Saturday, November 7, 2009

World Development Report 2010 focuses on Climate Change

The most recent World Bank Development Report, WDR 2010, focuses on development and climate change. The main ideas of the report aren't particularly surprising: a) both developed and developing countries need to address emissions now and b) developing countries can shift to lower-carbon paths while promoting development and reducing poverty, but this depends on financial and technical assistance from high-income countries.

However, there are a number of interesting specifics. Among them this map showing the predicted global changes in agricultural productivity. Canada, Northern Europe and Russia are the big winners, with the southern hemisphere suffering substantially.


Another graph compares the emissions savings from more fuel efficient cars in the US with the additional emissions needed to provide 1.6 billion people in developing countries with electricity. Quite a thought provoking comparison.

4 comments:

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  2. It looks like Atlantic Canada and Quebec will become the new breadbasket of North America. There's no data for Yukon, NWT or Nunavut, but I understand that the soil quality in the Boreal forest is not good for farming. If we lost the Boreal forest, we couldn't just convert the land to agriculture, except I suppose with massive chemical inputs. Interesting also that AB and Sask don't fare as well. They seem to be more impacted by drought.

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  3. I didn't notice at first but Ontario does very poorly. It actually loses a significant amount of productivity. I wonder why that's so? And, not to be flippant about it, but the Global South is toast. That's a fact.

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  4. informative post! I really like and appreciate your work, thank you for sharing such a useful facts and information about climate of trust development strategies, keep updating the blog, hear i prefer some more information about jobs for your career hr jobs in hyderabad .

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