doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/40609

Person:
Avner, Paolo

Last updated: February 21, 2024

Biography

Paolo Avner is a Senior Economist at Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). His current work in GFDRR focuses on the links between urban form, land uses, transport systems, labor markets and vulnerability to natural hazards in developing country cities. He has worked on a number of analytical products including Urbanization Reviews (Kenya, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guinea, Mali) and flagship reports and is the author of several policy-oriented research papers. Prior to joining the Bank, Paolo worked in France as a researcher in LEPII (Grenoble) before joining the Center for International Research in Environment and Development (Paris) where he collaborated to the development of an applied land use - transport interaction model (NEDUM-2D). His work specifically focused on the ability of public policies and investments to curb greenhouse gas emissions from urban transport while limiting the costs of these policies for urban residents. Paolo has graduated from La Sorbonne University and from University Paris X - Nanterre as an economist and holds a doctorate from EHESS – École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Full item page

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22

Within Reach: Navigating the Political Economy of Decarbonization
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-16) Hallegatte, Stéphane; Godinho, Catrina; Rentschler, Jun; Avner, Paolo; Dorband, Ira Irina; Knudsen, Camilla; Lemke, Jana; Mealy, Penny
Despite global commitments made through the Paris Agreement in 2015 to combat climate change, their translation into national policies has been slow, raising concerns about the feasibility of achieving climate targets. While policies face many obstacles, the political economy is one of the primary impediments to climate action, and urgency to reduce emissions makes slow and gradual approach increasingly insufficient. The report attempts to identify key political economy barriers and explore options to address them through the 4i Framework, considering how institutions, interests, ideas, and influence affect the political economy. The report offers a practical guide to help countries address political economy barriers when implementing climate policies with three prongs: (1) Climate Governance: governments can adapt their institutional framework, in ways that fit with the pre-existing political economy and moving from opportunistic and unstable to strategic and stable climate institutions. Establishing strategic climate governance institutions – such as climate change framework laws, long-term strategies, or just transition frameworks - can alter the political economy, set clear objectives, improve coordination across actors, and improve the ability to monitor progress and hold decisionmakers accountable. (2) Policy Sequencing: policies can be prioritized and sequenced based on dynamic efficiency, considering not only the economic costs and benefits, but also their feasibility and long-term impact on the political economy. The Climate Policy Feasibility Frontier tool can help identify policies that can overcome short-term political economy obstacles, and at the same time improve capacities and change the political economy to facilitate further climate action. (3) Policy Design and Engagement, considers the effective implementation of climate reforms by tactically navigating political economy constraints. This involves engaging citizens to create process legitimacy and reducing and managing distributional effects, not only across but also within income groups.
Mobility and Resilience: A Global Assessment of Flood Impacts on Road Transportation Networks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) He, Yiyi; Rentschler, Jun; Gao, Jianxi; Yue, Xiangyu; Radke, John; Avner, Paolo
This study provides the first global evaluation of both direct and indirect flood hazard impacts on road transportation networks. It constructs topological road networks for 2,564 human settlements, representing over 14 million kilometers of urban roads. It assesses their exposure to pluvial and fluvial flood risks under 10 scenarios, corresponding to different flood intensities (1:5 year to 1:1,000 year return periods). Under each scenario, the study analyzes direct infrastructure exposure and assesses the indirect effects of flood-induced mobility disruptions: route failures, travel delays, and travel distance increases. The results document a positive relationship between flood return period and flood impact (both direct and indirect). Compared with direct flood hazard exposure, the indirect impact of floods on mobility is more prominent and heterogeneous. The average share of the road network that is flooded by at least 0.3 meters is 3.64 percent (or 24.84 percent) under the 5-year (or 1,000-year) return period, yet 11.58 percent (or 65.67 percent) of the simulated trips fail in the same scenario. The results enable comparisons of exposure and vulnerability of road networks to flood hazards across countries, allowing the identification and prioritization of urban transport resilience measures.
Rapid Urban Growth in Flood Zones: Global Evidence since 1985
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04) Rentschler, Jun; Marconcini, Mattia; Su, Rui; Strano, Emanuele; Bernard, Louise; Hallegatte, Stephane; Riom, Capucine; Avner, Paolo
As countries rapidly urbanize, settlements are expanding into hazardous flood zones. This study provides a global analysis of spatial urbanization patterns and the evolution of flood exposure between 1985 and 2015. Using high-resolution annual data, it shows that settlements across the world grew by 85 percent to over 1.28 million square kilometers. In the same period, settlements exposed to the highest flood hazard level increased by 122 percent. In many regions, risky growth is outpacing safe growth, particularly in East Asia, where high-risk settlements have expanded 60 percent faster than safe ones. Developing countries are driving the recent growth of flood exposure: 36,500 square kilometers of settlements were built in the world’s highest-risk zones since 1985–82 percent of which are in low- and middle-income countries. In comparison, recent growth in high-income countries has been relatively slow and safe. These results document a divergence in countries’ exposure to flood hazards. Rather than adapting their exposure to climatic hazards, many countries are actively increasing their exposure.
Integrating Climate Change and Natural Disasters in the Economic Analysis of Projects: A Disaster and Climate Risk Stress Test Methodology
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Anjum, Rubaina; Hallegatte, Stephane; Shariq, Ammara; Winglee, Michelle; Avner, Paolo; Knudsen, Camilla
To maximize development gains, World Bank projects must consider climate change and disaster risks in their design and appraisal. Buildings could be exposed to heat waves, roads might be vulnerable to floods, and agricultural practices may be subject to drought and pests. Although projects can be simultaneously vulnerable to several such risks, in most cases, it is possible to design and implement projects that are resilient to future climate change and natural risks. Doing so, however, requires these risks to be considered at each step of the project cycle. To select the best projects and ensure they deliver as expected, it is important to ensure that all project appraisal and assessment processes including economic analyses properly consider all risks. This guidance note proposes a simple methodology for doing this by adding a stress test for climate change and natural disasters to the economic analysis of a project.
Carbon Pricing and Transit Accessibility to Jobs: Impacts on Inequality in Rio de Janeiro and Kinshasa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03) Nell, Andrew; Herszenhut, Daniel; Nakamura, Shohei; Saraiva, Marcus; Avner, Paolo; Knudsen, Camilla
Urban transport is a major driver of global carbon dioxide emissions. Without strong mitigation policies, rapid urbanization, especially in developing countries, is expected to exacerbate the problem. There is a growing consensus on the fundamental role of carbon pricing for achieving reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, carbon pricing policies are frequently criticized and resisted for having adverse distributional impacts, which could hinder their implementation, particularly when implemented as a fuel levy—which would impact private vehicle usage but may also affect transit services such as buses. Currently, there is a lack of evidence that quantifies these negative impacts, especially on people’s ability to reach economic opportunities and services. To this end, this paper studies the impact of a uniform carbon price, as one of the most commonly discussed climate policies, on access to employment opportunities via transit services in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro. Reduced access to jobs would contribute to fragmented urban labor markets and thus lead to negative social outcomes. Unlike most previous studies, this study defines access as being constrained by both travel time and travel budget. The results indicate that fuel price increases (simulating increases induced by a carbon tax) reduce accessibility, but the effect is lower in more compact and walkable cities as well as in cities that have green transit options. The paper also shows that fuel price increases have spatially and socially disparate outcomes, with the lowest income communities not necessarily being the most affected, in part because even in the absence of carbon pricing, they are found to be priced out of using transit services. The results demonstrate the importance of strategies and investments, such as land use planning and decarbonized transit services, but also possibly complementary social protection programs (such as targeted subsidies, or even cash transfers), to mitigate the negative distributional consequences of carbon pricing policies.
Efficiency and Equity in Urban Flood Management Policies: A Systematic Urban Economics Exploration
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-02) Liotta, Charlotte; Hallegatte, Stéphane; Avner, Paolo
Flood exposure is likely to increase in the future as a direct consequence of more frequent and more intense flooding and the growth of populations and economic assets in flood-prone areas. Low-income households, which are more likely to be located in high-risk zones, will be particularly affected. This paper assesses the welfare and equity impacts of three flood management policies—risk-based insurance, zoning, and subsidized insurance—using an urban economics framework with two income groups and three potential flood locations. The paper shows that in a first-best setting, risk-based insurance maximizes social welfare. However, depending on flood characteristics, implementing a zoning policy or subsidized insurance is close to optimal and can be more feasible. Subsidizing insurance reduces upward pressure on housing rents but increases flood damage, and is recommended for rare floods occurring in a large part of a city. Zoning policies have the opposite effect, avoiding damage but increasing housing rents, and are recommended for frequent floods in small areas. The social welfare impact of choosing the wrong flood management policy depends on the location of floods relative to employment centers, with flooding close to employment centers being particularly harmful. Implementing flood management policies redistributes flood costs between high- and low-income households through land markets, irrespective of who is directly affected. As such, they are progressive in terms of equity, compared to a laissez-faire scenario with myopic anticipations, in the more common scenario where poorer populations are more exposed to urban floods. But their impacts on inequality depend on flood locations and urban configuration. For instance, in a city where floods are centrally located and low-income households live in the city center, subsidized insurance would mitigate a surge in inequality, whereas a zoning policy could substantially increase inequalities.
Where Are All the Jobs ?: A Machine Learning Approach for High Resolution Urban Employment Prediction in Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03) Barzin, Samira; Rentschler, Jun; O’Clery, Neave; Avner, Paolo
Globally, both people and economic activity are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Yet, for the vast majority of developing country cities, little is known about the granular spatial organization of such activity despite its key importance to policy and urban planning. This paper adapts a machine learning based algorithm to predict the spatial distribution of employment using input data from open access sources such as Open Street Map and Google Earth Engine. The algorithm is trained on 14 test cities, ranging from Buenos Aires in Argentina to Dakar in Senegal. A spatial adaptation of the random forest algorithm is used to predict within-city cells in the 14 test cities with extremely high accuracy (R- squared greater than 95 percent), and cells in out-of-sample ”unseen” cities with high accuracy (mean R-squared of 63 percent). This approach uses open data to produce high resolution estimates of the distribution of urban employment for cities where such information does not exist, making evidence-based planning more accessible than ever before.
Climate Policy and Inequality in Urban Areas: Beyond Incomes
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Liotta, Charlotte; Viguié, Vincent; Selod, Harris; Hallegatte, Stephane; Avner, Paolo
Opposition to climate policies seems to arise, at least partly, from their effects on inequality. However, so far, the impact of climate policies on inequality has mainly been studied through the lens of income inequality, and their spatial dimension is poorly understood. This paper, using Cape Town, South Africa, as a case study, investigates the impact of a fuel tax on both spatial and income inequalities. It uses a model derived from the standard urban economics land use model, accounting for four income classes and four housing types. This modeling framework allows decomposing the impacts of the tax by income class, housing type, and housing location. The analysis also decomposes the impacts of the tax over different timeframes, assuming that households and developers progressively adapt to the tax. The findings reveal strong evidence that in the short term, there are both income and spatial inequalities, with households being more negatively impacted by the fuel tax if they earn low incomes or live far from employment centers. In the medium and long term, these inequalities persist: the poorest households, living in informal settlements or subsidized housing, have few or no ways to adapt to changes in fuel prices by changing housing type, adjusting their dwelling sizes or locations, or shifting transportation modes. Low-income households living in formal housing also remain impacted by the tax over the long term due to complex effects driven by the competition with richer households on the housing market. Complementary policies promoting a functioning labor market that allows people to change jobs easily, affordable public transportation, or subsidies helping low-income households to rent houses closer to employment centers will be key to enable the social acceptability of climate policies.
Predicting Urban Employment Distributions: A Toolkit for More Targeted Urban Investment and Planning Decisions
(Washington, DC, 2022-06) Maruyama Rentschler, Jun Erik; Barzin, Samira; O’Clery, Neave; Avner, Paolo
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.
Floods and Urban Connectivity: A Toolkit for Prioritizing Resilience Investments – Demonstration Note with Case Studies from Kinshasa and Kigali
(Washington, DC, 2022-06) Maruyama Rentschler, Jun Erik; He, Yiyi; Thies, Stephan Fabian; Nell, Andrew David; Avner, Paolo
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.