World Development Report 2010

THE CONTEXT: DEVELOPMENT IN A CHANGING CLIMATE
The physical impacts of climate change—such as sea-level rise, worsening hurricanes, and droughts—threaten the livelihoods and safety of millions of people in the developing world. To reduce their vulnerability to these impacts, all countries will need to adapt strategically to changing environmental conditions.
With a one-meter rise in sea level—now considered possible within our lifetimes—Egypt, already struggling with rising food prices, could lose 13 percent of its agricultural land. Vietnam could lose 28 percent of the wetlands that currently buffer coastal cities from storms and sustain the fisheries.

Global warming is caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide that are released into the atmosphere, primarily by burning fossil fuels and by deforestation. Global GHG emissions must be reduced in order to mitigate further warming.
Many scientists say global temperatures should not be allowed to rise by more than 2 to 2.5ºC above pre-industrial levels to prevent catastrophic harm to people through channels such as health, agricultural productivity, and ecosystem services. However, without dramatic cuts in global emissions, the world is heading toward a rise of as much as 11ºC this century.
At the same time, the primary concern of developing countries remains economic growth and poverty reduction.

The developing world is on track to achieve the first MDG to halve the poverty rate from its 1990 levels by 2015. But nearly a quarter of the world’s people – 1.6 billion – don’t have access to electricity and one in six people don’t have access to clean water. Large inequalities remain within countries: in developing countries, a poor child is typically twice or even three times as likely to die before reaching adulthood, compared to a child from a wealthy family.
WDR 2010: APPROACH AND OBJECTIVESLooking at both the challenges and the opportunities presented by climate change, the WDR 2010 will tackle three questions:
1. What does climate change mean for development?2. What does development mean for climate change?3. What does all this mean for policy?

Climate change is one of many challenges facing developing countries – but unless it is tackled soon, it will reverse development gains. Developing countries simply cannot afford to ignore climate change; nor can they focus on adaptation alone. One objective of the WDR is to inform development policy: climate change does represent a changing climate for development.
Climate-smart development, which incorporates adaptation and mitigation objectives, is needed and can be achieved. A rethinking of development policy can help to meet these challenges and to exploit the new competitive landscape created by climate change. A second objective of the WDR is to take a politically realistic, how-to approach, and contribute to emerging knowledge: how should development policy be designed in a greenhouse world?
But reaching a solution to climate change that is adequate, achievable and acceptable will also require reworking climate policy, especially as it relates to finance and innovation, so as to address the substantial concerns of developing countries. Further, rich countries will need to take the lead on mitigation efforts. A third objective of the WDR is to inform climate policy: the integration of development realities into climate change agreements will be essential to their success.

NEW GROUND THIS REPORT WILL COVER…

In the crowded field of climate change reports, the WDR will uniquely:
prioritize development;
examine the trade-offs, co-benefits, and physical and policy intersections of adaptation and mitigation;
present evidence that the elements of a global deal exist;
highlight development opportunities in the changing competitive landscape – and how to seize them;
propose policy solutions carefully grounded in analytic work and in realistic understanding of the political economy of reform.