Physical infrastructure, such as energy, transportation, telecommunications, water, and sanitation systems, can contribute to the sustained growth of a national economy. The global economy needs as much as $93 trillion of infrastructure investment through 2030, yet many analysts suggest that global investment is lagging behind the required rate.
This paper looks at the challenges faced by rapidly growing middle income countries in financing their infrastructure, and it focuses on the two seemingly very different models employed by the governments of Brazil and India to overcome those challenges. The paper assesses both the potential benefits and drawbacks of each model and how those potential benefits translate into practice once the particular national circumstances of each country come into play.
Evidence is growing that tenure-secure community forests are associated with avoided deforestation and other ecosystem-service benefits. However, securing community forest tenure also involves costs, including costs to establish supportive legislation, to demarcate and register the lands, to monitor and protect the lands as well as opportunity costs. But what are the costs compared to the benefits of securing and maintaining community forest tenure for community forest areas?
This working paper adresses this question by undertaking a benefit-cost analyses of community forest tenure in Brazil’s Indigenous Territories and Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. Although data limitations prevented a full accounting of all costs and benefits, the results of the analyses suggest that:
- in the study areas, the economic benefits of securing community forest tenure outweigh the costs;
- securing community forest tenure is a low-cost, high-benefit investment that benefits communities, countries, and global society;
- investing in strong community forest tenure security can be a cost-effective measure for climate-change mitigation.
The Green Growth Strategy, outlined in this book, provides concrete recommendations and measurement tools to support countries’ efforts to achieve economic growth and development, while at the same time ensure that natural assets continue to provide the ecosystem services on which our well being relies. The strategy proposes a flexible policy framework that can be tailored to different country circumstances and stages of development.
This paper investigates how the notion of ‘sustainability’ is strategically framed in the context of Dutch infrastructure governance in the Netherlands. By conducting a frame analysis (based on policy documents, websites and semi-structured interviews), the paper discerns six sustainability frames. These frames concern substantive (e.g., more focus on ecology), process (activating new networks) and organizational (e.g., new practices of work) aspects. The paper also illustrates how these sustainability frames relate to the changing institutional context of infrastructure policy and governance more broadly. The paper discusses some of the productive and challenging implications of the dynamics of sustainability in today’s complex and multi-dimensional world of governance.
Cities play a vital role in the global climate change mitigation agenda. City population density is one of the key factors that influence urban energy consumption and the subsequent GHG emissions. However, previous research on the relationship between population density and GHG emissions led to contradictory results due to urban/rural definition conundrum and the varying methodologies for estimating GHG emissions. This work addresses these ambiguities by employing the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) and utilizing the gridded CO2 emissions data. Our results, derived from the analysis of all inhabited areas in the US, show a sub-linear relationship between population density and the total emissions (i.e. the sum of on-road and building emissions) on a per capita basis. Accordingly, we find that doubling the population density would entail a reduction in the total CO2 emissions in buildings and on-road sectors typically by at least 42%. Moreover, we find that population density exerts a higher influence on on-road emissions than buildings emissions.