This book published by the World Bank suggests a multifaceted approach that addresses spatial development, energy-efficient industry, increased public transport, and sustainable waste management systems. By simultaneously acting on these issues, cities can begin to streamline climate change considerations into planning and investment decisions. The book also focuses on specific sectoral energy challenges, and provides recommendations to each sector. Furthermore, it lays out five key cross-cutting actions that form an overarching framework for low-carbon city development, namely to set appropriate indicators to encourage low-carbon growth; complement administrative measures with market-based approaches and tools; break links between land use, city financing and urban sprawl; encourage inter-sectoral and inter-jurisdictional cooperation; and balance climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. This summary was prepared by Eldis.
The discourse on climate change does not pay adequate attention to women, either at the local project level or in international negotiations. Women are unable to voice their specific requirements even though the impact of climate change affects women and men differently. In several rural areas of the South, although women are responsible for feeding their families and are therefore more dependent on natural resources such as land, wood and water, their access to these resources is limited. They are also denied full access to loans, education and information.
Second, the potential of women as agents of change for climate mitigation and adaptation remains untapped: Their extensive theoretical and practical knowledge of the environment and resource conservation is not given due consideration. In terms of economic participation, they are not paid for the environmental services that they already provide (e.g., reforestation). Their potential contribution to climate mitigation by being part of the economic cycle is not sufficiently exploited.
Climate change is one of the most pressing threats to development today. Addressing climate change requires that countries take an integrated approach to climate and development planning so that policies and actions across multiple sectors and scales facilitate the adaption to climate change and deliver poverty reduction gains. An important tool for countries to manage climate finance is the National Climate Fund (NCF). NCFs are nationally-driven and nationally-owned funds that help countries to collect climate finance from a variety of sources, coordinate them, blend them together and account for them. This guidebook is part of a series of practical guidance documents and toolkits to support national and sub-national governments to achieve low-emission, climate-resilient development. It is based on UNDP’s decades of experience in delivering climate change programming in order to help countries design and establish an NCF.
The guide presents the following as key goals of NCFs:
•collect sources of funds and direct them toward climate change activities that promote national priorities
Using a computable general equilibrium, this paper quantifies the GDP and employment effects of an illustrative greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy. The paper first analyses the direct negative economic effects of the emissions restrictions on GDP and examines labour sectoral reallocations in a framework where labour markets are perfectly flexible. The model is then modified to incorporate labour market imperfections in OECD countries that could generate unemployment, namely, short-run rigidities in real wage adjustment. It is shown that imperfect wage adjustment increases the cost of mitigation policy since unemployment increases in the short-run, but that the carbon tax revenue generated can be recycled so as offset some or all of this effect, notably when it is used to reduce wage-taxes. Thus, taking realistic labour market imperfections into account in a CGE model affects the GDP costs of mitigation policy in two ways: first by introducing extra costs due to the increased unemployment that such policy may entail; second by creating the possibility of a double dividend effect when carbon taxes are recycled so as to reduce distorting taxes on labour income.
