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Professor Tarp has four decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research and teaching. His field experience covers more than two decades of in-country work in 35 countries across Africa and the developing world more...
Climate change poses humanity’s biggest challenge. With climate change now an urgent priority, what can we learn from past successes of development co-operation in the environmental area, its failures, and how can some of these successes be scaled-up in the area of climate change adaption?
Foreign aid has always had a role in addressing environmental issues and in helping with natural disasters. In this animation we look at how aid works in relation to climate change. The film is part of a series produced by UNU-WIDER on the project ‘ReCom–Research and Communication on Foreign Aid’. It can for instance be used when teaching students about environmental challenges.
64 articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Working Paper
Development Assistance and Climate FinanceThe distinction between development assistance and climate finance is driven by an optic of compensation largely derived from the ‘polluter pays’ principle. For practical as well as conceptual reasons, this principle provides a weak basis for climate...
Journal Article
Is the Clean Development Mechanism effective for emission reductions?The UNFCCC COP 17 Durban conference confirmed the need to reach an all-party-inclusive global climate agreement by 2015 as the successor of the Kyoto Protocol. Although this Durban ‘road map’ is promising, the international negotiation process for...
Journal Article
Has the Clean Development Mechanism Assisted Sustainable Development?One of the dual objectives of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol is to assist host countries in achieving sustainable development. With various CDM indicators for 58 CDM host countries over the period 2005-2010, this paper...
Working Paper
Aid and Environment in MozambiqueMozambique benefits from environmental aid-related funds, but it is still unclear whether donor commitments render directly into projects that are copiously implemented for the purposes stated and what aid flows have actually been doing and are doing...
Working Paper
Aid and Environment in AfricaThis paper provides an assessment of what aid has actually been doing in the area of environment in Tanzania through a critical review of the flows, modalities and management of aid. Focusing on the funding for environmental degradation projects, the...
Position Paper
Aid, Environment and Climate ChangeThis position paper on Aid, Environment, and Climate Change, prepared under the UNU-WIDER ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid, is intended to improve the understanding of the role foreign aid has played and can...
Working Paper
Aid and the Environment in AfricaThis study seeks to understand what aid flows have been doing to the environment in eight countries in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa. Total aid to these countries’ environmental sectors for the 2000s decade is about US$10.17 billion and...
Blog
Storify - Aid and Our Changing Environment in social media
The story of the event as told by Twitter. [<a href="//storify.com/UNUWIDER/recom-results-meeting-aid-and-our-changing-environ" target="_blank">View...
Working Paper
‘Ground-Truthing’ Chinese Development Finance in AfricaA new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information—e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient...
Working Paper
Aid and the EnvironmentBotswana has serious environmental problems which, if not addressed, will undermine the attainment of sustainable economic development. This study attempts to determine what aid flows have actually been doing with regard to the environment in...
Working Paper
Aid, Environment, and Climate Change in AfricaThe paper reviews the dynamics of the financing based its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study...
Blog
Goodbye and hello ReCom!
The research programme ReCom – Research and communication on foreign aid – is ending this year. There is a large and unique collection of research...
Working Paper
Aid and Environment in Burkina FasoThe main objective of the paper is to determine the actual aid flows that have an environmental focus in Burkina Faso. The environment literature highlights important environment issues in air, land and water, including deforestation, desertification...
Working Paper
REDD+ as Performance-Based AidREDD+, when it officially became part of the international climate agenda in 2007, was an idea about payment to countries and projects for reducing emission from forests, with funding primarily from carbon markets. REDD+ has since become multi...
Working Paper
Aid and the EnvironmentWe investigate allocations of foreign aid by donors to the environment sector in Kenya covering the period 2001-12. Our data are largely obtained from official government and global aid databases complemented with donor interviews. We find that donor...
Blog
Seven reasons why research doesn’t become policy
Over the last decade there has been increasing demand to make research more useful and applicable for policy-making. And that is also very true within...
Working Paper
Environmental and Climate Finance in a New WorldIn this paper we update previous work that categorizes foreign aid projects in terms of their likely impact on the natural environment. We then document trends in the global distribution of environmental aid over time and show that environmental aid...
Working Paper
Aid and Environment in GhanaIn this paper we discuss aid and the environment in Ghana. Our analysis indicates that expenditure by the government of Ghana has increased consistently since 2000, with seven sectors weakly linked to the environment taking about 78.9 per cent of all...
Research Brief
Maximizing the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid in the Forestry SectorForest degradation remains a leading environmental problem, given the scale of forest loss and the crucial role of forests to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Initiatives from the climate change policy arena, especially REDD+, are...
Research Brief
Supporting Design of Green CitiesDevelopment of green cities is one way to help address problems associated with climate change. Curitiba, Brazil, combines integrated sustainable urban planning and strong leadership, resulting in a reduced environmental impact since it began these...
Working Paper
Trends and Patterns of Land Use Change and International Aid in Sub-Saharan AfricaThe sub-Saharan Africa region recorded the fastest conversion of forest land to agriculture in the past 20 years. The region also has the widest yield gap and together with Latin America and Caribbean has the largest unused arable land. However...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Sustainable ForestryForeign aid can contribute to sustainable forestry in many ways. The goal is to secure forest benefits of the future, without compromising the needs of the present generations. This paper elaborates on forestry aid as it has evolved in the past...
Working Paper
Land, Environment and ClimateThis paper discusses global public goods related to the world’s land resources, their current provision and likely future provision, their potential impacts on the world’s poorest households, as well as prospects for using foreign assistance to...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Sustainable Fisheries Management in Sub-Saharan AfricaThe fisheries sector in sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from high and increasing amounts of foreign aid for over four decades. In the 1990s when evidence emerged that most stocks were overcapitalized and overfished, the effectiveness of fisheries...
Blog
Getting ready for Copenhagen
After two ReCom Results Meetings in Stockholm we are returning to Copenhagen. The next event ‘Challenges in Fragility and Governance’ is coming up...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Sustainable EnergyEnergy is linked to most of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. Poverty eradication, climate change, ecosystem management, world health and security are all influenced by energy, its availability, cost, emissions and other...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid for Capacity-Building to Address Climate ChangeThe paper examines the role of foreign aid in building capacity to address climate change. While the experience with this topic is relatively recent and not yet extensive, analogous questions have arisen in many other areas of foreign aid. It is...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Sustainable Agriculture in AfricaAlthough agriculture is important for the livelihood of most Africans, especially the poor, donors did not accord it a high priority. Both volume and share of aid earmarked for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa not only remained low, around five per...
Research Brief
Confronting Climate ChangeLand-based services will become increasingly important as global public goods in the context of changing climate, particularly in terms of mitigation and adaptation. Carbon sequestration, irrigation, infrastructure and local environmental services...
Research Brief
Trends in Environmental AidLevels of environmental aid for global issues are increasing. Environmental aid is increasingly allocated through bilateral aid agencies rather than through the multilateral channels created for this purpose. A consistent demand of developing...
Research Brief
Improving Food SecurityCurrent international agricultural development and food security systems are ill-prepared to address the global agriculture, food and nutrition problems. Structural reforms are necessary to deliver the essential international public goods for...
Research Brief
Foreign Assistance in a Climate-Constrained WorldThe three goals of promoting development, adaptation to climate change, and climate change mitigation are in reality inseparable policy areas and as such there is a compelling case for addressing them simultaneously. Climate finance aimed at helping...
Research Brief
How Can Aid Help Mitigate the Problem of Overfishing in AfricaDevelopment aid aimed at increasing productivity in the fisheries sector has at times had a negative effect by encouraging or facilitating overfishing. A percentage increase in capacity enhancing or bad subsidies in sub-Sahara Africa, all else being...
Research Brief
How Can Aid Help Agriculture Become More Resilient to Climate Change?Review shows that global agricultural production must be increased by about 70 per cent by 2050 in order to provide sufficient nourishment for the world’s growing population. Focusing on tropical climates to 2050, climate change is likely to reduce...
Research Brief
Foreign Aid, Capacity Building and Climate ChangeThe goal of economic growth combined with environmental protection in developing countries requires not just financial and technological resources, but also the local capacity to design and implement successful policies. Aid programmes for capacity...
Working Paper
International Co-Operation for Agricultural Development and Food and Nutrition SecurityFollowing an overview on the fast changing global context of agriculture, and food and nutrition security, this paper provides a framework for identifying the set of essential international public goods for a well-functioning world agriculture and...
Working Paper
The Global Partnership for Inclusive GrowthThis paper investigates the determinants of inclusive growth with a focus on foreign aid. Based on the Solow growth model, a theoretical model has been developed which shows that foreign aid can stimulate inclusive growth if it is effectively used...
Working Paper
The Global Partnership for Sustainable DevelopmentThis paper examines whether foreign aid, together with other economic, social and environmental factors, contributes to sustainable development. It starts with a theoretical model where sustainable development is modeled as a different kind of growth...
Working Paper
Green GrowthWhat are the major determinants of green growth? What role can the government play to promote green growth? To address these questions, this paper develops a simple Green Solow model that sheds light on the role of finance and technology in the...
Working Paper
The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid for Sustainable EnergyForeign aid and technology transfer are an essential means, especially for the least developed countries, towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals as well as facilitating adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. The deployment of...
Working Paper
Leveraging Global Climate Finance for Sustainable ForestsForest loss and degradation remains a leading environmental problem. The long history of sustainable forest management has often failed to meet expectations—constrained by funding, governance, capacity and competing interests. Initiatives from the...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid, Urbanization and Green CitiesRapid urbanization, and particularly the associated problems of urban poverty, unsustainable development and environmental degradation, pose an enormous challenge to many developing countries. In the last decade more foreign aid has been diverted to...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid, Green Cities and BuildingsThis paper attempts, first, to assess foreign aid effectiveness in fostering green city procedures in developing countries. For this purpose, we rely on the following aid effectiveness criteria: national ownership; harmonization; alignment and mutual...
Working Paper
Financing Sustainable Agriculture Under Climate Change with a Specific Focus on Foreign AidAgricultural development is facing great challenges in meeting global food security and is expected to face even greater difficulties under climate change. The overall goal of this paper is to examine how foreign aid in particular can be used to...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid for Climate Change Related Capacity BuildingThe current climate change crisis has repeatedly alerted mankind to the urgency of tackling this pressing global challenge before it is too late. Developing countries, which have contributed negligibly to the present climate change problem are...
Research Brief
Greenhouse Gas Emissions and China’s Agriculture SectorChina is the world’s largest developing country and its huge population requires a similarly large agricultural sector to sustain it. A major challenge for China faces is working out how increasing demands for food can be met at the same time as...
Research Brief
Growth for Low-Income Countries?Even the most optimistic analyses accept that many low-income countries (LICs) will remain low income for some time to come. Consequently, when assessing the policy options available to LICs it is important to take a long term view. In the WIDER...
Working Paper
Aid, Fiscal Policy, Climate Change, and GrowthThis paper sets out to provide an introduction to two sets of questions, and to some relevant literature that has tried to answer them. The first set of questions concern what determines growth in low-income countries, and how the answers are...
Working Paper
The Decarbonization of China's AgricultureAgriculture is one of the major greenhouse gas (GHG) emission sources in China. This paper aims to identify the key factors that have led to rising GHG emissions in China’s agricultural sector in recent decades. This research allows for spatial...
Working Paper
Is the Clean Development Mechanism Effective for Emission Reductions?This research studies whether the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol achieves its objective of emission reductions in the host countries. It empirically investigates the impacts of CDM projects on CO₂ emission reductions for 60...
Working Paper
Is the Clean Development Mechanism Promoting Sustainable Development?One of the dual objectives of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol is to promote sustainable development in the host countries. With different CDM indicators for 58 CDM host countries over 2005-10, this paper empirically...
Working Paper
Foreign Assistance in a Climate-Constrained WorldThe emergence of climate finance has the potential to catalyze positive changes in the institutional architecture and distribution mechanisms for financial flows to lower income countries. The nature of the challenge of development in the context of...
Displaying 64 of 64 results
Context
Main subject
This project is part of ReCom - research and communication on foreign aid
Theme: Past, 2010-11