Topic: sustainable development

About 24 percent of all calories currently produced for human consumption are lost or wasted. This paper examines the implications of this amount of loss and waste, profiles a number of approaches for reducing it, and puts forth five recommendations for how to move forward on this issue. “Reducing Food Loss and Waste” is the second installment in the series that forms the foundation of the “World Resources Report 2013-14: Creating a Sustainable Food Future.”

How can the world adequately feed more than 9 billion people by 2050 in a manner that advances economic development and reduces pressure on the environment? This is one of the paramount questions the world faces over the next four decades. “The Great Balancing Act” seeks to start answering this question by exploring the scope of the challenge and proposing a menu of potential solutions. This working paper is the first in a series that forms the foundation of the “World Resources Report 2013-14: Creating a Sustainable Food Future.”

The global landscape of development finance is changing. Some formerly poor countries are becoming richer, and new, large-scale investors have entered the field. At the same time, the global community is becoming increasingly aware of the need to enhance social well-being and environmental sustainability. This working paper looks at different ways in which the World Bank has attempted to navigate this landscape with its safeguard policies. It provides lessons for the Bank and other institutions that are looking to encourage national ownership over the safeguard process while holding both themselves and governments accountable to minimum social and environmental standards.

Limiting global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels will require billions of dollars in investments each year to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and shift to low-emissions development pathways. This report draws on the experiences of six developing countries to examine how public climate finance can help meet the significant investment needs of developing countries by creating attractive conditions for scaled-up investment in low-carbon energy. Building on lessons from the case studies, it provides a number of recommendations for international climate funds and institutions, in particular for the new Green Climate Fund.

This document provides a glossary of financing instruments and the mechanism of these instruments. These definitions may serve as a useful reference for public sector decision-makers evaluating the broad toolkit of options available to support private sector climate change mitigation projects in developing countries.

These tables provide examples of donor government, development bank, research organization, and private sector efforts that examine how to use public climate finance to leverage private capital for climate change mitigation projects in developing countries. These tables are intended to illustrate, rather than exhaustively list, the range of research and convening initiatives focused on this topic. This document will periodically be updated as the landscape of such initiatives is dynamic and shifts periodically.

This document provides an array of relevant papers, publications, and resources that address: 1) Using Public Resources to Leverage Private Sector Participation; 2) Types of Public Financing Instruments and Mechanisms; and 3) Other Contextual Publications. These reading resources represent the current span of literature in climate finance as it relates to the private sector and can be reviewed to enhance one’s understanding of the nuanced opportunities and challenges presented by climate finance. This document will periodically be updated as organizations continue to publish in this space.