strategy
For climate politics, 2009 will be a year setting the switches for our future course. The prelude was given by the UN climate summit, which took place in Poznan shortly before the end of last year. There, the international "climate train" reached its minimum goals, creating the formal preconditions for the achievement of an ambitious post-2012 global deal twelve months later in Copenhagen. At...
Delivering substantially increased new and additional, adequate, predictable and sustainable financial resources will have to be a key outcome of the UNFCCC negotiation process towards an international climate change agreement to be achieved in Copenhagen by the end of 2009. Resources are required to assist developing countries in mitigating emissions (incl. REDD) and adapting (incl. insurance...
This background paper has two objectives. First, it provides an overview of trends in the magnitude, location and nature of rural poverty, with emphasis on least developed countries. There is a large body of recent work describing the trends in rural poverty across the globe. This paper selects the most relevant findings linked to the overall mandate and interests of IFAD in agricultural...
The management of water resources is currently undergoing a paradigm shift toward a more integrated and participatory management style. This paper highlights the need to fully take into account the complexity of the systems to be managed and to give more attention to uncertainties. Achieving this requires adaptive management approaches that can more generally be defined as systematic...
Global sources of change offer unprecedented challenges to conventional river management strategies, which no longer appear capable of credibly addressing a trap: the failure of conventional river defense engineering to manage rising trends of disordering extreme events, including frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, and water stagnation in the Hungarian reaches of the Tisza River...
Climatic hazards such as floods and droughts have always been a primary matter of concern for human populations. Severe floods damage settlements, transport networks, and arable land. Although devastating droughts are harmful primarily for agriculture and terrestrial ecosystems, they can also lead to local water supply shortages. Despite significant achievements in science and technology and...
This paper shows, through a numerical example, how to develop portfolios of flood management activities that generate the highest return under an acceptable risk for an area in the central part of the Netherlands. The paper shows a method based on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) that contributes to developing flood management strategies. MPT aims at finding sets of investments that diversify...
The world is entering a phase of enormous upheavals. The geography of development is now marked by the arrival on the scene of new lead players - such as China, India and Brazil - which are destined to perform an ever increasingly important role in the global economy. There is much that is positive about this process of broadening of development, particularly in reducing the problems of...
The argument for distance education (including e-learning) in developing countries could be imagined as a “triple jump.” Each leap of the triple jump consists of a theorem and a corollary applying it to developing countries.
Theorem 1: Education is good for development.
Corollary: The demand for education is especially high in the developing world....
In the wake of globalization and the current deluge of technological innovations, the digital divide that is now appearing and the fact that virtuality sometimes seems more real than reality itself, this book on telecentres has placed itself as a perfect bridge, which spans the past, present, and future.
Telecentres can be defined as strategically located facilities providing access to...
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