Policy communities in the United States and Europe are increasingly identifying climate change, environmental deterioration, water management, and food security as key concerns for development and global governance. The interplay of these trends is visible in the upheavals across the Middle East, with food riots and water disputes illuminating the region’s food insecurity.

Abstract. "We use numerical climate simulations, paleoclimate data, and modern observations to study the effect of growing ice melt from Antarctica and Greenland. Meltwater tends to stabilize the ocean column, inducing amplifying feedbacks that increase subsurface ocean warming and ice shelf melting. Cold meltwater and induced dynamical effects cause ocean surface cooling in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, thus increasing Earth's energy imbalance and heat flux into most of the global ocean's surface.

Bleak short-term economic outlook raises the risk that social and environmental
achievements may not be sustained. The changed economic circumstances have exposed shortcomings in Brazil’s development model, epitomized by the struggle to achieve a sustainable fiscal policy. Against this background, some Brazilians are now asking whether the gains of the past decade might have been an illusion, created by the commodity boom, but unsustainable in today’s less forgiving international environment. Brazil thus finds itself at an important juncture and, to a certain extent, the policy

Sri Lanka is in many respects a
development success story. With economic growth averaging
more than 7 percent a year over the past five years on top
of an average growth of 6 percent the preceding five years,
Sri Lanka has made notable strides towards the goals of
ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity (the
‘twin goals’). The national poverty headcount rate declined
from 22.7 to 6.7 percent between 2002 and 2012/13, while

This guidance note talks about Rooftop
solar in Maldives. The Maldives Ministry of Environment and
Energy, with support from the World Bank and from the
Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program (SREP), a funding window
of the Climate Investment Fund,has designed a program
centered on solar photovoltaic (PV) rooftop installations to
take advantage of the Maldive's high insolation while
also coping with the scarcity of land. Expensive

Afghanistan is a deeply fragile and
conflict affected state. It has been in almost constant
conflict for over 35 years since the Soviet invasion of
1979. Today the country is at a crossroads in its
development with economic growth down sharply and poverty
incidence stubbornly high. Afghanistan faces tremendous
development challenges. Gross domestic product (GDP)
per-capita is among the lowest in the world, poverty is deep

Uruguay is a country of about 3.3
million people, which has consistently given high priority
to achieving broadly-shared economic growth and a
sustainable reduction in poverty. A strong and progressive
social compact has been a defining feature of Uruguayan
society and politics, with consistent emphasis placed on
protecting vulnerable groups, assuring worker dignity and
promoting equitable growth. This compact, combined with

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD)
covers eight small Pacific island countries (PIC8):
Kiribati, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of
Micronesia, Palau, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The
objective of the SCD is to identify the most critical
constraints and opportunities facing the PIC8 to meet the
global goals of ending absolute poverty and boosting shared
prosperity in a sustainable manner. The report is intended

Ecosystem accounting is a coherent and integrated approach to the assessment of

Una serie de artículos recopilados y editados por Prisma dedicados al cambio climático. Textos que tratan la temática vigente desde la visión y perspectiva de diversos países de la región.

Rice is the world’s most heavily
consumed staple crop. Its production requires enormous
volumes of water and emits large quantities of atmospheric
methane, a greenhouse gas some many times more powerful than
carbon dioxide - particularly during a medium term period of
about seven years. In a global context of growing
population, increasingly scarce water resources, and climate
change, more productive, sustainable, and efficient rice

In a five-month period, man-made fire cost Indonesia $16.1 billion or 2 percent of GDP in 2015. An estimated 2.6 million hectares – an area four times the size of Bali – burned. While the 2015 fires were some of the worst in recent years (in part as a result of el Nino), they are by no means a singular event. Wide-scale fire crises occur annually in Indonesia. Indonesia’s fire story is not just one of loss and damage; fires contribute to significant economic upside for a diverse, if concentrated, group of actors.