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This brief expalins about accelerating the growth of climate related private equity investment and Mitigating climate change requires vast investment. The World Bank estimates the volume of financing needed to meet the additional costs by the international community for climate change-related development. However, this sum represents only the additional or incremental costs: it would need to leverage nearly 20 times that amount—or up to as much as $4.6 trillion—from underlying investment finance from other public or private sources. These investment needs are diverse, and catalyzing the necessary finance to address the challenge of climate change will require interventions across all asset classes. Among the various types ofcapital, Private Equity/Venture Capital (PE/VC) is uniquely suited to financing climate friendly investments that are risky, innovative,and relatively small. As a result, less than 2 percent of PE/VC fund activities spread across all the emerging markets outside of India and China, despite these countries making up 20 percent of the world’s economy. Further, most investment in emerging markets has been made by international firms investing from overseas. There is still a very limited numberof locally developed climate friendly private equity funds in Emerging Markets.

Around the world, it is increasingly being recognized that for sustainability goals to be reached, efforts need to go beyond complying with standards and mitigating adverse impacts, to identifying environmental sustainability as an objective of the development process. This approach requires the integration of environmental, sustainability, and climate change considerations into policy and sector reform. Because sector reform brings about significant policy change involving adjustments in laws, policies, regulations, and institutions, it is a sensitive political process often driven by strong economic interests. Policy makers are subject to a number of political pressures that originate in vested interests. The recommendations of environmental assessment are often of little relevance unless there are constituencies that support them and have sufficient political power to make their voices heard in the policy process. While strong constituencies are important during the design of sector reform, they are even more important during implementation. It follows that effective environmental assessment in policy and sector reform requires strong constituencies backing up recommendations, a system to hold policy makers accountable for their decisions, and institutions that can balance competing and, sometimes, conflicting interests.

Cities emerge from the spatial concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial concentration is not enough; the economic viability of cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly across the urban area. This constant movement within dense cities creates wealth but also various degrees of unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental degradation. In addition, the poorest inhabitants of many cities are often unable to afford a minimum-size dwelling with safe water and sanitation, as if the wealth created by cities was part of a zero-sum game where the poor will be at the losing end. The main challenge for urban planners and economists is reducing cities' negative externalities without destroying the wealth created by spatial concentration. To do that, they must plan and design infrastructure and regulations while leaving intact the self-organizing created by land and labor markets. The balance between letting markets work and correcting market externalities through infrastructure investment and regulation is difficult to achieve. Too often, planners play sorcerer's apprentice when dealing with markets whose functioning they poorly understand. The role of the urban planner is then, first, to better understand the complex interaction between market forces and government interventions, infrastructure investment and regulation, and second, to design these interventions based on precise quantitative objectives. Each city's priorities would depend on its history, circumstances, and political environment. But maintaining mobility and keeping land affordable remains the main urban planning objective common to all cities.

This volume builds on the foundation laid by the 2005 report by focusing on the factors affecting the region's competitiveness and the critical role that the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) has to play as a driver of integration and economic development. In addition it highlights the potential of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), if properly implemented, to significantly increase the region's competitiveness and to help it attain long-term sustained development. This potential, however, will only be realized if precise trade and competitiveness strategies are crafted to focus primarily on removing the constraints to competitiveness endemic in the region. In addition, and this is a critical element of any newly-devised strategy, is the necessity to revise regional institutional mechanisms and mandates to promote implementation and to take advantage of the market access opportunities presented by successive trade agreements such as the EPA. This report, while highlighting the need for immediate and concrete actions on the part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states, also recognizes the responsibility of the donor community in helping to play a catalytic role in supporting trade reform and macroeconomic stability. The aid for trade agenda must seek to address the weaknesses inherent in the formulation and application of international aid policies and implement new frameworks aimed at enhancing the ability of these small nation states to meet and overcome the challenges of global competitiveness.

Firms have employed strategic alliances with other firms to effectively manage costs, overcome resource and technology constraints, and enhance competitive position. Strategic alliances can lead to productive institutional collaborations in rural financial markets, thereby expanding the array of financial products, and scaling up access of rural households and micro-businesses to financial services. Strategic alliances comprise a new theme in rural finance. The institutions in the study used strategic alliances to tap new capital resources, manage transaction costs, access banking technology and infrastructure, and acquire new skills to provide an expanding array of financial services to wider markets. The authors carefully examine the experiences of selected rural finance institutions, and their strategic allies or development partners in Guatemala, the Philippines, Ghana, and India to draw out the main findings and share lessons that may be applied in other country settings. The study addressed a number of key questions: What motivated the rural finance institution to structure its alliance or partnership with a bank, commercial, or development organization? How are gains from and costs of alliances and partnerships shared between collaborating institutions? What are the key elements that make partnerships or alliances successful, and which conditions lead to unproductive ones? Which financial products and services are best introduced through strategic alliances?

Armenia meets about 75 percent of its energy needs through imports, with natural gas imports from Russia accounting for about 80 percent of total energy imports and 60 percent of total primary energy supply. Because of high dependence on imported energy, Armenia is vulnerable to external energy price shocks, which are often beyond the control of its policymakers. A most recent case in point was the 2010 Russian gas tariff increase, which led to a nearly 40 percent increase in the retail gas price for residential consumers. Coming on the heels of the global economic recession that hit Armenia's economy hard, the price hike amplified the impact on households that rely primarily on gas for heating and cooking. Using aggregate energy consumption data and a nationally representative household survey immediately before the crisis, this paper provides an overview of household energy consumption patterns, highlights Armenia's energy vulnerability, and estimates the direct poverty and distributional impacts of the increase in the cost of imported gas. The analysis shows that the gas price hike resulted in a significant increase in energy expenditures, with disproportionately higher impact on the poor and vulnerable households. The paper concludes with a discussion on the effectiveness of the mitigation measures employed by the Government of Armenia.

Improving processes’ efficiency and reducing their carbon footprint is becoming more vital as the population and demand for energy increases. Today, carbon capture with amine solvents stands as the most effective and industrially applicable chemical separation technology demonstrated at a commercial scale due to their high absorption capacity and regenerability. However, aside from advantages that aqueous amine solutions offer, they suffer from the exceedingly high regeneration energy which is required to strip off the majority of absorbed CO2. The objective of this work is to improve the regeneration process of a 22 vol.% mono-ethanolamine (MEA) solution by attempting to mineralize carbon dioxide using different solid calcium precursors namely Ca(OH)2, CaCl2, and CaO at low regeneration temperatures around 80oC. The results show that adding stoichiometric amounts of Ca(OH)2, CaO and CaCl2 to balance the absorbed CO2 in MEA while heating the rich MEA solutions brought their CO2 loading to below 0.045 mol CO2/mol MEA ratio, which was much lower than 0.226 mol/mol in the case of thermal regeneration alone. In addition, the generation of solid CaCO3 particles in MEA solutions by the partial mineralization of absorbed CO2 has shown to improve both absorption and desorption kinetics. Overall, the study results proved the importance of the thermal energy in driving the mineralization reaction and thereby regenerating MEA. Moreover, the mineralization of captured CO2 could become a potential industrial improvement as it combines capturing CO2 in a thermodynamically stable form and leveraging a more chemically favored route for amine regeneration.

Hatton National Bank is the largest private commercial bank in Sri Lanka and one of the handful of commercial banks in the world that have initiated microfinance programs. The bank launched its program in 1989 as an integral part of its operations, motivated by two business objectives. First, the program aims to protect the bank s market share from state-owned rural banks and nonbank microfinance institutions such as credit cooperatives, especially in rural and semiurban areas, where more than 75 percent of the country s population lives. Second, the program is an investment in the future: it targets microfinance clients with the potential to grow into small enterprises in the formal sector. This Note profiles Hatton National Bank's microfinance operations, highlighting two questions: How does a privately owned bank downscale part of its operations for microfinance? Is microfinance consistent with profit orientation?

Over the last two decades, Moldova has achieved major development results: with average annual growth of 4.6 percent since 2000, poverty has decreased dramatically, and the growth has also benefitted more citizens: Inequality, as measured by the Gini Index, has declined from 36.4 in 2000 to 26.3 in 2016. Macroeconomic stability has been maintained despite the 2014 banking crisis, and monetary and the exchange rate policies have led to a declining inflation protecting the living standard of Moldova’s citizens. The country has benefitted from its unique assets, such as a strategic European location and growing global integration. The authorities’ focus on investment policy put the country on investors’ map: commitment demonstrated in investment promotion and the level of service and attention that was given to investors led to attracting manufacturing FDI. They on the other hand helped reorient exports towards more technology-intensive products and allowed for a stronger contribution of exports to growth and employment generation. Moldova has also significantly reformed its business environment, ranking today 47th of the 190 countries measured on ease of doing business. There was also effort to improve the quality of human capital. The education system reform led to improvement of student learning outcomes in Moldova, as measured by the Program for International Students Assessment (PISA), although there are still major gaps in learning outcomes that need to be addressed. The preprimary enrollment rates increased substantially, and labor force participation rate increased to historical highs, albeit at 43 percent still comparatively low.

This sourcebook is designed to be a guide for developing and implementing land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) projects for the BioCarbon Fund of the World Bank that meet the requirements for the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. Only project types and carbon pools that are eligible for credit under the CDM during the first commitment period (2008-2012) are covered. With its user-friendly format, the sourcebook introduces readers to the CDM processes and requirements, and provides methods and procedures to produce accurate and precise estimates of changes in carbon stocks. The sourcebook is not designed as a primer on field measurement tech-niques, although guidance is given. The sourcebook is intended as an addition to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) good practice guidance on land use, land-use change and forestry (2003), providing additional explanation, clarification and enhanced methodologies. It is designed to be used alongside the good practice guidance.