Africa

The guide serves as a primer for decision and policy makers, technical specialists, central, regional and local government officials, and concerned stakeholders in the community sector, civil society and non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. The Guide embodies the state-of-the art on integrated urban flood risk management. The Guide starts with a summary for policy makers which outlines and describes the key areas which policy makers need to be knowledgeable about to create policy directions and an integrated strategic approach for urban flood risk management.

Speech on the policy issues in the climate debate that affect water resource management with examples from Southern and subSaharan Africa more generally, because it is one of the regions where the challenges and threats are greatest and the resources and ability to respond most limited.

Global climate models predict a rise in extreme weather in the next century. To better understand future interactions among adaptation costs, socioeconomic development, and climate change in developing countries, observed losses of life from floods and droughts during 1960–2003 are modeled using three determinants: weather events, income per capita, and female education. The analysis reveals countries with high female education weathered extreme weather events better than countries with equivalent income and weather conditions.

This paper discusses the interplay between international trade, regional adaptation to climate change and financial transfers for funding adaptation. It combines insights from a theoretical model of North-to-South transfers with the findings of a calibrated dynamic multi-region multi-sector computable general equilibrium model that takes into account the impacts of climate change and the adaptation to it. Assessing the effects of adaptation funding indicates that funding of adaptation in developing regions can be Pareto-improving.

This study links a multisectoral, regionalized, dynamic, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Ethiopia with a system country-specific hydrology, crop, road, and hydropower engineering models to simulate the economic impacts of climate change scenarios from global circulation models (GCMs) to 2050. In the absence of externally funded, policy-driven adaptation investments, Ethiopia’s GDP in 2050 will be up to 10% below the counterfactual no climate change (historical climate) baseline.

This paper reviews the literature on the relationship between climate and the energy sector. In particular,we primarily discuss empirical papers published in peer-reviewed economics journals focusing on how climate affects energy expenditures and consumption. Climate will affect energy consumption by changing how consumers respond to short run weather shocks (the intensive margin) as well as how people will adapt in the long run (the extensivemargin).

Neither the costs nor the benefits of adaptation to climate change have been systematically studied so far. This paper discusses the extent to which the vast body of literature on climate change impacts can provide insights into the scope and likely cost of adaptation. The ways in which the impacts literature deals with adaptation can be grouped into four categories: no adaptation, arbitrary adaptation, observed adaptation (analogues), and modeled adaptation (optimization). All four cases are characterized by the simple assumptions made about the mechanisms of adaptation.

Based on a literature review and expert interviews, this paper analyzes the most important climate impacts on development goals and explores relevant institutions in the context of mainstreaming climate adaptation into development assistance in Mozambique. Climate variability and change can significantly hinder progress toward attaining the Millennium Development Goals and poverty aggravates the country’s climate vulnerability.

This paper develops a Structural Ricardian model to measure climate change impacts that explicitly models the choice of farm type in African agriculture. This two stage model first estimates the type of farm chosen and then the conditional incomes of each farm type after removing selection biases. The results indicate that increases in temperature encourage farmers to adopt mixed farming and avoid specialized farms such as croponly or livestock-only farms. Increases in precipitation encourage farmers to shift from irrigated to rainfed crops.