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.
Green economy has been proposed as a means for catalysing national policy development and international cooperation to respond to climate change related crises and support sustainable development. The concept has received significant international attention over the past few years, which has resulted in a rapidly expanding literature on the topic. Despite the growing international interest in green economy, negotiations among countries on the concept in the lead up to the Rio+20 conference were challenging, partly due to the lack of an internationally agreed definition or universal principles. This document provides an overview of recent literature on green economy and the related concepts of green growth and low carbon development. In most cases, a web link and citation have been included allowing the reader to easily access more information on the issue.
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.
The world is increasingly faced with the challenges stemming from the need to sustain an expanding global population while simultaneously addressing the environmental pressures that could threaten our ability to accomplish this. Green growth has emerged as a strategy to balance the historically divergent priorities of achieving economic growth and social development without putting at risk the environmental systems and natural capital we rely so heavily upon. This approach emphasizes the environmental and economic gains achieved by reducing inefficiencies in the management of resources and the stimulation of new sources of activity through innovation and green market growth.