The authors describe and analyze water resources reform and decentralization of river basin management in the state of Ceara, Northeast Brazil, the poorest part of the country. The Jaguaribe river basin is located entirely within the state of Ceara. With a drainage area of 72,560 square kilometers, it covers almost half of the state's territory. The basin has 80 municipalities and more than 2 million people, about half rural and half urban, in primarily small towns, representing about a third of Ceara's population.

The most traditional and widely used
farming systems in the humid upland tropics are based on
fallowing and various forms of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Their sustainability depends on the duration of the fallow;
as long as the fallow stage is longer than seven or eight
years, slash-and-burn systems usually remain efficient. They
produce a moderate yield using a low-input technology that
is especially efficient in terms of returns to labor. With a

This report reviews the collaboration
between the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and the
African states. Since 1991 GEF has financed 425 projects to
address global environmental problems through sustainable
development in more than 50 African countries. This report
specifically reviews the GEF's works with African
countries on key natural resource issues : land degradation,
forests, fresh water resources, marine and coastal areas,

During the 2007 spring meetings, the
development committee endorsed the World Bank Group's
action plan on the Clean Energy Investment Framework (CEIF).
This progress report is a response to the committee's
request for an update on the implementation of the action
plan for the annual meetings in October 2007. It summarizes
accomplishments in the three areas of the action plan: 1)
energy for growth, with a particular emphasis on access to

This report provides recommendations on
how to better manage ongoing changes in livestock
development. First, it presents an overview of the main
trends that can be expected to drive the sector over the
next decades. Second it discusses the negative or positive
social, environmental, and health repercussions of those
trends, and the institutional, policy, and technical
requirements needed to manage them. It concludes with a

This Country Economic Memorandum is the
first economic report in a decade. It gives priority to
updating knowledge about the evolution of social and
economic developments during the 1990s. It reviewareas of
progress in macroeconomic reforms and the lack of success in
governance and institutional reforms. Substantial reforms
were undertaken in this period , but the civil war continued
to have a serious negative impact on Sudan's people and

This report is the first step in a
process toward using environmental damage cost assessments
for priority setting and as an instrument for integrating
environmental issues into economic and social development.
The report provides estimates of damage cost for several
areas of the environment: air, water, land and forests, and
waste disposal. The estimates should be considered as orders
of magnitude and a range is provided to indicate the level

The objective of this study is to raise awareness and understanding of exposure and vulnerability to drought in Central Asian countries and the Caucasus and to introduce a strategic, pro-active framework of mitigation and prevention. The audiences of the report are the governments of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia. The report will further be of interest to NGOs and civil society, as well as donors.

China has an ancient tradition of
hydraulic engineering but in the past half century the
intensity of exploitation of water resources has accelerated
as a result of population and economic growth. The three
major issues for Chinese water management are water
shortages, flood control and pollution. The World Commission
on Dams noted that since 1949 the number of large dams in
China had increased from 22 to 22,000, almost half the

The author looks at the feasibility and potential of instituting small-scale irrigation dams to reduce Ethiopia s dependence on rainfed agriculture and the associated food insecurity. He develops a theoretical framework to assess the welfare implications of irrigation development programs and provides empirical evidence from microdam construction and reforestation projects in northern Ethiopia. The author pays particular attention to health-related costs of establishing small-scale irrigation dams in areas prone to waterborne diseases.

The objectives of the project ($9.37
million, 1996-2001) were to (a) enhance the capacity of the
mining sector institutions to carry out their functions of
encouraging and regulating investments in the mining sector
in an environmentally sound manner and (b) support the use
of techniques and mechanisms that will improve productivity,
financial viability and reduce the environmental impact of
small-scale mining operations. It had two components:

This staff sector assessment note
accompanies the recently completed national environmental
action plan for sustainable development (NEAP-SD), which, as
an output of the Industrial Pollution Control Project in
Algeria, focused on charting a new course for environmental
management in the country, based on an objective assessment
of past policy, and institutional failures, on a new
consensus on the need for mainstreaming the environment into