Person:
Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ede

Social, Urban, Rural and Resilence Global Practice
Profile Picture
Author Name Variants
Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ede, Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ede Jorge
Fields of Specialization
Social Development, Urban Development, Agriculture and Rural Development, Disaster Risk Management, Water
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Social, Urban, Rural and Resilence Global Practice
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated:January 31, 2023
Biography
Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez is the Senior Director for the World Bank Group’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice. In this position, Mr. Ijjasz-Vasquez leads a team of over 600 technical experts deployed across the world, leveraging global knowledge and collaborating with partners to help tackle the world’s most complex development challenges in: social inclusion and sustainability; mainstreaming resilience in all dimensions of development; territorial and rural development; and urban planning, services and institutions. His team manages a portfolio of about $29 billion and the delivery of more than 200 policy and advisory reports per year. Before this, he was Director for Sustainable Development of the Latin America and Caribbean Region since November 2011, covering infrastructure, environment and climate change, social development, agriculture and rural development, disaster risk management, and urban development with an active portfolio of about $17 billion. From 2007 to 2011, he was based in Beijing, where he managed the Sustainable Development Unit for China and Mongolia. Earlier in his career, he managed the global trust-funded programs ESMAP and WSP in energy and water and sanitation, respectively. Mr. Ijjasz has a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in civil and environmental engineering, with a specialization in hydrology and water resources. He has been a lecturer at the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University, and at Tsinghua University. He is a Colombian and Hungarian national. Connect with Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez on Twitter (@Ede_WBG) and LinkedIn.
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/10986/38707

Filters

2000 - 20192
Browse document type tree
Reset filters

Settings

Statistics
Citations

Publication Search Results

Now showing1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Sustainable Low-Carbon City Development in China
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-02) Baeumler, Axel; Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ede; Mehndiratta, Shomik
    Cities contribute an estimated 70 percent of the world's energy-related greenhouse gases (GHG). Their locations, often in low-elevation coastal zones, and large populations make them particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. But cities often take steps, even ahead of national governments, to reduce GHG emissions. So it is with China's cities, which are well placed to chart a low-carbon growth path to help reach China's national targets for reducing the energy and carbon intensity of its economy. China's cities will need to act on multiple fronts, in some cases scaling up elements of existing good practice, in others changing established ways of doing business. Actions affecting land-use and spatial development are among the most critical to achieving low-carbon growth as carbon emissions are closely connected to urban form. Spatial development also has very strong 'lock-in' effects: once cities grow and define their urban form, it is almost impossible to retrofit them because the built environment is largely irreversible and very costly to modify. Furthermore, cities need energy-efficient buildings and industries. They need a transport system that offers alternatives to automobiles. They need to shift to efficient management of water, wastewater, and solid waste. And they need to incorporate responses to climate change in their planning, investment decisions, and emergency-preparedness plans.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    How Has Environment Mattered? An Analysis of World Bank Resource Allocation
    (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04) Acharya, Anjali; Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ede Jorge; Hamilton, Kirk; Buys, Piet; Dasgupta, Susmita; Meisner, Craig; Pandey, Kiran; Wheeler, David
    How has environment mattered for the World Bank? The aggregate figures suggest that it has mattered a great deal, since the Bank's total environmental lending has exceeded $US 9 billion over the past six years. In this paper the authors use newly available data to address a more precise version of the question: Across countries and themes, how well has the Bank's environmental lending and analytical and advisory activities (AAA) matched the incidence of environmental problems? For their assessment, the authors extend their previous work on local pollution and fragile lands (Buys and others 2003) to consideration of global emissions, biodiversity, water resources, and institutional development. They construct cross-country problem indicators for each environmental theme and combine them with country risk measures to estimate optimal thematic lending and AAA for each country. The authors then compare their estimates with actual lending and AAA to assess the match between environmental problems and the Bank's response. The authors begin by constructing an overall indicator of environmental problems from their thematic indicators. Using regression analysis, they find a strong relationship between countries' general indicator values and the scale of their environmental borrowing, but a relatively weak relationship for AAA. At the thematic level, the authors find that problem indicators have relatively weak relationships with both lending and AAA. Adding country risk to the analysis, they test an optimal allocation model and find that it is consistent with the Bank's actual lending and AAA since 1998. The authors conclude that their model's assignment of lending and AAA to countries reflects the Bank's actual experience with partner countries. The model's explanatory power is relatively low, however, and when they compare model assignments to actual allocations, the authors find many large discrepancies for countries and environmental themes. Some gaps may reflect activity by other donor institutions, but many others may represent problems with efficient implementation of the Bank's Environment Strategy. To promote further discussion of this issue, the authors use their optimal allocation model to develop measures of lending opportunity by environmental theme for the Bank's partner countries.