Policies and Strategies Department

The activities of the Environmental Policy Department revolve around four main axes:

• Planning, policy, & strategy: Planning the Ministry's agenda and supervising its implementation; Promoting and supporting key strategic plans and conducting environmental status assessments
• Improving Ministry regulations: Improving existing regulatory processes and examining the impact of new regulations
• Environmental economics: Leading the field of environmental economics in the Ministry and the government using various economic policy tools to protect the environment and to internalize external environmental costs
• Innovative policy tools and advancement of environmental technologies: Promoting innovative policies for sustainable production and consumption in the public sector, the private market, and households; Promoting Israeli environmental technologies and organizational innovation

Main responsibilities of the department:

1. Conducting environmental situation assessments, as a part of which an internal and external environmental mapping is conducted for the ministry in Israel and the world in order to help the ministry focus its activities, by analyzing alternatives and determining priorities.
2. Preparing strategic plans for the Ministry of Environmental Protection in different fields and helping the staff departments with preparing strategic plans.
3. Preparing the Ministry of Environmental Protection's annual workplans – supervising their implementation and whether or not they meet their requirements, while synchronizing the work plans and ministerial budget. As a part of that the ministry's annual activity focuses are determined, in addition to the tasks, milestones, production measurements and the results of meeting them.
4. Reducing the regulatory burden and improving the regulation in the ministry – developing the methodology, forming an improvement plan and reducing the regulatory burden, measuring the prices of the regulation.
5. Assessing the effects of the new regulation – developing the methodology and performing Regulatory Impact Assessments, with emphasis on implementing environmental considerations in these processes in the ministry and the government.
6. Environmental finance -  developing the governmental methodology for analyzing the price of financial-environmental benefits, conducting price-benefit analyzes and promoting the development of financial policy tools (such as taxing, excises, fees and subsidies) for the sake of protecting the environment and assimilating external prices.
7. Promoting Israeli innovative environmental technologies – by developing support courses for Israeli initiatives and companies.
8. Promoting innovation in organizations – developing the perception of innovation in organizations and tools to promote it.
9. Initiating and forming of policy steps in the fields of sustainability in production and consumption – developing policy tools in the fields of sustainability in production and consumption; initiating change processes in the fields of sustainability in production and consumption in cooperation with the ministry's departments, governmental ministries, local authorities and non-governmental organizations. With emphasis on implementing seeing the full life cycle of products.
10. Creating connections and cooperations, and developing information and policy tools to obtain sustainability in the government – identifying, developing and implementing outer-governmental strategic change levers in order to obtain sustainability in the government.
11. Collecting, creating and publishing information regarding environmental policies – participating in forums in Israel and the world, initiating and organizing conferences, seminaries and educational programs regarding environmental policies.