OECD Green Growth and Sustainable Development Forum

Navigating the twin transitions: Going green and digital

21-22 November 2023 | OECD Conference Centre, Paris & online

The annual OECD Green Growth and Sustainable Development Forum is a conference open to a wide range of stakeholders and experts from OECD Committees, agencies, other international organisations, government officials, civil society, academics and the private sector. It aims to identify remaining knowledge gaps and promote new initiatives to effectively address them. Each year, it focuses on a different cross-cutting issue related to sustainable development and green growth.

About this year's Forum

The convergence of the digital and green transitions presents opportunities and challenges for societal efforts to meet the Paris Agreement goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Digital technologies can facilitate the design of more efficient and effective environmental policies including by decreasing the cost of monitoring greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. The large-scale adoption of smart meters can support progress towards net-zero power systems, while big data and artificial intelligence (AI) can help to design smarter and more sustainable cities. At the same time, the growing carbon footprint of computing and increasing e-waste are key challenges. Both transitions are likely to drive substantial changes in skills demand and sectoral competitiveness, with important implications for affected workers, households, communities and regions. 

Drawing on the OECD Horizontal Projects “Net Zero+: Climate and Economic Resilience in a Changing World” and “Going Digital”, the GGSD Forum focused on the convergence of the digital and green transitions, and how to leverage the complementarities and minimise the trade-offs between them to maintain progress towards greener and fairer societies. The Forum also considered how external shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, are affecting the international landscape for green growth.
The OECD’s Horizontal Project on Climate and Economic Resilience in a Changing World uses the multidisciplinary reach of the OECD to support governments in driving the swift transformational change needed to tackle climate change. The project provides analysis and insights that take into account the whole climate picture – the need for an accelerated and resilient transition to net zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts – in the context of unexpected global disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic and far-reaching effects of Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine.

Watch the sessions replay

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