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.
This paper surveys the state of knowledge about the trade-related environmental consequences of a country's development strategy along three channels: (i) direct trade-environment linkages (overexploitation of natural resources and trade-related transport costs); (ii) 'virtual trade' in emissions resulting from production activities; and (iii) the product mix attributes of a 'green-growth' strategy (environmentally preferable products and goods for environmental management). Trade exacerbates over-exploitation of natural resources in weak institutional environments, but there is little evidence that differences in environmental policies across countries has led to significant 'pollution havens.' Trade policies to 'level the playing field' would be ineffective and result in destructive conflicts in the World Trade Organization. Lack of progress at the Doha Round suggests the need to modify the current system of global policy making.
The paper aims to highlight some of the most important implementation issues associated with the greening of global value chains with special attention given to how public policies and business strategies can support each other in meeting the challenge, particularly in developing countries. This requires a systemic view of global value chains that includes downstream supply chains and explicitly takes into account the relationships between regular members (raw materials providers, component manufacturers, and assembly plants, notably) and their clean-tech suppliers. It also involves a careful description of the business landscapes of global value chains as well as reliable environmental metrics and data, carefully examining how these can be shared among global value chain members and their stakeholders.