The challenge for the development community is to exploit the links between energy and poverty to combat global poverty. The human scale of this challenge is huge. Today, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and 2.4 billion rely on traditional biomass for cooking and heating. Indoor air...

Renewable energy and energy efficiency projects continue to perform strongly in the World Bank Group (WBG) energy portfolio and are increasingly being mainstreamed in the WBG's energy lending. In fiscal 2007 a total of US$1,433 million supported 63 renewable energy and energy efficiency projects...

This policy note is a summary of the findings of a joint study of the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, and the World Bank. The policy note is organized as follows: the next section, 'in the shadow of king coal,' provides a brief history of the...

Achieving global goals for access to energy and mitigation of climate change will require a quadrupling of present levels of solar photovoltaic (PV), a multiplication by nine of the wind power generation and a doubling of the geothermal power generation in the developing world by 2025. To reach...

Each year, water pollution accounts for 1.8 million deaths and costs businesses an estimated 425 billion dollars. The 2030 Water Resources Group (WRG) supports industries and utilities to use water more efficiently and recycle more of the freshwater they consume. By changing incentives,...

This note summarizes lessons and practices deployed in embedding climate resilience into the design of projects that received catalytic funds from The Africa Climate Resilience Investment Facility (AFRI-RES). It draws from application of the Resilience Booster Tool to specific projects, as...

A Development Emergency: the title of this year's Global Monitoring Report, the sixth in an annual series, could not be more apt. The global economic crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. No region is immune. The poor...