Rozenberg, Julie

Person:
Rozenberg, Julie

Sustainable Development Group

Fields of Specialization

Climate change economics, Infrastructure, Development economics

ORCID

0000-0003-0569-5908

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Sustainable Development Group

Last updated: January 31, 2023

Biography

Julie Rozenberg is a Senior Economist with the Chief Economist of the World Bank Sustainable Development Group. Her work includes green growth and climate change mitigation strategies and climate change adaptation and disaster risk management. She is the author of many research articles and book chapters and led the World Bank report “Beyond the Gap”. She also develops innovative methodologies to take long-term uncertainties into account in the economic analyses of projects, in sectors like transport, water or urban, to help World Bank clients deal with climate change constraints and other long-term uncertainties in the preparation of projects and strategies. Julie Rozenberg holds an engineering degree from Ecole Nationale Superieure de Techniques Avancees and a PhD in economics from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 23

Revised Estimates of the Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Poverty by 2030
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Jafino, Bramka Arga; Walsh, Brian; Rozenberg, Julie; Hallegatte, Stephane
Thousands of scenarios are used to provide updated estimates for the impacts of climate change on extreme poverty in 2030. The range of the number of people falling into poverty due to climate change is between 32 million and 132 million in most scenarios. These results are commensurate with available estimates for the global poverty increase due to COVID-19. Socioeconomic drivers play a major role: optimistic baseline scenarios (rapid and inclusive growth with universal access to basic services in 2030) halve poverty impacts compared with the pessimistic baselines. Health impacts (malaria, diarrhea, and stunting) and the effect of food prices are responsible for most of the impact. The effect of food prices is the most important factor in Sub-Saharan Africa, while health effects, natural disasters, and food prices are all important in South Asia. These results suggest that accelerated action to boost resilience is urgent, and the COVID-19 recovery packages offer opportunities to do so.
Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-06-19) Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, Julie
From serving our most basic needs to enabling our most ambitious ventures in trade and technology, infrastructure services are essential for raising and maintaining people’s quality of life. Yet millions of people, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are facing the consequences of unreliable electricity grids, inadequate water and sanitation systems, and overstrained transport networks. Natural hazards magnify the challenges faced by these fragile systems. Building on a wide range of case studies, global empirical analyses, and modeling exercises, Lifelines lays out a framework for understanding infrastructure resilience—the ability of infrastructure systems to function and meet users’ needs during and after a natural shock—and it makes an economic case for building more resilient infrastructure. Lifelines concludes by identifying five obstacles to resilient infrastructure and offering concrete recommendations and specific actions that can be taken by governments, stakeholders, and the international community to improve the quality and resilience of these essential services, and thereby contribute to more resilient and prosperous societies.
360° Resilience: A Guide to Prepare the Caribbean for a New Generation of Shocks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10-27) Browne, Nyanya; Rozenberg, Julie; De Vries Robbé, Sophie; Kappes, Melanie; Lee, Woori; Prasad, Abha
Caribbean countries, a set of mostly Small Island Developing States (SIDS), have a history of dealing with large shocks. The region is threatened by both economic and natural hazards. Nations have specialized in tourism and commodity exports, disproportionately exposing them to global economic cycles through changes in tourism demand and commodity prices. They are also located in a region that is highly exposed to a range of natural hazards, from volcanic eruptions to earthquakes and hurricanes, which damage their infrastructure stock, reduce tourism demand, and destroy agricultural production. Hazards have often caused severe damage to economies and livelihoods in the region. This report reviews existing assessments of past losses from natural and economic shocks in the Caribbean, looking at impacts on physical capital, private sector activity (especially tourism and agriculture), economic growth, poverty, and well-being. It concludes that, despite the damage to physical capital experienced by countries due to natural hazards (especially in housing and transport infrastructure), the impacts on growth are short-lived, possibly because many mechanisms are in place to help economies bounce back rapidly. However, natural hazards have a high impact on poverty and human capital and threaten the sustainability of economic growth.
Adaptation Principles: A Guide for Designing Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-17) Hallegatte, Stephane; Rentschler, Jun; Rozenberg, Julie
Effective action on resilience and climate change adaptation can be a complex task—requiring coordinated efforts from the highest levels of government to individual households and firms. The Adaptation Principles offer a guide to effective climate change adaptation, containing hands-on guidance to the design, implementation and monitoring of national adaptation strategies. It specifies six guiding principles, which correspond to common policy domains: 1) Ensuring resilient foundations through rapid and inclusive development; 2) Facilitating the adaptation of firms and people; 3) Adapting land use and protecting critical public assets and services; 4) Increasing people’s capacity to cope with and recover from shocks; 5) Anticipating and managing macroeconomic and fiscal risks; 6) Ensuring effective implementation through prioritization and continuous monitoring. While outlining these universal Adaptation Principles, this guide shows that each country needs to tailor these actions to its specific needs and priorities. To guide this process, Adaptation Principles offers concrete and practical tools: Screening questions to identify the most urgent and effective actions, toolboxes illustrating common datasets and methodologies to support decisions, indicators to monitor and evaluate progress, and case studies on how the COVID-19 pandemic influences priorities in taking effective adaptation action.
Beyond the Gap: How Countries Can Afford the Infrastructure They Need while Protecting the Planet
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-02-19) Rozenberg, Julie; Fay, Marianne; Rozenberg, Julie; Fay, Marianne; Fox, Charles J.E.; Leifman, Michael M.; Lopez-Alascio, Blanca; Nicolas, Claire
Beyond the Gap: How Countries Can Afford the Infrastructure They Need while Protecting the Planet aims to shift the debate regarding investment needs away from a simple focus on spending more and toward a focus on spending better on the right objectives, using relevant metrics. It does so by offering a careful and systematic approach to estimating the funding needs to close the service gaps in water and sanitation, transportation, electricity, irrigation, and flood protection. Exploring thousands of scenarios, this report finds that funding needs depend on the service goals and policy choices of low- and middle-income countries and could range anywhere from 2 percent to 8 percent of GDP per year by 2030. Beyond the Gap also identifies a policy mix that will enable countries to achieve key international goals—universal access to water, sanitation, and electricity; greater mobility; improved food security; better protection from floods; and eventual full decarbonization—while limiting spending on new infrastructure to 4.5 percent of GDP per year. Importantly, the exploration of thousands of scenarios shows that infrastructure investment paths compatible with full decarbonization in the second half of the century need not cost more than more-polluting alternatives. Investment needs remain at 2 percent to 8 percent of GDP even when only the decarbonized scenarios are examined. The actual amount depends on the quality and quantity of services targeted, the timing of investments, construction costs, and complementary policies. Finally, investing in infrastructure is not enough; maintaining it also matters. Improving services requires much more than capital expenditure. Ensuring a steady flow of resources for operations and maintenance is a necessary condition for success. Good maintenance also generates substantial savings by reducing the total life-cycle cost of transport and water and sanitation infrastructure by more than 50 percent.
Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Bonzanigo, Laura; Kane, Tamaro; Fay, Marianne; Narloch, Ulf; Treguer, David; Rozenberg, Julie; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien
Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win” situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.
Strengthening New Infrastructure Assets: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Nicolas, Claire; Hallegatte, Stephane; Fox, Charles; Rozenberg, Julie; Rentschler, Jun
This paper explores the benefits and the costs of strengthening infrastructure assets to make them more resilient, reducing the repair costs and infrastructure disruptions caused by natural hazards. Strengthening infrastructure assets in low- and middle-income countries would increase investment needs in power, transport, and water and sanitation by between $11 billion and $65 billion a year, i.e. 3 percent of baseline infrastructure investment needs. The uncertainty pertaining to the costs and benefits of infrastructure resilience makes it difficult to provide a single estimate for the benefit-cost ratio of strengthening exposed infrastructure assets. To manage this uncertainty, this paper explores the benefit-cost ratio in 3,000 scenarios, combining uncertainties in all parameters of the analysis. The benefit-cost ratio is higher than 1 in 96 percent of the scenarios, larger than 2 in 77 percent of them, and higher than 4 in half of them. The net present value of these investments over the lifetime of new infrastructure assets -- or, equivalently, the cost of inaction -- exceeds $2 trillion in 75 percent of the scenarios and $4.2 trillion in half of them. Moreover, climate change makes the strengthening of infrastructure assets even more important, doubling the median benefit-cost ratio.
From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing: Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Espinet Alegre, Xavier; Rozenberg, Julie; Fox, Charles; Koks, Elco; Hallegatte, Stephane; Tariverdi, Mersedeh; Rentschler, Jun; Avner, Paolo
Reliable transport infrastructure is one of the backbones of a prosperous economy, providingaccess to markets, jobs and social services. Sustainable Development Goal 9 (SDG9) calls forincreased access to sustainable transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.Collectively, these countries will need to spend between 0.5 percent and 3.3 percent of their GDPannually (157 billion to 1 trillion US Dollars) in new transport infrastructure by 2030 – plus an additional 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP to maintain their network – depending on their ambition and their efficiency in service delivery (Rozenberg and Fay, 2019). Because of the wide spatial distribution of transport infrastructure, many transport assets are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, increasing costs for national transport agencies and operators. During the 2015 floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, the repair of transport assets contributed approximately 60 percent of the total damage cost (GFDRR, 2015). In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, accessibility as measured by the length of open networks directly after the shock dropped by 86 percent for highways and by 71 percent for railways (Kazama and Noda, 2012b). Such transport disruptions necessarily have direct impacts on the local economy. Employees face difficulties commuting, access to firms is disrupted for clients, interruptions in the supply chain inhibit production, and finished products cannot be easily shipped (Kajitani and Tatano, 2014). The paper, prepared as background material for the Lifelines report on infrastructure resilience, summarizes the main findings on the risk faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change, and the main recommendations for building more resilient transport networks. It starts by describing how transport disruptions affect firms and households either directly and through supply chains. It then proposes a range of approaches and solutions for building more resilient transport networks, showing that the additional cost of resilience is not high if resources are well spent. Finally, it provides a set of practical recommendations.
Cyber Resilience of Autonomous Mobility Systems: Cyber Attacks and Resilience-Enhancing Strategies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Zou, Bo; Choobchian, Pooria; Rozenberg, Julie
The increasing cyber connectivity of vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure will drastically reshape mobility in the coming decades. Although the advent of connected mobility is expected to benefit travelers and society by smoothing traffic, improving rider convenience, and reducing accidents, the augmented cyber components in connected and autonomous vehicles and related infrastructure also give rise to cyber attacks on the transportation system. Yet, little attention has been paid to transportation cyber resilience. This paper thus proposes an investigation on this topic with a comprehensive literature review. Cyber components and plausible autonomous mobility systems operation scenarios are discussed, before identifying possible cyber attacks to autonomous mobility systems at the vehicle and system levels. The discussion then moves to existing practices to enhance cybersecurity, and several strategies are investigated toward enhancing autonomous mobility system cyber resilience. At the vehicle level, creating layers and separation to reduce cyber component connectivity and deploying an independent procedure for data collection and processing are important in vehicle design and manufacturing. At the system level, recommended strategies include keeping redundancy in transportation capacity, maintaining a separate road network, and deploying different sub-autonomous mobility systems.
Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017) Bangalore, Mook; Hallegatte, Stephane; Vogt-Schilb, Adrien; Rozenberg, Julie
“Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.” Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.