by: Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

Climate change and the environmental pressures resulting from economic growth imply that the importance of eco-innovation and the need to develop clean technologies are being increasingly recognized as mainstream policy concerns with multiple ramifications. The financing and development of clean technologies requires policy efforts to coordinate initiatives across many different areas, involving multiple actors over a sustained period of time. The public sector is bound to play a crucial role not only in defining the regulatory and policy framework that drives change but also in designing and funding arrangements to overcome the market failures that hamper progress.

The introduction of new environmental technologies and their diffusion within and across countries on a massive scale requires specific interventions in a number of typical innovation-related areas, such as early-stage financing, R&D support and intellectual property rights.

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