Safer homes, stronger communities: a
handbook for reconstructing after disasters was developed to
assist policy makers and project managers engaged in
large-scale post-disaster reconstruction programs make
decisions about how to reconstruct housing and communities
after natural disasters. As the handbook demonstrates,
post-disaster reconstruction begins with a series of
decisions that must be made almost immediately. Despite the

Using subnational historical data, this
paper establishes the within country persistence of economic
activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The
paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of
pre-colonial population density, new measures of present
regional per capita income and population, and a
comprehensive set of locational fundamentals. These
fundamentals are shown to have explanatory power: native

Indigenous peoples across Latin America
and the Caribbean (LAC) already perceive and experience
negative effects of climate change and variability. Although
the overall economic impact of climate change on gross
domestic product (GDP) is significant, what is particularly
problematic is that it falls disproportionately on the poor
including indigenous peoples, who constitute about 6.5
percent of the population in the region and are among its

The report is divided into two volumes.
The first volume includes the fundamental content of the
report. It is organized as follows. Chapter one provides a
conceptual framework to analyze risk and vulnerability and
provides a definition of social protection. Chapter two
assesses the main risks faced by the Malagasy population as
well as its vulnerability profile. Chapter three reviews
Madagascar's social protection policies, the

Poverty, environment, social
development, and gender are important cross-cutting themes
of the World Bank and government investment programs,
especially within the Sustainable Development Network (SDN).
For developing sectoral strategies and programs, economic,
environment and social assessments are undertaken, however,
these are usually done separately, and most often gender
issues are not included. This is a missed opportunity,

The objective of this analysis is to
assess the state of progress of risk management in Colombia
and propose recommendations to help the Government set
public policy in the short-and long-term. For this reason,
the study sought to: (i) establish the risk and impact of
disasters in recent decades, (ii) identify legal,
institutional and conceptual themes in the country, (iii)
review the state and evolution of investment in risk

Burkina Faso is one of the priority
countries of the World Bank's Disaster Risk Management
(DRM) team for 2009 to 2011. this country note on Disaster
Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate Change (DRM/ACC)
is a baseline document for priority investments in those
areas, and for the support the World Bank will provide to
Burkina Faso through funds allocated under the "Global
Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery" (GFDRR).

The specific objective of this policy
note is to derive insights that can contribute to rapid and
sustainable integration of small-scale farmers into the
livestock and horticulture value chains in Swaziland. It
seeks to do this by identifying constraints that may be
contributing to poor performance in the two value chains,
evaluating technological options that could improve
productivity, and identifying priority areas for future

International migration has increased
rapidly in recent decades and this has been accompanied by a
remarkable increase in transfers made by migrants to their
home countries. This paper investigates the effect of the
rural economic growth brought about by migration and
remittances on Nepal's Himalayan forests. The authors
assemble a unique village-panel dataset combining remote
sensing data on land use and forest cover change with data

Welfare losses from the 2008 food price
crisis in Pakistan are deepening the gap between poor and
non poor populations and further increasing inequality
between the provinces. To estimate welfare losses, the
reduction in caloric availability at household level is
measured. The analysis of calorie intake by source supports
the notion that rural households were shielded from the
worst effects of the crisis by their capacity to grow their

Did the rise in food prices have a long-term impact on agricultural production? Using household-level panel data from seven provinces of Indonesia, this paper finds that the price shock created a forward-looking incentive to invest, which can dynamically enhance productivity in agriculture. It also finds that the impact of the price shock on investment behavior differs by initial wealth. In response to price increases, wealthy farmers invested more in productive assets, while poor farmers increased their financial savings as well as consumption.

This is a Regional Program Review (RPR)
of the World Bank's support for the MBC. The review is
framed around an assessment of five Global Environment
Facility (GEF)-financed World Bank implemented projects in
Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama that had
the common objective of consolidating the Mesoamerican
Biological Corridor (MBC). It also reports on the
achievements of trust fund activities, financed by the Bank