Other ESW Reports

309 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/2209

This includes miscellaneous ESW types and pre-2003 ESW type reports that are subsequently completed and released.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 25

Global Gas Flaring Tracker Report
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-09) World Bank
The Tracker report for 2024 comes as a global sense of urgency is taking hold. At the end of last year, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) again underscored the importance of transitioning away from unabated oil and gas. At the same time, oil and gas will continue to play a material role in the global energy system until at least 2050. This places the burden of responsibility on operators to ensure that oil and gas are produced as cleanly as possible during the energy transition. It is clear that routine gas flaring also continues to represent a lost opportunity to provide communities around the world with much-needed energy security and a cleaner source of power. This business-as-usual practice of pursuing oil production with little consideration for the potential use of associated gas is not just polluting, it is immensely wasteful. To support countries with the least resources and capacity to address greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, the World Bank has launched the Global Flaring and Methane Reduction (GFMR) Partnership. GFMR builds on the legacy of the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership and broadens the scope to include providing support for gas flaring and methane emissions reduction along the entire oil and gas value chain.
Green Competitiveness in Ethiopia: An Overview of How Environmental and Climate Factors Increasingly Shape Ethiopia's Economic Outlook in Selected Value Chains
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-12) World Bank
Environmental and climate factors play an increasing role in shaping Ethiopia’s economic competitiveness, and this report aims to provide an overview of these shifts. This novel report is a high-level assessment of how certain factors could affect Ethiopia’s economic competitiveness: (i) supply side impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, and (ii) demand-side changes caused by a growing number of sustainability requirements in key export markets, notably sustainability regulations and decisions by international buyers. Concentrating on four sectors that are both critical to Ethiopia’s economy and exposed to environmental and climate factors - coffee, textiles and garments, cut flowers, and aviation - illustrates these shifts. The objective is to identify cross-cutting trends of how sustainability factors affect Ethiopia’s economic competitiveness, but the sector-specific angle helps identify pressing challenges that policy makers in Ethiopia need to address. Note that the selected sectors are used to illustrate the trends described in this report and do not imply a recommended prioritization. Many other sectors essential to Ethiopia’s green transformation are not discussed. Moreover, although the report acknowledges that social and environmental aspects are deeply intertwined, it does not cover topics such as occupational health and safety, inclusion, living wages, and gender rights. The assessment applies a mixed methods approach by drawing on insights from interviews with experts conducted online and in person in Ethiopia (conducted mainly between November 2023 and April 2024), analysis of trade and economic data, and an extensive literature review. This report underlines the macro criticality of green competitiveness for Ethiopia, embedded in the wider economic and political context.
Defueling Conflict Environment and Natural Resource Management as a Pathway to Peace: Executive Summary
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-20) World Bank
Fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), environmental degradation, and natural disasters are on the rise and threaten to reverse development gains. In the past decade, violent civil conflicts have tripled and the number of people living in proximity to conflict has nearly doubled, with forced displacement at a record high. The World Bank Group (WBG) Strategy for Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) 2020–2025 marks a shift in the World Bank’s work in fragile and conflict situations, as it adopts a more holistic approach to prevention. The Strategy seeks to enhance the World Bank Group’s effectiveness in supporting countries’ efforts to address the drivers and impacts of FCV and strengthen their resilience, especially for their most vulnerable and marginalized populations. The FCV Strategy explicitly recognizes the importance of climate change as a driver of FCV and as a threat multiplier, as well as the need to address the environmental impacts and drivers of FCV. Delivering on this shift toward preventing conflict underscores the importance of understanding the role the environment and natural resources can have. This report seeks to build a strong narrative on the need for the World Bank Group to engage and invest in environment, natural resource management, and climate change resilience in FCV-affected situations. It further aims at facilitating the integration of a conflict-sensitive lens into World Bank operations and programs addressing natural resource degradation and climate change. The report is divided in six sections: Section 1 sets the Background, Context, and Approach; Section 2 describes the risks associated with the interplay between natural resources, climate change, fragility, and conflict across the conflict cycle; Section 3 connects those causal chains to the delivery of the FCV Strategy across its four pillars; Section 4 showcases a suite of options to improve conflict-sensitive project design and implementation; and Section 5 presents an annotated questionnaire that serves as a complementary tool to the report.
Bioeconomy Paraguay: Innovation and Economic Diversification
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-12) World Bank
This report aims to inform the Government of Paraguay about the economic potential of an innovative bioeconomy to diversify exports and create better jobs. There are a number of innovative, biobased sectors with significant growth potential globally and in Paraguay, that could contribute to Paraguay’s economic diversification. However, to build on this potential, Paraguay would need to expand its innovation capabilities to enter sectors such as bioplastics, biopharmaceuticals, forestry and wood, ecotourism and other ecosystem services, such as carbon markets for export. A wide range of products can be produced from wood, and wood pulp can serve as an alternative input material for textiles. Besides wood itself, the forests or plantations in which it grows can also provide non-wood forestry products such as cosmetics, biopharmaceuticals, or food additives. Paraguay can also expand its bioplastics production to take advantage of a global market that is expected to grow between 35–45% through 2027. In part, this is because large buyers, such as car manufacturers, have committed to purchase bioplastics. Further market opportunities are also evident in ecotourism and carbon financing, both fast-growing service industries with potential to contribute to conservation of natural capital assets.
Early Warning Systems in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence-affected Settings: Shielding Communities from Natural Hazards Amid Compounded Crises - World Bank White Paper for EWS Implementation in FCV Settings, 2024
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-26) World Bank; GFDRR
This study, led by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) teams working on the Disaster-FCV Nexus thematic area and the Hydromet Services and Early Warning Systems thematic area, aims to contribute to GFDRR’s overarching objective: to help low- and middle income countries understand and reduce their vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change. More specifically, the purpose of this report is to provide valuable insights into the nuances of early warning systems (EWS) implementation within fragile, conflict, and violence (FCV)-affected contexts against growing natural hazards, offering practical recommendations and identifying entry points for enhancing stakeholder coordination, optimizing resource allocation, and fostering community resilience. It is aimed at development practitioners, especially World Bank staff, who work with communities and governments to enhance the scaling-up of EWS coverage to populations living in contexts affected by FCV.
Planning for Flood Resilience in Romania: Results and Lessons Learned from the RO - FLOODS Project
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-17) World Bank
This document relates to the work carried out within the RAS on Technical Support for the Preparation of Flood Risk Management Plans for Romania Project, also known as the RO - FLOODS Project, and is directed at professionals working in flood risk management and in water resources management in the European Union (EU) and in other regions. It contains chapters dedicated to each key activity of the RAS (e.g., data acquisition and processing, data management, flood hazard modeling and mapping, flood risk assessment and mapping, development of the programs of measures, promotion and inclusion of green infrastructure and nature-based solutions, stakeholder engagement and communication, capacity building etc.) the main challenges faced, the approach chosen to address them, the implementation results, and lessons learned.
The Knowledge Compact for Action: Transforming Ideas Into Development Impact - For a World Free of Poverty on a Livable Planet
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-07) World Bank
Today’s global challenges are bigger, more complex, and more intertwined than ever before, from the relentless grip of poverty and stubborn persistence of inequality to the devastations caused by climate disasters, fragility, pandemics, and conflicts. Financing and investments alone cannot solve these problems in a global context of higher debt and scarce resources. Now more than ever, clients are demanding innovative ideas and successful experiences from other countries to tackle the ongoing and emerging global crises, regain the development progress of past decades and move faster towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, recent breakthroughs in technology, including the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, offer enormous potential to revolutionize development work. Policymakers and practitioners across the globe are poised to benefit from new tools to innovate, act based on evidence and accelerate the transformation of new ideas into development outcomes that improve lives of the poor. This paper articulates the strategic direction of the Knowledge Compact for Action, which seeks to empower all WBG clients, public and private, by systematically making the latest development knowledge available to respond more effectively to increasingly complex development challenges. The Compact seizes the opportunity of the digital revolution, bringing together the wealth of data analytics, research and best practices accumulated by the WBG over decades and combining this knowledge with the WBG’s proven mix of public-private finance to power learning and innovative solutions. This includes capturing the tacit knowledge embedded in operations for policymakers and development practitioners to easily access lessons of development successes and failures in other countries. Ultimately, the Compact aims to take knowledge to a new level, placing it front and center of the WBG’s work to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.
Resilience Rating System: A Methodology for Building and Tracking Resilience to Climate Change - Synthesizing Key Lessons from IDA19 Piloting
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-19) World Bank
In response to the growing recognition that measuring inputs, such as climate finance, is not enough to capture the impacts of investments, the World Bank Group developed the Resilience Rating System (RRS). Developed over a two-year,multi-sectoral consultative process through close collaboration with internal and external actors, the RRS methodology aims to guide investment decisions and improve climate resilience in project design and outcomes. The methodology report is publicly available. The RRS evaluates and rates investment projects from C to A+, based on their resilience attributes in two complementary dimensions. The resilience of rating considers a project’s design, reflecting the confidence that it will achieve its expected objectives and maximize development benefits in the face of climate and disaster risks.The resilience through rating considers a project’s outcomes and reflects its contribution to improving climate resilience in the broader community, sector and systems, and to driving transformational adaptation. Combining the two dimension ratings provides an overall project rating, from CC to A+A+.
Managing Flood Risks: Leveraging Finance for Business Resilience in Malaysia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-19) World Bank; Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM)
Building resilience to natural disasters is imperative for sustainable private sector development and growth in Malaysia. Floods have been Malaysia’s most frequent natural disaster, accounting for 85 percent of all natural disasters since 2000. This report looks holistically at the challenges of adaptation to climate change for businesses, exploring the complementarity among the public sector, the financial sector, and the private sector efforts in managing flood risks. It does so by using a range of complementary analyses that bring together the private sector perspective drawn from a firm-level survey, the financial sector perspective based on a survey of financial institutions (both banks and insurers and takaful operators), along with macro-modelling estimates of the aggregate impacts of future floods. The report concludes with a roadmap for policy action to strengthen private sector resilience and enhance the management of flood risks for businesses, zooming in on policies for the financial sector.
Trading Towards Sustainability: The Role of Trade Policies in Indonesia’s Green Transformation
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-01-22) Montfaucon, Angella Faith; Lakatos, Csilla; Agnimaruto, Bayu; Silberring, Jana Mirjam
Climate change - and efforts to mitigate and adapt to it - will affect global flows of trade and Indonesia’s ability to transition to a more environmentally sustainable economy on its path to become a high-income economy is, therefore, interlinked with trade policy. Environmental policy stringency (EPS) is increasing around the globe - a crucial challenge lies in harmonizing these with sustained economic growth, yet both goals can be reached. Although trade flows facilitate emissions, they are also a critical part of the solution, including through trade in environmental goods (EGs) and plastic substitutes - with important economic spillovers. This report provides a detailed analysis of the role of trade and trade policy on EGs and plastic substitutes in Indonesia’s green transition. Chapter one describes the need for, and urgency of, this transition, by looking at the carbon intensity of Indonesia’s trade, the impacts of environmental policies of Indonesia and key trading partners, and the roles of EGs. Chapter two examines where Indonesia stands on the level of trade in EGs and plastic substitutes and the competitiveness of EGs trade. Chapter three explores trade agreements and tariffs and simulates potential impacts of tariff reforms - including through multilateral actions. Chapter four examines what non-tariff measures (NTMs) apply on the products including inputs of firms exporting EGs and assesses which NTMs may be costly. Finally, chapter five concludes with policy recommendations.