Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

584 items available

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Embedding Climate Resilience into Energy Projects

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-05) World Bank

The Africa Climate Resilience Investment Facility (AFRI-RES) is a partnership between the Africa Union, African Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the World Bank Group, established with support from the Nordic Development Fund (NDF). The partnership seeks to assist governments, planners, and private developers in integrating climate resilience in project planning and design, thereby attracting funding from both development and climate finance sources. This note summarizes lessons and practices deployed in embedding climate resilience into the design of projects that received catalytic funds from AFRI-RES. It draws from application of the Resilience Booster Tool to specific projects, as relevant, Compendium Volume on Climate Resilient Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank (2023a) and Guidance, Standards, and Good Practice Notes developed under the program.
Floods and Urban Connectivity: A Toolkit for Prioritizing Resilience Investments – Demonstration Note with Case Studies from Kinshasa and Kigali

(Washington, DC, 2022-06) Avner, Paolo ; Maruyama Rentschler, Jun Erik ; He, Yiyi ; Thies, Stephan Fabian ; Nell, Andrew David

Cities are intricately interconnected socioeconomic systems, with transport networks connecting people to their jobs, health, and education facilities, and ensuring the smooth functioning of supply chains. When floods happen, they isolate people and firms from these vital networks, causing cascading disruptions and losses. Such floods are not limited to rare and extreme events. Especially in developing country cities, the lack of resilient infrastructure systems means that even regular rainfall events, for example, during rainy seasons, can cause havoc. Attention is often biased towards direct asset losses from floods, rather than the wider economic costs of disrupted networks. This is due primarily to the complex dynamics of economic and infrastructure networks. But public transport and road usage data are also often limited, especially when the predominant modes of transport are informal and walking. So how can we identify and prioritize cost-effective measures for urban resilience This note describes an analytical approach that can help prioritize investments in urban transport resilience and public transport, while also strengthening the economic case for such investments.
Five Facts about Shocks in the Sahel

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12) Brunelin, Stephanie ; Ouedraogo, Aissatou ; Tandon, Sharad

The high level of exposure to shocks, in particular climate-related and conflict induced shocks, across the Sahel region exacerbates the vulnerability of the population. It also increases the risk of non-poor falling into poverty. In 2018-2019 a new set of harmonized household surveys were conducted by each of the countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and in Chad. The surveys included Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, and Senegal (Mauritania was not included). These surveys help identify the distributional impact of shocks in much greater detail for the region than before. This note presents the key findings of the surveys summarized in five facts. These findings can help inform the development of adaptive social protection systems across the Sahel.
Adaptive Safety Nets for Rural Africa: Drought-Sensitive Targeting with Sparse Data

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Baez, Javier E. ; Kshirsagar, Varun ; Skoufias, Emmanuel

This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework for use in scarce-data contexts. To accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these five countries, comparable, in size, to the effects of mother’s illiteracy or a fall to a lower wealth quintile; and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and regressions predict stunting as accurately as complex machine learning methods that are not interpretable.2 Taken together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a data-driven approach may contribute to the design of a transparent and easy-to-use drought-contingent targeting framework
How is the COVID-19 Crisis Affecting Nitrogen Dioxide Emissions in Sub-Saharan Africa?

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) Masaki, Takaaki ; Nakamura, Shohei ; Newhouse, David

Daily estimates of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2)—one of a group of pollutant gases that derive from human activity, primarily combustion—can provide a useful, albeit "noisy", real-time proxy measure of how COVID-19 has affected economic activity. To examine how the crisis affects NO2 levels in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), we calculated mean daily NO2 tropospheric estimates for 43 regions that contain either national capitals or large urban areas for the period July 2018 to April 2020. We found that emissions reductions in April were sizeable, larger in more developed areas, and large in many but not all of the countries that implemented national lockdowns. Overall, the data suggest that NO2 readings contain useful information to help track the reduction in motorized transport, and possibly overall economic activity, in urban, developed areas.
Who Wins and Who Loses from Staple Food Price Spikes?: Welfare Implications for Mozambique

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Baez, Javier E. ; Caruso, German ; Pullabhotla, Hemant

Changes in food prices – triggered frequently by natural disasters, macroeconomic shocks or regional market disruptions– can lead to large household welfare effects. At over 60 and 40 percent, food budget shares remain high in rural and urban Mozambique, respectively. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. To determine the net impact of food price changes on consumption and poverty, we performed incidence analysis combining household and farmer survey data with disaggregated, market-level price data on major staples (maize, rice, and cassava). Overall, we find evidence for a large net negative welfare effect of price rises in rural areas, and a small, negative effect in the urban areas. For instance, A 10 percent increase in maize prices is associated with an average reduction of 1.2 percent in consumption per capita in rural areas and 0.2 percent in urban areas. Not all households are affected equally. Overall, the negative impacts are larger for the bottom half of the distribution. As a result, the sharp food price spike observed in 2016–17 may have translated into a poverty increase of 4-6 percentage points, with some of the poorest provinces bearing much of the brunt. These findings underscore the importance of improving the functioning of agricultural input and output markets, developing early food security warning systems, and increasing the availability of rapidly scalable safety nets.
Extreme Weather and Poverty Risk: Evidence from Multiple Shocks in Mozambique

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03) Baez, Javier E. ; Caruso, German ; Niu, Chiyu

Thanks to strong economic growth over the last two decades, poverty in Mozambique has decreased and the average household is now more likely to access basic education, health, and housing. Yet, the country is still ravaged by intense and frequent weather disasters. To determine the scale and nature of the impacts of these shocks, this paper analyzes the vulnerability of rural livelihoods across three different extreme weather events: droughts, floods and cyclones. The study finds that per capita food and non-food consumption and asset ownership are reduced among households affected by any of the three weather shocks. Their children are less likely to attend school, have a higher probability of falling sick and show higher engagement in paid and unpaid work. What’s more, staple food prices are disrupted and remain affected nearly a year after the disaster. Helping households confront these events requires comprehensive risk management policies, including making agriculture more resilient to weather, improving the functioning of credit and insurance markets, facilitating economic diversification and market access, and increasing the availability of flexible safety nets – all before the shocks occur.
Strengthening Regional Collaboration and Integration

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04) World Bank Group

West Africa’s coastal area is critical to the region, home to a third of its people and the source of about half of its gross domestic product (GDP). Because most of it is composed of mangroves and sand formations, the area’s coastline is also highly vulnerable to erosion caused by coastal currents and storm surges. Erosion is evident from Mauritania to Gabon - and the rates of erosion are increasing. Around the port of Lome, for example, Togo’s coastline is estimated to have receded by as much as 12 to 15 meters a year. Regional integration will improve the sustainability of shared coastal waters, the protection of environmental services, and the livelihoods that rely on coastal ecosystems. Cooperation will also contribute to the development of regional principles or guidelines for coastal infrastructure investments.
Reducing Marine and Coastal Pollution

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) World Bank Group

The West African coastline is home to major industries, mining activities, peri-urban and agro-industry, and tourism, as well as urban and seaside residences, all of which generate waste and cause pollution. Many areas along the coast also lack adequate wastewater and solid waste management systems. As a result, large volumes of untreated wastewater and solid waste are dumped into the open, polluting the land and water. Water quality studies can help policy makers set targets and baselines and develop pollution reduction plans at the local, national, and regional levels. Such studies generally focus on pollution from sewage/wastewater, nutrients, and marine litter; they may also include other pollutants, such as oil (spills from ships and offshore oil exploration and production), chemicals, and heavy metals. Reducing the generation of plastic debris requires collect¬ing data on the origin, volumes, and types of plastic litter, so that appropriate measures can be taken to reduce the use of, reuse, or recycle plastic products.
Protecting the Region’s Natural Resources

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-11) World Bank Group

The West African coastal zone hosts critical natural resources and habitats that provide important ecosystem services. The area’s natural resources play vital roles in the functioning of the shoreline, providing natural protection against erosion, pollution, sea level rise, and extreme weather events. Coastal and marine ecosystems, including cold-water coral reefs, sea¬grass meadows, mangrove forests, and coastal wetlands and lagoons, also provide indispensable ecosystem services for the fisheries sector, as spawning and nursery areas for fish. The destruction and degradation of coastal natural resources has trans-boundary impacts. Joint efforts are therefore needed to develop win-win solutions. Regional collaboration and integrated decision making on the part of West African coastal countries is paramount if long-term, viable solutions are to be identified and implemented.