Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

697 items available

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/9388

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Knowledge, Data, and Information
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World Bank
Africa has significant potential to improve its climate-smart sustainable development by focusing on the Blue Economy. However, efforts to reach this potential are stymied by poor access to relevant data and knowledge due to inadequate historical investments in technology and institutional capacity for modernization. Today, many opportunities exist to leapfrog traditional development paths by leveraging a new range of technologies. BlueTech refers to the innovative use of emerging technologies to scale up the development impact of the Blue Economy, while managing associated trade-offs. These technologies can potentially accelerate the expansion of the Blue Economy, but only if African countries invest in enabling infrastructure, capacity, and services to strengthen their technological innovation ecosystem. A robust technological backbone will better harness the power of the cloud, e-package data, and technological knowledge to enable new ways to collect, analyze, and share data, making it more accessible and usable. At the same time, it will facilitate the collaborative development of harmonized systems to generate insights into and support decisions relating to the Blue Economy.
Climate Change and the Blue Economy in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-26) World Bank
Climate change impacts the planet overall, and the Blue Economy is not exempt from these effects. On the contrary, the ocean is a major regulator of global and regional weather, and ocean acidification is a fundamental influencer of coastal and marine ecosystems. Climate change is already affecting the Blue Economy in various ways. Sea-level rise is causing havoc on shorelines due to geomorphological processes. Changes in precipitation are causing floods and droughts in unpredictable patterns. Rising sea temperatures are starting to change patterns of ecosystem productivity, which will, in turn, reduce the availability of fish for human consumption. If climate change continues unchecked, extreme weather, such as storm surges, could conceivably combine with normal lunar tides to overwhelm the ability of coastal countries to safeguard their residents and infrastructure. Preparing for these outcomes by developing Africa’s Blue Economy could help reduce the potential impacts of climate change while improving the resilience and adaptation of the continent’s coastal communities.
Marine Pollution
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
Across Africa, rising populations and increased socioeconomic activity in coastal areas are resulting in increasing marine pollution. Rather than expand their Blue Economies, countries need to combat pollution in coastal and marine waters to mitigate the threats posed to biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, food security, and human health. This brief presents the challenges and potential solutions for three types of marine pollution: plastics, wastewater, and oil spills. The World Bank is well-placed to provide analytical, technical, policy, and capacity development assistance relating to marine pollution. In addition, the World Bank provides financing through various instruments for initiatives that seek to combat marine pollution by improving waste management, strengthening and expanding wastewater treatment, and protecting the marine and coastal environment. With ocean health widely recognized as a key contributor to addressing climate change, the World Bank’s work will enable African countries to transition towards a resilient and inclusive Blue Economy.
Blue Economy for Resilient Africa Program Overview
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
The Blue Economy is at the core of economic development and competitiveness for African coastal countries. Job-creating economic sectors like tourism and food-production sectors like fisheries depend on a clean and healthy coastal environment. Future development opportunities in sustainable blue energy and ocean mining are key to countries’ competitiveness. Ecosystem services from mangroves and coastal habitats, upon which coastal populations depend, can be supported by new revenue-generating instruments, like blue carbon. However, unsustainable infrastructure development, pollution, and the inadequate management of natural habitats and resources threaten the productivity of coastal marine ecosystems on the African continent. Climate change-related events such as sea level rise, land subsidence, storm surge, and coastal flooding are exacerbating the region’s vulnerability. The challenge today is: How can coastal countries manage their coastal landscapes to spur economic growth and reduce poverty while adapting to the effects of climate change? The World Bank produces Country Climate and Development Reports, a new series of core diagnostic reports that integrates climate change and development considerations. These reports help countries prioritize impactful actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and boost adaptation while delivering on broader development goals. In this series of briefs, the World Bank reflects on successful Blue Economy operations that support African countries as they pursue green, resilient, and inclusive recovery and development.
Marine Spatial Planning
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
Governments face the complicated challenge of making policy decisions relating to coastal and marine ecosystems without a well-established body of knowledge about such systems. To complicate matters, the benefits that marine and coastal ecosystems deliver, which include resilience to climate change, are highly contested and, ironically, vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Marine spatial planning (MSP) provides a framework for managing these tensions. MSP reduces investment risk and improves investor confidence by including a broad range of stakeholders in participatory mapping and decision-making processes. This is important because Africa’s Blue Economy will require substantial private-sector investment. This brief sets out how MSP can help governments better manage the dual challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in a collaborative, participatory manner that considers both present and future uses and creates an attractive environment for private investment into the Blue Economy.
Sustainable Fisheries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
Climate change will have implications for the sustainability of Africa’s fisheries sector, with knock-on consequences for local livelihoods, income, nutrition security, and economic development. The effects of climate change are already being felt in some parts of the continent’s vast coastline, where changes in species productivity and fish growth have been observed. To better withstand climate change and the amplifying effects of human-induced changes to the marine environment, countries must work across borders and at different levels to develop and scale solutions that foster sustainability, adaptation, and resilience. Partnership with and between regional organizations, neighboring governments, and local communities will be key. This brief describes the nature of these challenges and what can be done to address them before explaining how the World Bank contributes to climate solutions based on knowledge creation, partnership across borders and scales, and innovative financing ranging from concessional public financing to private investment to projects that seek to ensure the financial inclusion of fishery communities.
Developing and Incentivizing Institutions
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
The Blue Economy in Africa, with its extensive aquatic and marine resources, is expected to play a major role in the continent’s climate adaptation. It presents distinct opportunities to generate jobs and encourage economic growth while addressing the concerns of food security and climate resiliency. However, sustainable and resilient Blue Economy activities and projects can be hamstrung by fragmented policies, unrealistic budgets, and limited cooperation across blue sectors. To address these challenges, the World Bank is currently supporting African countries at both the national and regional levels to develop operational arrangements to foster coordination in managing the ocean and Africa’s coastline and avoid siloed approaches. Success combines development opportunities with nature-based solutions, in which the different ministries collaborate to arrive at governance structures that smooth out conflicting goals and use incentives to trigger transformation.
Coastal and Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystems
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-25) World Bank
The Blue Solutions for Africa series of operational briefs captures how a thriving Blue Economy can help African countries better manage the development challenges they face while supporting economic growth, sustainable livelihoods, and the health of these precious ecosystems.
Making Progress on Parental Benefits in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-24) Jain, Himanshi; Sharma, Ambika; Cherchi, Ludovica
The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in employment would increase long-run gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 20 percent (Pennings 2022). Realizing this achievement, however, depends not only on removing gender barriers to employment but also and most emphatically on improving the quality of women’s employment. Women’s labor force participation has been stagnant since 1990, at around 53 percent for women compared to 80 percent for men, with the largest gaps in lower-middle-income countries (World Bank 2023). Moreover, as noted by the World Bank’s most recent gender strategy, “Women in the labor force are half as likely as men to have a full-time wage job, their jobs tend to be more vulnerable, and they earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn” (World Bank 2023). This note compiles findings from a study undertaken in two countries—one low income (Nepal) and one middle income (Argentina)—to examine the take-up of existing parental benefits and how parental benefit policies (or the lack thereof) influenced women’s labor market choices, childcare responsibilities, and well-being.
New Frontiers of Innovation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-24) World Bank
Africa’s Blue Economy shows great potential for tackling the enormity of climate change while improving livelihoods for coastal communities. However, achieving this potential requires improvement in the scientific understanding of marine and coastal conditions in the context of climate change, paired with innovations in technology, business, finance, and, importantly, the institutional structures that will develop and implement mitigation and adaptation initiatives. This brief sets out how the World Bank, in addition to developing novel financial instruments to unlock the investments needed to grow the Blue Economy, contributes to innovation by supporting research into local marine and coastal conditions, supporting the localization of global technologies where appropriate, and encouraging partnerships across stakeholder groupings around a common purpose of developing the continent’s Blue Economy through innovative solutions.