Climate change is now widely acknowledged as one of the great – if not the greatest – challenges facing humanity in the coming decades. Through its impact on average temperature, precipitations and sea levels, it will endanger the livelihood of hundreds of millions and impose increasing costs on our societies if nothing is done.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the only way to get the sort of commitments needed to effectively deal with the challenge is to create a global consensus that involves all stakeholders. Such a consensus will only arise if there is a seemingly “just” sharing of the burden in this battle to keep the planet hospitable to human beings.
This is particularly true when it comes to employment. It goes without saying that climate change and policies to mitigate it will in time have an enormous impact on industries, jobs and workers. Yet, despite the rhetoric about the elusive “social dimension” of sustainable development, until very recently climate change negotiations showed only limited concern about the fate of workers, and far greater efforts were directed at measuring the environmental rather than the social impacts of climate change.
Ho Chi Minh City faces significant and growing flood risk. Recent risk reduction efforts may be insufficient as climate and socio-economic conditions diverge from projections made when those efforts were initially planned. This study demonstrates how robust decision making can help Ho Chi Minh City develop integrated flood risk management strategies in the face of such deep uncertainty. Robust decision making is an iterative, quantitative, decision support methodology designed to help policy makers identify strategies that are robust, that is, satisfying decision makers’ objectives in many plausible futures, rather than being optimal in any single estimate of the future. This project used robust decision making to analyse flood risk management in Ho Chi Minh City’s Nhieu Loc-Thi Nghe canal catchment area. It found that the soon-to-be-completed infrastructure may reduce risk in best estimates of future conditions, but it may not keep risk low in many other plausible futures. Thus, the infrastructure may not be sufficiently robust.
The private sector is increasingly being engaged in climate finance and climate-related activities. Private sector opportunities for engagement in climate change adaptation are less clear than for mitigation, particularly in developing countries. This article first conceptualizes private sector engagement in adaptation by exploring: (1) different roles of the private sector in adaptation in developing countries; and (2) the way governments can create an enabling environment to increase private sector engagement. Second, it analyses how 47 least developed countries (LDCs) envisage the role of the private sector in their National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). This article argues that private sector engagement in adaptation is often inevitable and potentially significant. Yet, the results show that it receives little attention in NAPAs.
By reducing the costs of environmental protection, technological change is important for promoting green growth. This entails both the creation of new technologies and more widespread deployment of existing green technologies. This paper reviews the literature on environmentally friendly technological change, with a focus on lessons relevant to developing countries. It begins with a discussion of the data available for measuring the various steps of technological change. It continues with a discussion of sources of environmental innovation. Given that most innovation is concentrated in a few rich countries, this leads to a discussion of the remaining role for lower-income countries, followed by a discussion of technology transfer. Because of the importance of market failures, the paper discusses the role of both technology policy and environmental policy for promoting environmentally friendly technological change. The review concludes with a discussion of what environmental economists can learn from other fields.
This paper examines the processes used in the United States and Mexico to assess the economic costs and benefits of environmental improvement, the kinds of information obtained from these procedures, and the additional knowledge that is needed about both elements to improve understanding of the problems and prospects of advancing a green growth agenda. Because environmental and other development needs are large and resources are limited, it is important to choose the best projects, those with the highest returns on both public investments and private resources harnessed by regulation. The United States is a well-recognized leader in the use of quantitative methods to evaluate options for environmental regulation and policy. Mexico represents a case where a country has made clear advances in reforming its economy and in introducing transparency in its regulatory processes for environmental and other policy areas.