The purpose of this paper is to outline
an approach for Bank engagement in forests, trees, and
woodlands on farms in Sub-Saharan Africa for the coming five
years. The paper takes the framework of the Africa
development strategy, which has two main pillars: supporting
employment and competitiveness, and building resilience and
reducing vulnerability; and one underlying foundation:
strengthening capacity and governance. It is consistent with

Donors could assist in clarifying the
role, building the capacity, and potentially helping to
secure funding of key disaster risk management organizations
in Ghana. Engagement in Ghana to develop private sector
property catastrophe risk and agriculture insurance should
be seen as a medium term engagement. Banking penetration is
low, as is insurance and micro-insurance penetration, even
when compared to regional countries. That said, Ghana has

This book analyzes the risks to
Nigeria's development prospects that climate change
poses to agriculture, livestock, and water management. These
sectors were chosen because they are central to achieving
the growth, livelihood, and environmental objectives of
Vision 20: 2020; and because they are already vulnerable to
current climate variability. Since other sectors might also
be affected, the findings of this research provide

The Government of Indonesia (GOI) is in
the process of designing a national REDD+ mechanism to allow
it to access donor funding in the medium term, and funding
from a potential performance based mechanism in the long
term. This policy brief is focused on the broad question of
how REDD+ can address underlying community issues such as
lack of access to forest land, and does not deal with the
more specific questions of legal and institutional

This paper contributes to the
long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized
beneficiary targeting in the administration of development
programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input
Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey
data are used to systematically analyze the decentralized
targeting performance of the program during the 2009-2010
agricultural season. The analysis begins with a standard

This overview of climate change
activities in the Kyrgyz Republic is part of a series of
country notes for five Central Asian countries that
summarize climate portfolio in a number of sectors, namely
agriculture, forestry, water, health, energy, and transport.
Recognizing the nature and significance of climate change
contribution to an increase in disaster risk, the note also
looks into the development partners' approaches and

The Partnership for Market Readiness
(PMR) is a global partnership, which provides funding and
technical assistance to support the design and development
of market-based instruments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. The PMR is country-led and builds on countries
own mitigation priorities. It emphasizes improving technical
and institutional capacity to scale up mitigation efforts,
including domestic emissions trading, crediting mechanisms

This paper examines some of the concepts
surrounding the idea that forests and trees can contribute
to making households more resilient to food insecurity. The
paper begins with a discussion of the widely accepted
definitions of food security, and the implications for our
understanding of the role of forests and trees in
contributing to food security. Authors discuss the origins
of the idea of resilience, adaptability, and transformation

Climate-induced livelihood transitions
in the agricultural systems of Africa are increasingly
likely. A recent study by Jones and Thornton (2009) points
to the possibility of such climate-induced livelihood
transitions in the mixed crop-livestock rainfed
arid-semiarid systems of Africa. These mixed systems cover
over one million square kilometers of farmland in West
Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southeastern Africa. Their

In many Pacific island countries,
meeting non-food basic needs is a growing challenge and
further complicated by substantial economic and
environmental risks. Hardship and vulnerability are
increasingly prominent concerns in Pacific island countries,
but the knowledge base to guide policymaking is limited.
Family and community networks are central to life in most
Pacific island countries, providing critical support to

"Ecosystem services" has
become a catch-phrase for the complex connections between
the natural environment and human well-being. This paper
considers the impact of changes in the supply of ecosystem
services, and programs to increase their supply, on
near-term growth of gross domestic product. It focuses on
the relationship between locally generated versus
transboundary services and growth in developing countries,

The paper provides an up-to date and
selective review of the literature on how social safety nets
contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to
show how safety nets have the potential to overcome
constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is
organized into 4 distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset
accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing
imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in