Climate resilient cities a primer on reducing vulnerabilities to disasters is prepared as a guide for local governments in the East Asia Region to better understand the concepts and consequences of climate change; how climate change consequences contribute to urban vulnerabilities; and what is being done by city governments in East Asia and around the world to actively engage in learning, capacity building, and capital investment programs for building sustainable, resilient communities.

The purpose of this paper is to outline
an approach for Bank engagement in forests, trees, and
woodlands on farms in Sub-Saharan Africa for the coming five
years. The paper takes the framework of the Africa
development strategy, which has two main pillars: supporting
employment and competitiveness, and building resilience and
reducing vulnerability; and one underlying foundation:
strengthening capacity and governance. It is consistent with

The purpose of this report is to improve
the knowledge base for facilitating investments in land
management technologies that sequester soil organic carbon.
While there are many studies on soil carbon sequestration,
there is no single unifying volume that synthesizes
knowledge on the impact of different land management
practices on soil carbon sequestration rates across the
world. A meta-analysis was carried out to provide soil

This report provides a disaggregated
profile of the world's small and large-scale fisheries
and an estimate of its direct and indirect contributions to
gross domestic product, food security, and rural livelihoods
to uncover the hidden importance of the fisheries sector
with a view to increasing its economic and environmental
contributions in a sustainable manner. The study reveals
serious information deficiencies that undermine decision

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
region is one of the most water-stressed parts of the world.
In just over 25 years, between 1975 and 2001. Looking to the
future, MENA's freshwater outlook is expected to worsen
because of continued population growth and projected climate
change impacts. The region's population is on the way
to doubling to 700 million by 2050. Projections of climate
change and variability impacts on the region's water

The Government of Georgia is considering
options for reducing fossil fuel imports in favor of
introducing large scale use of domestic energy sources for
public and private transportation. However, this must be
considered within the overall context of green
transportation-which will generate benefits well beyond the
substitution of fossil fuels with domestic energy sources.
The concept of green transportation has emerged in response

"Getting the prices right" is
a good starting point but is not sufficient for achieving
environmentally efficient outcomes. Other policy
interventions are often necessary to complement pricing
policies. Moreover, when pricing is not at all feasible,
regulatory and command-and-control policies must be used
instead. This paper focuses on three interrelated themes at
the core of the pricing problem. First, there is the

Zambia is endowed with an abundance of
natural resources that include, water, forests and wildlife.
The country's wildlife resources are managed through
government-supported National Parks and Game Management
Areas (GMAs) and private sector game ranches. The main
objective of this wildlife sector policy review is to
consolidate the findings collected from an extensive
bibliography published during the life of the current

This paper investigates the optimal
timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a
multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector
having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic
inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia -- a social
planner chooses investment on persistent abating activities,
as opposed to choosing abatement at each time period
independently -- and increasing marginal investment costs in

The forces unleashed by the Arab
political awakening have the power to be transformational.
One critical parameter of success will be whether the Arab
political awakening is accompanied by a concurrent economic
awakening. Economic integration through increased trade and
foreign direct investment (FDI) is one key means available
in the short to medium term to policy makers to put the
Partnership countries on a higher path of sustainable

The paper aims to provide an overview of
the gender disparities in three major domains-human capital,
labor market and entrepreneurship. In doing so, it builds on
the framework of the World Bank's regional gender
report opportunities for men and women: emerging Europe and
Central Asia (World Bank, 2011) and the world development
report on gender and development (World Bank, 2011). This
joint gender assessment work has the objectives of analyzing

Argentina is one of the world's
largest biodiesel producers and the largest exporter, using
soybeans as feedstock. Using a computable general
equilibrium model that explicitly represents the biofuel
industry, this study carries out several simulations on two
sets of issues: (i) international markets for biofuel and
feedstock, such as an increase in prices of soybean, soybean
oil, and biodiesel, and (ii) domestic policies related to