The Clean Development Mechanism, a provision of The Kyoto Protocol, allows countries that have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to gain credit toward their treaty obligations by investing in projects located in developing (host) countries. Such projects are expected to benefit...

The scale of investment needed to slow greenhouse gas emissions is larger than governments can manage through transfers. Therefore, climate change policies rely heavily on markets and private capital. This is especially true in the case of the Kyoto Protocol with its provisions for trade and...

Many experts believe that low-cost mitigation opportunities in agriculture are abundant and comparable in scale to those found in the energy sector. They are mostly located in developing countries and have to do with how land is used. By investing in projects under the Clean Development...

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries can only tap mitigation opportunities in developing countries by investing in projects under the Clean Development Mechanism. Yet Clean Development Mechanism investments have so far failed to reach many of the high-potential sectors identified by the...

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely determined by how energy is created and used, and policies designed to encourage mitigation efforts reflect this reality. However, an unintended consequence of an energy-focused strategy is that the set of policy instruments needed to tap mitigation...

The reality of climate change associated with anthropogenic emissions is now widely acknowledged by the scientific community. Its potential devastating future harms are equally well perceived and as stated in the Copenhagen Accord major nations agree on the need to jointly and urgently combat...

Established by the United Nations in 2015 with a target date of 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework with specific objectives to guide global development policy. The SDGs extend and modify an earlier framework, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established in...

While the economic returns to using chemical fertilizer in Africa can be large, application rates are low. This study explores whether this is due to missing and imperfect markets. Results based on a panel survey of Ethiopian farmers suggest that while fertilizer markets are not altogether...

Lessons from six case studies illustrate the complex relationships between international trade, vulnerable ecologies and the poor. The studies, taken from Africa, Asia and Latin America and conducted by local researchers, are set in places where the poor live in close proximity to ecologies that...

Arab countries depend heavily on imported food, particularly wheat. Population growth, rising incomes, and climate change will only increase their dependency on wheat imports, thereby making Arab countries even more exposed to international market volatility. A recent World Bank study, 'the...