ľ¹ÏÓ°Ôº

Sustainability and Infrastructure

May 22, 2024

Lasting poverty reduction requires sustainable natural resource management as well as infrastructure development. This research program encompasses energy, environment, land, agriculture, water, climate change, biodiversity, and urbanization.

Featured Research
  • world bank land conference

    World Bank Land Conference 2024: Securing Land Tenure and Access for Climate Action - Research Track

    Conference, May 13-17, 2024, Washington, DC
    For over two decades, the World Bank Land Conference catalyzed the global land community. The Conference is the premier forum for the land sector, bringing together participants from governments, development partners, civil society, academia, and the private sector to showcase research, discuss issues and good practice, and inform policy dialogue.
  • PBS Energy Switch Interview, April 2024
    Sea level has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age, when continental ice sheets began to melt. In island nations and low-lying coastal areas sea level rise is contributing, among other things, to high tide flooding, and saltwater encroaching into farmland and freshwater aquifers. This television program discusses what the future could bring and ideas of how communities could adapt to sea level rise.
  • City Skyline

    8th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

    Conference, March 7-8, 2024, Washington, DC
    Cities in developing countries are growing at faster rates and at lower income levels than those in developed country alternatives. The 8th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference will bring together academics and development practitioners to present and discuss questions relating to urban expansion and the future spatial organization of cities.
  • Presentation, December 2023
    Families in coastal Bangladesh are already on the ¡°front line¡± of climate change. Their experience gives a preview of the kinds of future decisions faced by hundreds of millions of families worldwide that will be confronted by similar threats well before 2100. In a presentation delivered at Harvard Graduate School in December 2023, Susmita Dasgupta discussed the multifaceted threats from sea-level rise in the Ganges Delta, as well as policy and adaptation measures to respond to these threats.
  • Datasets and Research, January 2024
    Reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) is urgently required to mitigate climate change. Steep emissions reductions will be needed to keep global warming below 1.5¡ãC. While countries around the world have pledged to curb both carbon and methane emissions¡ªtwo of the most significant GHGs¡ªmany nations do not have the infrastructure to adequately track their emissions. To fill this gap, the World Bank has rolled out major new datasets, tools, and research using satellite data to make frequently updated GHG emission data easily accessible to the general public.
  • Presentation, December 2, 2023, Harvard Graduate School
    Families in coastal Bangladesh are already on the ¡°front line¡± of climate change. Their experience gives a preview of the kinds of future decisions faced by hundreds of millions of families worldwide that will be confronted by similar threats well before 2100. In this presentation delivered at Harvard Graduate School in December 2023, Susmita Dasgupta discussed the multifaceted threats from sea-level rise in the Ganges Delta, as well as policy and adaptation measures to respond to these threats.
  • Presentation, September 20, 2023
    Carolyn Fischer spoke at the G20 Global Financial Stability Conference in Seoul in the first session, ¡°Challenges of the Global Economy and the International Financial Market in Turbulence¡±, featuring Jason Furman from Harvard Kennedy School, Fischer, and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti from the Brookings Institution. Fischer¡¯s talk was on the topic of ¡°Climate Policies for a Global Transition.¡±
  • Photo of the Opening Session Panel of the 7th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

    Sustainable Cities Must Become Central to Climate Change Strategies

    Feature Story, 2023
    Approximately 56 percent of the world¡¯s population¡ªor 4.4 billion individuals¡ªlives in a city. The growth of cities is expected to continue, with the urban population more than doubling its current size by 2050. Following a three-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference series returned earlier this year for its 7th iteration.
  • Report, 2023
    Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, land is a scarce and valuable resource. The projected increase in land demand due to demographic trends, coupled with decreasing land supply due to climatic and governance factors, indicate a looming crisis happening at a time when the region is also facing dramatic social and political transformation. This report identifies and analyzes the economic, environmental, and social challenges associated with land in MENA countries, shedding light on policy options to address them.
  • Postcard for the event Local and Global Economic Impacts of the War in Ukraine

    Local and Global Economic Impacts of the War in Ukraine

    Policy Research Talk, December 2022
    The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had far-reaching consequences for human wellbeing, first and foremost for the citizens of Ukraine, but also for the world at large. Quantifying the costs of war is a challenging undertaking, given the lack of reliable data as well as the difficulty of capturing the complex welfare effects of war with typical indicators like GDP. In this Policy Research Talk, three World Bank researchers - Erhan Artuc, Klaus Deininger, and Bob Rijkers - rely on inventive methods and sources of data to paint a more complete picture of the appalling costs of war.

LATEST WORKING PAPERS

This section highlights a few recent working papers. For a full list of working papers, please see: 

Bhavya Srivastava, Kibrom Tafere, A. Patrick Behrer
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10714, March 2024


A. Patrick Behrer, Sam Heft-Neal
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10689, January 2024


Ana Goicoechea, Megan Lang
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10644, December 2023

Impacts and Sources of Air Pollution in Tbilisi, Georgia
Sandra Baqui¨¦, Patrick A. Behrer, Xinming Du, Alan Fuchs, Natsuko K. Nozaki
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10643, December 2023


Gabriel Englander, Christopher Costello
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10594, November 2023


LATEST JOURNAL ARTICLES


Lucie Letrouit, Harris Selod
Regional Science and Urban Economics, vol. 106, May 2024

Govinda Timilsina, Yazid Dissou, Michael Toman, Dirk Heine
Climate Policy, vol. 24, 2024 

Carolyn Fischer
International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, vol. 17, September 2023

Klaus W. Deininger, Daniel Ayalew Ali, Roman Neyter
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 213, September 2023

Paolo Agnolucci, Carolyn Fischer, Dirk Heine, Mariza Montes de Oca Leon, Joseph Pryor, Kathleen Patroni, and St¨¦phane Hallegatte
World Bank Research Observer, September 2023

Susmita Dasgupta, Somik Lall, David Wheeler
Science of The Total Environment, vol. 883, July 2023

Susmita Dasgupta, Maria Sarraf, David Wheeler
Journal of Management and Sustainability, vol. 13 (1), July 2023

Christoph B?hringer, Carolyn Fischer, Nicholas Rivers
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 10, July 2023

Jan Witajewski-Baltvilks, Carolyn Fischer
Environmental and Resource Economics, vol. 85, June 2023

Govinda Timilsina, Ilka Fabiana Deluque Curiel
Energy Policy, vol. 177, June 2023

Christoph B?hringer, Carolyn Fischer
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, vol. 119, May 2023

Ram Fishman, Xavier Gine, Hanan G. Jacoby
Journal of Development Economics, vol. 162, May 2023

Kibrom A Abay, Nishant Yonzan, Sikandra Kurdi, Kibrom Tafere
Journal of African Economies, vol. 32, issue supplement 2, April 2023

Govinda Timilsina, David I. Stern, Debasish K. Das
Applied Economics, March 2023

Klaus Deininger, Daniel Ayalew Ali, Nataliia Kussul, Andrii Shelestov, Guido Lemoine, Hanna Yailimova
Food Policy, vol. 115, February 2023

Jianda Wang, Kangyin Dong, Gal Hochman, Govinda R. Timilsina
Energy Policy, vol. 172, January 2023

Anna Alberini, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, Govinda Timilsina
The Energy Journal, vol. 43, no. 4, 2023

 


Books and Reports
  • Joseph Pryor, Paolo Agnolucci, Carolyn Fischer, Dirk Heine, Mariza Montes de Oca Leon, April 2023
    This book chapter provides an overview of approaches for measuring carbon pricing. It summarizes World Bank indicators for tracking direct carbon pricing, including recent trends, as well as outlining the methodologies and limitations (https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/). This chapter appears in the book Data for a Greener World: A Guide for Practitioners and Policymakers.
  • Susmita Dasgupta, David R. Wheeler, 2022
    The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of socio-economic systems globally and exposed the risks that natural capital degradation imposes on human health, economy, and society. This book studies the environmental challenges faced by developing economies in a post-COVID-19 world. This chapter appears in the book Environmental Economics in Developing Countries: Issues and Challenges.
  • Govinda R. Timilsina, Kalim Shah, May 2022
    This chapter appears in the book Oxford Encyclopedia of Environmental Economics. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Environmental Economics focuses on the most important research topics in environmental and natural resource economics, with a treatment of close to 100 different research areas.
  • M. Shahe Emran, Forhad Shilpi, March 2022
    Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility¡ªespecially in the developing world. This book chapter provides a critical survey and synthesis of the recent economic literature on intergenerational mobility in developing countries, with a focus on data and methodological challenges.
  • Apurva Sanghi, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, December 1, 2021
    This report seeks to understand the size, impacts, and potential for energy subsidy reform in the Russian Federation to inform policymakers as they explore approaches to reducing such subsidies.
  • Susmita Dasgupta, David Wheeler, Md. Istiak Sobhan, Sunando Bandyopadhyay, Ainun Nishat, and Tapas Paul, November 2020
    Climate change is a major threat to the Sundarbans ¡ª the world¡¯s largest remaining contiguous mangrove forest ¡ª wetland of international importance, and the surrounding poor communities whose livelihoods depend on its natural resources. This book synthesizes multiyear, multidisciplinary studies that assess the vulnerability of this ecosystem and its neighboring coastal communities and recommend ¡°resilient-smart¡± adaptation measures. The methods and findings will be of interest to development practitioners, policy makers, and researchers focused on island nations and countries worldwide that feature high density populations and economic activity in low-lying coastal regions vulnerable to sea-level rise.




MANAGER

Carolyn Fischer

Research Manager, Sustainability and Infrastructure
Research Staff »