Tag Archives: World Bank

Participatory Scenario Development Approaches

Participatory scenario development is a process that involves the participation of stakeholders to explore the future in a creative and policy-relevant way. For an example see the 2008 paper Making Investments in Dryland Development Work: Participatory Scenario Planning in the … Continue reading

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Persepctives on Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Nagoya

Eight perspectives on the recent Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Nagoya. 1. Environmental economist Charles Perrings interviewed by Earth and Sky on his recent Science article 20 Biodiversity targets for 2020: Charles Perrings: The rate of species decline is … Continue reading

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Short Links: Networks, Amazonian historical ecology, and development data

Two recent papers and comments + a new data site: 1) Tom Fiddaman on a new Nature paper (doi:10.1038/nature08932) from Eugene Stanley‘s lab on cascading failure in connected networks, that shows that feedbacks between connected networks can destabilize two stable … Continue reading

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Are ecosystem service trade-offs relatively common?

A recent paper by Heather Tallis et al. reports the finding that win-win conservation projects — those that aim to achieve both conservation objectives and economic gains — are relatively rare. In this paper (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S … Continue reading

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Improve Devlopment Lending to Build Resilience

Andrew Revkin writes in the New York Times about a recent world bank report that finds that the world bank is not lending in ways that invest in natural capital or resilience (The report is online at worldbank.org/oed). However, there … Continue reading

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Agricultural trade and poverty

A recent Economist article poses the question Does freer farm trade help poor people? Given the ideological slant of the Economist, it is unsurprising that the article concludes yes. The interesting aspect of the article discusses two World Bank research … Continue reading

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Absolute poverty in China: Higher, but going down faster than previously estimated

From the Economist: In December 2007 the World Bank unveiled the results of the biggest exercise in window shopping in history. Scouts in 146 countries scoured stalls, supermarkets and mail-order catalogues, recording the price of more than 1,000 items, from … Continue reading

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Well-Being vs. Wealth (2) – Natural Capital

This is the 2nd of three posts on well-being and wealth (see 1 & 3). While the increase in average human wellbeing over the past century is good, a common worry of ecologists (and ecological economists) is much of this … Continue reading

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