Clean, safe energy for rural areas is an important component of green growth and sustainable development. Biogas could be an important contributor, if its record in reality lives up to its expected potential. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of biogas use by smallholder farmers in...

Negative attitudes toward groups in society are widespread and underpin systematic processes of social exclusion that marginalize people and deny them opportunities and dignity. This paper looks at the processes underlying social exclusion. It uses data covering Eastern Europe and Central Asia...

The food, fuel, and financial crises that started in 2008 reverberated throughout the global economy, causing job losses; poverty; and economic, financial, and political upheaval in countries all over the world. This book is not about the causes of these crises or the macroeconomic and financial...

This paper surveys qualitative crisis monitoring data from sites in 17 developing and transition countries to describe crisis impacts and analyze the responses and sources of support used by people to cope. These crises included shocks to export sectors as a result of the global financial...

This paper develops a methodology for regional disaggregated estimation and mapping of the areas that are ex-ante the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and variability and applies it to Tajikistan, a mountainous country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The...

Mongolia was hit hard by the global economic recession, notably the fall in commodity prices. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 1.6 percent in 2009 after growth of 8.9 percent in 2008. The country is narrowly specialized in production of a few primary goods with minerals comprising 70...

Tajikistan is highly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of global climate change, as it already suffers from low agricultural productivity, water stress, and high losses from disasters. Public awareness of the multiple consequences of climate change is high, with possible impacts on health,...

In the years ahead, development efforts aiming at reducing vulnerability will increasingly have to factor in climate change, and social protection is no exception. This paper sets out the case for climate?responsive social protection and proposes a framework with principles, design features, and...

This paper uses primary source data from several World Bank-led case studies on the ???social dimensions of climate change??? from 2008-2012 to understand how communities in developing countries can more successfully adapt to climate change. Poor communities face an adaptation deficit,...