The 2011 Human Development Report argues that the urgent global challenges of sustainability and equity must be addressed together – and identifies policies on the national and global level that could spur mutually reinforcing progress towards these interlinked goals. Bold action is needed on...

The extinction of polar bears by the end of the 21st century has been predicted and calls have been made to list them as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The decision on whether or not to list rests upon forecasts of what will happen to the bears over the 21st Century....

Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even...

Changes in the climate will have a major impact on the Dutch economy and environment. According to official Dutch climate scenario’s, at the end of the century the sea level will have increased by between 35 and 85 cm. This paper investigates major policy options for the IJsselmeer-area to...

Using an exhaustive panel dataset of the German agricultural sector, this paper is evaluating the relationship between climate conditions and land prices. The main advantage of this so-called hedonic approach is the consideration of the full range of adaptation options to the climatic...

Climate change is widely recognised as a serious threat to the world's environment. The Mediterranean basin is considered as a unique scaled down model to assess the severity of potential climate change impacts on coastal zones. The paper examines the regional differences in the vulnerability of...

Experience with existing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) shows that trade measures agreed to within the MEAs themselves may not necessarily lead to a dispute between parties. On the contrary, there is a great chance that disputes may arise from national measures undertaken to fulfil...

This paper studies the implications for climate policy of the interactions between environmental and knowledge externalities. Using a numerical analysis performed with the hybrid integrated assessment model WITCH, extended to include mutual spillovers between the energy and the non-energy...

Climate change and the increasing demand of water intensify the global water cycle, altering the distribution of water in space and time. This is expected to result in wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting drier (Pan et al., 2015). As water is key to life, water scarcity is likely to...

The Sahel is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change in the world. Located in the central part, Niger is facing many complex and interconnected challenges which strongly hinder the achievement of the key sustainable development goals (SDGs). The high population growth rate (3.8% per...