commitments (e.g. on five-yearly cycles); financial and technical support for developing country action, and strong commitments to take adaptation action. It should also provide as much transparency as possible to build confidence. The principles of equity and a just transition should underpin the agreement, reflecting the current and changing circumstances of countries.
Developed countries should commit to a clear pathway for meeting the Copenhagen commitment to mobilise US$100 billion annually by 2020 in public and private finance, combined with greater transparency of financial commitments and identifying new sources of finance (see Recommendation 5).
Businesses, cities, states, national governments, international institutions and civil society organisations should complement an international agreement by strengthening (and where appropriate, creating) cooperative initiatives to drive growth and climate risk management in key sectors, including major commodities and energy-intensive industries, and to achieve the phase-out of hydrofluorocarbons (HCFs).
National governments should develop comprehensive plans for phasing out fossil fuel and agricultural input subsidies. These should include enhanced transparency and communication and targeted support to poor households and affected workers. Governments should explore innovative approaches with multilateral and national development banks on how to finance the upfront costs of reducing the impact on low-income households, and enhancing service delivery as or before the subsidies are phased out.
Export credit agencies should agree to restrict preferential terms for new coal power stations to supercritical or more efficient technologies, and then to a timetable for phasing out these preferential terms, initially for middle-income countries, and then for low-income countries (See Recommendation 5).
Regions, cities and urban development ministries should phase out incentives for urban sprawl. Multilateral and national development banks should work with countries to redirect infrastructure spending away from projects that enable urban sprawl and towards more connected, compact and coordinated urban development.
National governments should introduce a strong, predictable and rising carbon price as part of fiscal reform strategies, prioritising the use of resulting revenues to offset impacts on low-income households and finance reductions in other distortionary taxes.
Major companies worldwide should apply a "shadow" carbon price to their investment decisions and support governments in putting in place well-designed, stable regimes for carbon pricing.
Efficient regulations, standards and other approaches should be used to complement pricing; these can also help to put an "implicit" price on carbon for countries where a low level of carbon pricing is politically difficult, preferably with flexibility built in to facilitate the introduction of explicit pricing later.
National governments should seek to reduce policy risk and uncertainty by enacting domestic climate legislation, modifying their national plans and developing the institutional arrangements needed to meet their commitments under an international climate agreement (see Recommendation 2)
Donors, multilateral and national development banks should review all lending and investment policies and practices, and phase out financing of high-carbon projects and strategies in urban, land use and energy systems, except where there is a clear development rationale without viable alternatives.
Governments and multilateral and national development banks should help provide new and existing financing institutions with the right skills and capacity to provide finance for low-carbon and climate-resilient infrastructure, and to leverage private finance towards this goal. This would include finance for distributed off-grid and mini-grid renewable energy solutions, as a contribution to achieving universal access to modern energy services.
In rapidly developing countries facing high interest rate environments, governments should shift their support models for low-carbon infrastructure more towards low-cost debt, and away from price subsidies such as feed-in tariffs. This could reduce the total subsidy required, bring down the cost of energy over time, and in some cases, may reduce the need to buy imported fuel.
Governments, working with investor groups, should help develop well-regulated asset classes, industry structures and finance models for renewable and other low-carbon energy investment which match the needs of institutional investors, and identify and remove barriers that may hamper these investments.
Governments of the major economies should at least triple their energy-related research and development expenditure by the mid-2020s, with the aim of exceeding 0.1% of GDP; in addition, all countries should develop coordinated programmes to support the development, demonstration and deployment of potentially game-changing technologies, such as energy storage and carbon capture, use and storage.
Governments should strengthen the market pull for new low-carbon technologies, in particular through carbon pricing, performance-based (technology-neutral) codes and standards, and public procurement policies.
Governments should work individually and together to reduce barriers to the entry and scaling of new business models, particularly around "circular economy" and asset-sharing mechanisms, and trade in low-carbon and climate-resilient technologies.
Donors, working with international agencies such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and national research institutes in emerging and developing countries, should double investment in agriculture and agroforestry R&D, with the aim of boosting agricultural productivity, climate-resilient crop development and carbon sequestration.
Learning from the CGIAR experience, governments should collaborate to establish an international network of energy access "incubators" in developing countries. These should enhance public and private R&D in off-grid electricity, household thermal energy, and micro- and mini-grid applications. They should also boost business model development for new distributed energy technologies.
Finance and urban planning ministries, national development banks, and city mayors should commit to a connected, compact and coordinated urban development model, centred on mass transport and resource-efficient service delivery.
City authorities, working with national and sub-national governments, should identify ways to increase locally generated revenues to finance and incentivise smarter, more compact and resilient urban development - for example, through greater use of congestion charging, parking fees, land development taxes and land value capture mechanisms.
Governments, multilateral and national development banks should work with major cities and private banks to strengthen the creditworthiness of cities. They should work together to set up a global city creditworthiness facility.
Networks of cities, such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), working with international organisations and the private sector, should create a Global Urban Productivity Initiative aimed at significantly increasing the economic and resource productivity of the world's cities. The initiative could start by developing, quantifying and disseminating best practices in boosting urban productivity, and support countries' efforts to put sustainable urbanisation at the heart of their economic development strategies.
Developed countries should scale up payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) to at least US$5 billion per year, focused increasingly on payments for verified emission reductions.
Forest-rich countries should take steps to correct the governance and market failures undermining natural forest capital, including actions to improve land use planning, secure tenure, strengthen enforcement of forest laws, and increase transparency concerning the condition and management of forests.
Companies and trade associations in the forestry and agricultural commodities sectors (including palm oil, soy, beef, and pulp and paper) should commit to eliminating deforestation from their supply chains by 2020, for instance through collaborative initiatives such as the Consumer Goods Forum and its Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 and in cooperation with banks willing to incorporate environmental criteria into their trade financing instruments.
National governments, working together with farmers, development banks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the private sector, should commit to and start the restoration of at least 150 million hectares of degraded agricultural land, to bring this back into full productive use - for example, through agroforestry measures. This target could be scaled up over time, based on learning from experience. It is estimated that such action could generate additional farm incomes of US$36 billion, feed up to 200 million people and store about 1 billion tonnes of CO2e per year by 2030.
Governments, with the support of the international community, should commit to and start the restoration of at least 350 million hectares of lost or degraded forest landscapes through natural regeneration or assisted restoration by 2030. This could generate an estimated US$170 billion per year in benefits from ecosystem services, and sequester 1-3 billion tonnes of CO2e per year.
Governments should reverse the "burden of proof" for building new coal-fired power plants, building them only if alternatives are not economically feasible, bearing in mind the full range of financial, social and environmental costs associated with coal power.
All countries should aim for a global phase-out of unabated fossil fuel power generation by 2050. High-income countries should commit now to end the building of new unabated coal-fired power generation and accelerate early retirement of existing unabated capacity, while middle-income countries should aim to limit new construction now and halt new builds by 2025.
Governments and multilateral and national development banks should adopt an integrated framework for energy decisions, ensuring a public and transparent consideration of all the costs and benefits of different energy sources, including demand management options, based on consideration of supply costs, energy security impacts, health costs of air pollution, other environmental damage, risks related to climate change and technology learning curves.
Governments worldwide should steer energy sector investments towards renewable energy sources, energy efficiency improvements and other low-carbon alternatives. Energy efficiency should be prioritised, given the cost savings and energy security benefits it provides.
Governments should provide assistance to support workers, low-income households and communities in coal-dependent regions and carbon-intensive sectors that may be adversely affected by these policies, to ensure a just transition with appropriate social protection measures, using where relevant some of the revenues from carbon taxes and subsidy reform for this purpose.