Greening SMEs

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for 60% of total employment and have significant footprint on aggregate in OECD economics. Furthermore, entrepreneurship is a key driver of growth and invention of new business models and technologies. Therefore, their greening is critical for green growth.

However, SMEs and entrepreneurs face a number of barriers in their greening efforts. In addition to complexity around business cases, a lack of awareness, information and knowledge on changing environmental requirements and needs represent additional challenges.

Current work focuses on better understanding the drivers and barriers for green entrepreneurship and the greening of SMEs, taking account of their different types of sectors, places, and business models.

In November 2021, the OECD established a Platform on Financing SMEs for Sustainability, bringing together key stakeholders, including public and private financial institutions, policy makers and SME representatives, with the aim to foster knowledge sharing on sustainable finance for SMEs and identify practical financial solutions to accompany SMEs on their journey to net zero.

Ongoing work examine the wide range of policies and schemes introduced by governments to stimulate and support green entrepreneurship in recent years with case studies on the approaches used in Canada, Germany and Israel. Also, a dashboard of SME greening and green entrepreneurship indicators is being developed with the aim of addressing the lack of sound and comparable evidence on the magnitude and type of SME environmental impacts and greening efforts across countries.