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Liberia's 14-year civil war left much of the country's infrastructure shambles. The country's 170 megawatt power generation capacity and national grid were completely destroyed. In Monrovia, just 0.1 percent of households had access to electricity. According to the 2008 National Census, access to piped water fell from 15 percent of the population in 1986 to less than 3 percent in 2008. The national road network was left in severe disrepair. Peace brought many positive developments. The Freeport of Monrovia is now privately managed and has resumed normal operations. Essential rehabilitation work has been carried out, and the port's performance now matches that of neighboring ports along the West African coast. Liberia has also successfully liberalized its mobile telephone markets, with access surging to 40 percent in 2009, at some of the lowest prices in Africa. Despite the potential for private investment, Liberia will likely need more than a decade to reach the illustrative infrastructure targets outlined in this report. Under business-as-usual assumptions for spending and efficiency, it would take at least 40 years for Liberia to reach these goals. Yet with a combination of increased finance, improved efficiency, and cost-reducing innovations, it should be possible to significantly reduce that time.

The country’s unique philosophy is expressed by Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) as the guiding principle of development. Bhutan is at a crossroads: It can maintain the current pattern of development—with rising inequality—or develop a vibrant private sector to generate jobs and diversify the economy, building resilience to future external shocks. The overarching priority of this Country Partnership Framework (CPF) is job creation. This CPF presents an integrated framework of WBG support to help Bhutan achieve inclusive and sustainable development through private sector–led job creation.

The key objective of this study is to explore practical, politically feasible, scalable, and sustainable approaches to address the challenge of adverse water-energy-agriculture nexus in Rajasthan. Advancements in solar and communication technologies have opened new possibilities to take a fresh look at the nexus and realign the incentives and interests of the farmers, power utilities, the government, and other stakeholders to create win-win opportunities. This study presents alternatives that have the potential to achieve the trifecta of increased irrigation energy efficiency, water conservation, and doubling farmer income. The study is in five chapters. Chapter one lays out the objectives of the study. Chapter two presents the sectoral and nexus context and an approach to review sectoral policies in a nexus framework. Chapter three presents alternatives for addressing the challenges posed by adverse nexus, and potential business models. Chapter four examines the comparative advantages and disadvantages of three institutional models for implementation. Chapter five presents the study’s conclusions and recommendations.

This Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores the challenges and opportunities of improving the alignment of Egypt’s development goals with its climate ambition. The CCDR offers a set of policy options and investment opportunities that, if implemented within five years, can deliver short-term benefits in selected sectors while also creating momentum toward important long-term benefits. The options identified in this report provide: Cost-effective adaptation approaches to reduce the negative impacts of climate change; Policy interventions to improve efficiency in the use of natural resources, and complement the creation of fiscal space to finance projects that reduce the vulnerability of people and the economy to climate shocks; Actions that can help avoid carbon lock-in through low-cost policy changes; Interventions to strengthen the country’s competitiveness while reducing negative externalities (such as pollution) and incentivize Egypt’s move towards a low carbon growth path in a manner consistent with its development objectives. Overall, the report identifies opportunities to reduce inefficiencies, manage risk, and strengthen the foundation for increased private sector participation.

Le diagnostic sur l’Eau, l’Assainissement, l’Hygiène et la pauvreté (EAH) au Niger fait partie d’une initiative mondiale pour améliorer la compréhension des relations entre EAH et la pauvreté. Le diagnostic fournit une analyse détaillée de la situation du secteur, ses forces et faiblesses pour informer de la réalisation des nouveaux objectifs de développement durable (ODD) qui ont pour but l’accès universel à l’eau et à l’assainissement gérés en toute sécurité. The Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Poverty Diagnostic (PD) in Niger is part of a global initiative to improve evidence on the linkages between WASH and poverty. The Diagnostic provides a detailed analysis of sector status, strengths, and weaknesses to inform the attainment of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aim for universal access to safely managed water supply and sanitation.

The Paris Agreement sets out that tackling climate change is a common but differentiated challenge across signatory Parties and other actors. COP26 was the most recent focal point to monitor and commit to progress. Various leaders specifically called for carbon pricing to act as a barometer and price signal during COP26 to help shift the trillions in finance towards a lower carbon economy and to meet the Paris goals. Establishing and securing agreement on a global-level benchmark carbon price can be achieved by consolidating a range of carbon pricing initiatives (explicit, implicit and implied) into a single global platform that can be broken down into regions or sectors. This can then be compared against a target price corridor required to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. A benchmark serving these dual purposes can be embedded into financial markets via an investable or tradable price, which in turn can facilitate forward pricing capabilities. In addition, a user-defined data visualization framework can support a variety of stakeholder interests.

There is a growing effort in the non-market valuation literature toward better understanding of the stability and evolution of preferences over time. The study uses a novel approach combining a repeated choice experiment with a randomized controlled trial on stove adoption in Ethiopia to analyze the stability and evolution of preferences. The treatment group in the randomized controlled trial received an improved fuelwood stove with less fuelwood use, whereas the control group continued to use traditional cooking methods. Respondents were given the exact same choice questions in 2013 and 2016. The study began with 504 households in 36 communities in 2013, and 486 of the same households participated in 2016 (a 96 percent retention rate). The results show that preferences of the respondents from the control group are stable over the study period, while preferences of the respondents from the treatment group evolve. Moreover, households in the treatment group still using the stoves have significantly higher willingness to pay for all the stove's attributes in 2016 compared with 2013, indicating how longer experience can increase the willingness to pay for technology with environmentally preferable attributes.

Climate change poses direct risks to power sector investments, as the components of this sector are highly sensitive to environmental variables such water availability, extreme weather, and flooding. With this in mind, it is imperative to account for and address these changing conditions during development and design for WB-financed power sector infrastructure. The World Bank has made a commitment to mainstream climate change into its operations and scaling up action for climate adaptation. This good practice note aims to assist World Bank task teams in incorporating climate adaptation and resilience into power sector projects for client countries.

Climate-smart development is a rapidly growing area in Morocco, and indeed much of the world. It has simultaneously been proven to boost economic development and contribute to more sustainable economic development by reducing emissions and energy costs, creating jobs, and increasing economic opportunity. A World Bank Group (WBG) team, together with the support of Cluster Solaire’s and the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN), undertook a climate entrepreneurship ecosystem diagnostic in Morocco. The purpose was to shed light on the complexities of the country’s climate entrepreneurship ecosystem. The overarching aim of this report is to inform different ecosystem stakeholders in Morocco on how to spur and sustain high-growth, green entrepreneurship and innovation activity. At the same, this report also aims to increase the awareness of and support to green entrepreneurs, as well as contribute substantively to the design of the aforementioned International Finance Corporation (IFC)-supported activity.

The empirical literature on natural resource accounting uses methods which implicitly or explicitly entail measuring changes in total resource asset value when an exhaustible resource is depleted. In contrast, the growth theoretic literature on saving, social welfare and sustainable development is built upon a central finding, that the change in real wealth (as measured by net or 'genuine' saving) is proportional to the change in social welfare. We show that the change in total wealth exceeds the change in real wealth in optimal and non-optimal models of resource-extracting economies. This suggests that the change in social welfare is over-estimated when the change in total resource asset value is used as the measure of depletion. A simple empirical exercise, using World Bank data on 'adjusted net saving', reinforces the results from theory.