The science is unequivocal: stabilizing climate change implies bringing net carbon emissions to zero. And this must be done by 2100 if we are to keep climate change anywhere near the 2 C. degree warming that world leaders have set as the maximum acceptable limit. Decarbonizing Development looks...

The choices developing countries make today in building and expanding transport networks will irreversibly shape development for the next century. That is why urgent steps are needed to ensure that transport development avoids locking in carbon intensive or high-risk patterns. While investments...

As humanity’s current production and consumption patterns exceed planetary boundaries, many opinion leaders have stressed the need to adopt green economic stimulus policies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris...

This paper investigates the costs and benefits of three ex ante flood management strategies -- risk-based insurance, zoning, and subsidized insurance -- in an urban economics framework that takes land scarcity into account. In a theoretical setting and in the absence of market failures,...

In June 2015, about 53,000 people were affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster is a product of exposure ("Who was affected?"), vulnerability ("How much did the affected households lose?"), and socioeconomic resilience...

Transit subsidies in the urban area of Buenos Aires are high, amounting to a total of US$5 billion for 2012. They have been challenged on several counts: suspected of driving urban sprawl and associated infrastructure costs, diverting resources from system maintenance, and failing to reach the...

Natural disasters have an impact on poverty through many different channels -- economic growth, health, schooling, behaviors -- that are difficult to quantify. It is nonetheless possible to assess the short-term impacts of income losses. A counterfactual scenario is built of what people's income...

This paper presents a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare. The paper proposes a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising policy options to...

The welfare impact of a natural disaster depends on its effect on consumption, not only on the direct asset losses and human losses that are usually estimated and reported after disasters. This paper proposes a framework to assess disaster-related consumption losses, starting from an estimate of...

The impacts of climate change on poverty depend on the magnitude of climate change, but also on demographic and socioeconomic trends. An analysis of hundreds of baseline scenarios for future economic development in the absence of climate change in Vietnam shows that the main determinant of the...