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Climate change is unfolding amid the greatest information and communication revolution in human history. From e-commerce and social media to smart manufacturing and precision farming, digital technologies have become prevalent in all aspects of economic and social life. Digital technologies also have the potential to shape climate change action. Green digital transformation can help countries adapt e¬ffectively to the impacts of climate change and create greener growth pathways. Doing this means combining a focus on digital transformation and inclusion with a strategic and sustainable use of digital technologies to address climate change. Green Digital Transformation: How to Sustainably Close the Digital Divide and Harness Digital Tools for Climate Action illuminates the channels through which digital technologies intersect with climate change, and it proposes a path to low-emissions applications of digital technologies to help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.
One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of climate change? Small towns across America and around the world face mounting challenges with flood risk, a result of not only climate change but also poorly adapted landscapes, sprawl, overdevelopment and poor planning. After the Floods is about Ellicott City, a small town in central Maryland that experienced two devastating flash floods just 22 months apart. Despite the town's many advantages—wealth, access to expertise, a mobilized community, and a stout identity steeped in 250 years of history—Ellicott City found itself mired in a deep...
This Staff Climate Note is part of a series of three Notes (IMF Staff Climate Note 2022/001, 2022/002, and 2022/003) that discuss fiscal policies for climate change adaptation. A first Note (Bellon and Massetti 2022, henceforth Note 1) examines the economic principles that can guide the integration of climate change adaptation into fiscal policy. It argues that climate change adaptation should be part of a holistic, sustainable, and equitable development strategy. To maximize the impact of scarce resources, governments need to prioritize among all development programs, including but not limited to adaptation. To this end, they can use cost-benefit analysis while ensuring that the decision-ma...
Adaptation to climate change is a necessity for advanced and developing economies alike. Policymakers face the challenge of facilitating this transition. This Note argues that adaptation to climate change should be part of a holistic development strategy involving both private and public sector responses. Governments can prioritize public investment in adaptation programs with positive externalities, address market imperfections and policies that make private adaptation inefficient, and mobilize revenues for, and distribute the benefits of, adaptation. Although the choice of what should be done and at what cost ultimately depends on each society’s preferences, economic theory provides a useful framework to maximize the impact of public spending. Cost-benefit analysis, complemented by the analysis of distributional effects, can be used to prioritize adaptation programs as well as all other development programs to promote an efficient and just transition to a changed climate. While compensations may be needed to offset damages that are either impossible or too expensive to abate, subsidies for adaptation require careful calibration to prevent excessive risk taking.
Between 1970 and 2021, the number of people living in cities increased from 1.19 billion to 4.46 billion, while the Earth’s surface temperature climbed by 1.19 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels. Because of the prosperity they helped generate, cities have been a major cause of this climate change. However, it is also in cities that many of the solutions to the climate crisis—in terms of both adaptation and mitigation—will be found, not least because by 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s population will call cities home. As such, cities are the key to arguably the greatest public policy challenge of our times. To take stock of how green, how resilient, and how inclusiv...
This book explores economic concepts related to disaster losses, describes mechanisms that determine the economic consequences of a disaster, and reviews methodologies for making decisions regarding risk management and adaptation. The author addresses the need for better understanding of the consequences of disasters and reviews and analyzes three scientific debates on linkage between disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change. The first involves the existence and magnitude of long-term economic impact of natural disasters on development. The second is the disagreement over whether any development is the proper solution to high vulnerability to disaster risk. The third debate ...
Democratic Republic of the Congo: Selected Issues
The twenty-first century is already an urban one. Cities are pivotal to sustainability concerns globalization, climate change, food security, environmental protection, and innovation.Today's urban actors, both citizens and their leaders, have a major responsibility as trustees of the future: their present actions will influence the shape and structure of cities, so that the generation to come may live healthy and contended lives.This volume takes the reader straight to the heart of how cities work, and identifies contemporary trends, mechanism and tools that can influence current strategies and choices.The authors show that urbanization is not a problem per se for sustainable development, but rather that cities, in all their diversity and complexity, offer solutions as well as challenges.The reader will be inspired by vital analyses of the next decade's windows of opportunity for sustainable urban growth.
Africa s Pulse is a biannual publication containing an analysis of the near-term macro-economic outlook for the region. It also includes a section focusing on a topic that represents a particular development challenges for the continent. It is produced by the Office of the Chief Economist for the Africa Region.This issue is an analysis of issues shaping Africa's economic future. Growth remains stable in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some countries are seeing a slowdown, but the region's economic prospects remain broadly favorable. External risks of higher global financial market volatility and lower growth in emerging market economies weigh on the downside. In several Sub-Saharan African countries, la...
The World Development Report 2014 examines how improving risk management can lead to larger gains in development and poverty reduction. It argues that improving risk management is crucial to reduce the negative impacts of shocks and hazards, but also to enable people to pursue new opportunities for growth and prosperity.