Green growth is about fostering growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies. Governments that pursue policies designed to promote green growth, need to catalyse investment and innovation that underpin growth and give rise to new economic opportunities. They also need indicators that can raise awareness, measure progress and identify opportunities and risks.

Our ability to sustain economic and social progress in the long run will depend on our capacity to reduce dependence on natural capital as a source of growth, abate pollution, enhance the quality of physical and human capital and reinforce our institutions. Delivering the quality of growth to which citizens of OECD and G20 countries aspire will require concerted action across countries and within ministries invested in green growth – finance, economy, industry, trade and agriculture, among others.

The OECD green growth indicators enable the monitoring of progress towards four main objectives: establishing a low-carbon, resource-efficient economy; maintaining the natural asset base; improving people’s quality of life; and implementing appropriate policy to realise the economic opportunities of green growth.

This chapter provides an overview of progress towards green growth in OECD and G20 countries. It builds on a cross-thematic analysis of some central elements of green growth. To that end, it uses a small set of headline indicators describing carbon and material productivity, environmentally adjusted multifactor productivity and population exposure to air pollution. These are complemented by indicators on land consumption by buildings, environmentally related innovation and taxation, and on income levels and inequality. For each aspect of green growth covered, it provides an overview of key developments drawing on results from the substantive chapters of the report.

The list of indicators has been kept flexible so that countries can adapt it to their particular contexts. It also balances the desire to be exhaustive and the need for simplicity. Not all issues of importance to green growth can be measured in quantitative terms. Not all indicators proposed here are equally relevant to all countries.

This Glossary includes additional information on the main variables and indicators used in this report. An overview by chapter is given below.