Browse Research

Extreme weather events in China, expected to become increasingly common because of climate change, pose a grave threat to essential infrastructure that provides running water, electricity, road and railway connections. This research looks at the fundamental issues of understanding the vulnerability and risks to Chinese infrastructures due to adverse climate impacts. The authors have developed a suite of infrastructure (energy, transport, water, waste and ICT) models to understand how exposed China's infrastructure is to various potential climate change impacts. A concept called the “infrastructure criticality hotspot” is used which is defined as a geographical location where there is a concentration of critical infrastructure, measured according to the number of customers directly or indirectly dependent upon it. Key findings from this research show that China’s top infrastructure vulnerability hotspots are Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang. Using spatial hydrological models, the authors then investigate how these areas may be affected by flooding.

The report Smallholder Farming Systems in Coastal Kenya: Key Trends and Innovations for Resilience explores key trends in climate, livelihoods, food security, crop diversity and social capital in five Mijikenda communities, as well as traditional knowledge-based innovations to address climatic and socioeconomic challenges.

This report Uncharted Waters: The New Economics of Water Scarcity and Variability presents new evidence to advance understanding on how rainfall shocks coupled with water scarcity, impacts farms, firms, and families. On farms, the largest consumers of water in the world, impacts are channeled from declining yields to changing landscapes.

Providing clean water requires maintenance, as well as the initial connections that are typically measured. Frequently, the water supply fails in the developing world, especially when users don’t pay the marginal cost of water.

To sustain Africa’s economic growth and accelerate the eradication of extreme poverty, investment in infrastructure is fundamental. The Program for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), endorsed in 2012 by the continent’s heads of state and government, lays out an ambitious long- term plan for closing Africa’s infrastructure gap, including through major increases in hydroelectric power generation and water storage capacity. Much of this investment will support the construction of long-lived infrastructure (for example, dams, power stations, and irrigation canals), which may be vulnerable to changes in climatic patterns—yet the direction and magnitude of climatic changes remain uncertain. This recently completed effort evaluates—using for the first time a single consistent methodology and a wide range of state-of-the-art future climate scenarios—the impacts of climate change on hydropower and irrigation expansion plans in Africa’s main river basins (Congo, Niger, Nile, Orange, Senegal, Volta, and Zambezi), as well as the effects on the electricity sector across four power pools.