At the same time, climate change driven by rapidly increasing global C02 emissions has also become an urgent political topic, indicating that significant efforts are needed to curb global emissions. Comprehensive policies for increasing resource efficiency and reducing emissions are needed to deal with rising natural resource prices and to mitigate C02 emissions. Such economic instruments can shift production costs away from labour towards natural resources and emissions. Economic instruments can be a cost effective and efficient way of changing incentives to guide consumers and producers towards lower resource and emissions intensity in their daily consumption, and in the way production processes in businesses are organised.