This report is part of a larger series of stocktaking and analytical products on plastic pollution in South Asia. It supports the Bank's commitment to work with countries of South Asia to pursue and scale-up policies and programs that help them move toward a circular plastic economy and, in...

In 2015, a global study estimating inputs of plastic waste into the oceans ranked Indonesia as the second largest contributor to plastic marine pollution. In 2017, another study ranked four Indonesian rivers in the world's most polluting top 20. The challenge of plastic waste and marine debris...

Governments, development institutions, and the private sector are increasingly turning to nature-based solutions to address the world's climate and biodiversity crisis. Countries, corporations, and investors are increasingly looking to forest- and land-based emission reduction programs (ERPs) to...

Protected areas conserve nature and support livelihoods and economies, yet they are undervalued and underfunded. In Africa, 40 co-management and delegated collaborative management partnerships (CMPs) have been established by 15 governments. An analysis of these 40 CMPs in the CMP Toolkit shows...

The World Bank has engaged with the government of Sri Lanka in an advisory services and analytics (ASA) work entitled priorities for sustainably managing Sri Lanka's marine fisheries, coastal aquaculture and the ecosystems that support them. The development objective of this ASA is to support...

The report provides insights into the relationship between cooling and already-agreed-upon climate and development goals; presents the barriers, critical step-changes, and solutions needed to accelerate innovation and transformation; proposes aspirational targets and actions for each decade with...

Artisanal gold mining occurs informally and therefore relies on low technologies and extraction methods lacking pollution controls. As a result, despite the fact that artisanal gold mining produces only twenty percent of the world's gold, it releases more mercury than any other sector and...

Tropical forest countries that seek to reduce deforestation and participate in REDD+ are being challenged to develop policies that conserve forests in the long term; create incentives for local actors to protect forests; and align forest policies with agricultural and rural development and other...

This paper argues that governments and regulators, supported by financial institutions and multilateral development banks (MDBs), hold the key to mobilizing private finance at the scale needed to transform the way we build, produce, and consume in order to protect nature while fostering...

Despite the significant potential of soil to sequester organic carbon, there are challenges to implementing carbon sequestration projects. For example, changes in soil carbon can be relatively small in magnitude per unit area and slow to be fully achieved, while its measurement and monitoring...