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Last week, the World Bank released a new Forest Action Plan (FAP) following presentation to the Board’s Committee on Development Effectiveness. And the tagline for a high-level event during the Spring Meetings is “Think Forests: Why Investing in Forests is the Next Big Thing.”
More electricity. Fewer cases of diarrhea. Fewer lives lost to deadly storms. These are among the objectives of the development planners and financiers meeting next week in Washington at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings.
This year, a common theme of those discussions was financing for infrastructure investment in developing countries. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that these conversations tend to focus exclusively on the need for new bricks-and-mortar infrastructure to meet needs for energy, water, or transport services, and seldom acknowledge the need to maintain the ecological infrastructure that already provides a large portion of those services for many of the world’s poor.
Over the past week World Bank president Jim Kim’s mind seems to have been on water and development. But what does he mean by “water” and how does this relate to the huge water-related development challenges faced by the World Bank’s borrowers?
Many obstacles to development transcend national borders and therefore cannot be adequately addressed within a single country. These include issues such as drug resistance and other cross-border health risks, financial crises contagion, money laundering, water scarcity, fisheries collapse and, of course, climate change. Economists call efforts to address these problems Global Public Goods (GPGs). Like other public goods, funding for GPGs is chronically in short supply: of $125 billion in annual official development assistance (ODA ) only about $3 billion goes to GPGs.
This is a joint post with Lawrence MacDonald.
What do the stalled climate talks getting underway in Doha, Qatar, this week and the partisan jousting in Washington over the impending “fiscal cliff” have in common? Not much if you get your information from the mainstream media, which has mostly either ignored the idea or poured cold water on it. Below the surface, however, there is fresh interest in the United States in taxing carbon pollution, including from some unexpected quarters. Such a move can’t come soon enough.
World Bank president Jim Kim delivered a speech and responded to questions today at Brookings in his first public event since taking the helm at the world’s top development organization on July 1. He struck me as thoughtful, well-informed, articulate and dedicated to multilateralism and the bank’s mission of reducing global poverty. You can see his speech and the Q&A here.
Our motto at CGD is “Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity.” Translating ideas to action requires world-class policy research, effective outreach, and teamwork with colleagues in many global institutions, When everything goes right, my colleagues at CGD produce some real gems that command global recognition.
This just happened to CGD senior fellow David Wheeler, whose work with colleagues at the World Bank and United Nations Development Program has received the first annual prize for excellence awarded by the journal Climate Policy.
Muthukumara Mani, an environmental economist at the World Bank, has written a moving account of the efforts underway in Orissa, one of India’s poorest states, to figure out what to do about climate change—not the future threat of climate change, but the impacts hitting poor people in Orissa NOW:
Climate change politics are strange. Innovation, even when it’s about easy new money, is hard. That’s the lesson I extract from what happened on March 4th in the IMF boardroom.
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