The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
are a challenge the global community has set for itself.
They are a challenge to poor countries to demonstrate good
governance and a commitment to poverty reduction. And they
are a challenge to wealthy countries to make good on their
promise to support economic and social development. The MDGs
have captured the world's attention, in part because
they can be measured, as this little book demonstrates. More

Urban wastewater management has become a major challenge in India as infrastructural development and regulations have not kept pace with population growth and urbanisation. This study argues that against the backdrop of water scarcity and climate change, it is important to examine issues related to wastewater reuse more holistically and to investigate the challenges and opportunities for its safe and efficient reuse.

Infrastructure can be an agent of change in addressing the most systemic development challenges of today s world from social stability to rapid urbanization, climate change adaptation and mitigation, natural disasters, and global issues such as food and energy security. Transformation through Infrastructure the updated World Bank Group Infrastructure Strategy FY12-15 - lays out the framework for transforming the Bank Group s engagement in infrastructure.

In recent years, Indonesia has made great strides in economic growth and development. This growth has been accompanied by rapid urbanization that has transformed Indonesian cities. Urbanization has the potential to boost national economic growth by facilitating the emergence of agglomeration and localization economies. Increasing urbanization presents Indonesia with an opportunity to leverage the transformation taking place to ensure that it is harnessed for economic growth and, more importantly, sustained improvements in the quality of life of its community members.

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 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 last five to ten years have seen a
strong resurgence of interest in bioenergy along with the
gradual development of more modern and efficient bioenergy
production systems. This has been driven by several factors
including instability in oil producing regions, financial
market shift of investments in 2007-2008 to commodities and
oil, extreme weather events, and surging energy demand from
developing countries. Bioenergy developments present both

Agriculture is one of the major sources
of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounting for
approximately 14 percent of total GHG emissions. However,
unlike other sectors such as transport or energy,
agriculture is potentially a significant carbon
'sink'. Moreover, because the majority of GHG
emissions from agriculture originate in developing
countries, early intervention could be highly
cost-effective. This note examines the potential role of

The Bank has been involved in a number
of urban upgrading projects over the last three decades,
which have demonstrated that quality of life in slums can be
improved through realistic policies, investments and
implementation processes. This note reviews community-driven
development (CDD) in World Bank-assisted urban upgrading
projects. The note identifies how CDD approaches have been
applied in such projects. The review focuses on a small

The proliferation of urban slums is due
in large part to obsolete regulatory, legal and
institutional frameworks at the local level governing land
use, development standards, land registration and titling.
These regulations are often exclusionary, insisting on
development norms and standards that are outside the realm
of the poor to pay and subdivision procedures are often over
burdensome, leading to informal land subdivision, thus

Recent experience with monitoring and
evaluation (M&E) in Uganda has shown how M&E can be
developed to contribute to national capacity building,
rather than become a demanding, but unproductive data
collection exercise. Symptoms of M&E overload have been
addressed by assigning coordination responsibility to the
Office of the Prime Minister. Prospects are now improving
for aligning M&E capacity with strengthening

The Northeast region of Brazil has long
been the single largest pocket of rural poverty in Latin
America. With a combined area of 1.6 million square
kilometers-16 percent of Brazil's total-the Northeast
is home to 45 million people, 28 percent of Brazil's
total population , of whom 5.4 million people live on about
$1 a day and a total of 10.7 million on $1.60 or less per
day. Nearly half of all rural communities are in the