China is experiencing rapid and large scale urbanization, and the resulting local and global urban environmental challenges are unprecedented. The Chinese Government has fully recognized these challenges and is aiming to promote more sustainable urbanization in line with the objectives of the eleventh five year plan, which calls for 'building a resource-conserving and environmentally friendly society'. Various initiatives are being pursued to support this objective, both at the national and local levels.

This paper explores how a 'conflict and violence sensitive' framework in project assessment, design and implementation facilitates early identification and mitigation of negative consequences of competition and dispute, and promotes sustainable development over the longer term. It discusses the role of renewable resources in perpetuating conflict and violence, and distills lessons from selected development programming experiences in managing conflict risks associated with these dynamics.

Using recent estimates of industry assistance rates, the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world and in Pakistan alone are analyzed using a global and a Pakistan computable general equilibrium (CGE) model under two tax replacement schemes: a direct income tax and an indirect tax replacement. The results indicate that the distributional and poverty effects in Pakistan of a unilateral liberalization of all traded goods are significantly greater than the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world.

In 1990, Australia and New Zealand were ranked around 25th and 37th in terms of Gross National Product (GNP) per capita, having been the highest-income countries in the world one hundred years earlier. Those countries relatively poor economic growth performance over that long period contrasts markedly with that of the past 15 years, when these two economies out-performed most other high-income countries. This difference in growth performance is due to major economic policy reforms during the past two to three decades, both at and behind the border.

The world faces unprecedented opportunities to reduce global poverty and improve human welfare. Strong global growth and better economic policies in recent years have substantially reduced poverty in many developing countries. However, with the recent financial turmoil in the United States and rising prices for food, oil, and other commodities, the world economy faces heightened risks and volatility. Policymakers around the world face the challenge of maintaining momentum in growth, as well as of improving the quality of growth.

The operations policy on Development Policy Lending (DPL), approved by the Board in August 2004, requires that the Bank systematically analyze whether specific country policies supported by an operation are likely to have "significant effects" on the country's environment, forests, and other natural resources. The implicit objective behind this requirement is to ensure that there is adequate capacity in the country to deal with adverse effects on the environment, forests, and other natural resources that the policies could trigger, even at the program design stage.

This strategic framework serves to guide and support the operational response of the World Bank Group (WBG) to new development challenges posed by global climate change. Unabated, climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains. The poorest countries and communities will suffer the earliest and the most. Yet they depend on actions by other nations, developed and developing. While climate change is an added cost and risk to development, a well-designed and implemented global climate policy can also bring new economic opportunities to developing countries.

This strategic framework serves to guide and support the operational response of the World Bank Group (WBG) to new development challenges posed by global climate change. Unabated, climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains. The poorest countries and communities will suffer the earliest and the most. Yet they depend on actions by other nations, developed and developing. While climate change is an added cost and risk to development, a well-designed and implemented global climate policy can also bring new economic opportunities to developing countries.

The Strategic Framework for Development and Climate Change (SFDCC) approved in 2008 guides and supports the operational response of the World Bank Group (WBG) to new development challenges posed by climate change. One activity pursued by the SFDCC is to further develop and test methods to analyze climate risks and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the project level. The SFDCC emphasizes the need to improve GHG accounting activities at the project level to understand the implications of the World Bank's interventions.

Local and Community Driven Development (LCDD) is an approach that gives control of development decisions and resources to community groups and representative local governments. Poor communities receive funds, decide on their use, plan and execute the chosen local projects, and monitor the provision of services that result from it. It improves not just incomes but people's empowerment and governance capacity, the lack of which is a form of poverty as well. LCDD operations have demonstrated effectiveness at delivering results and have received substantial support from the World Bank.

This report is intended to provide guidance on best practices in mining licensing, based on examples from low, middle and high income countries in Africa, Asia, North America, and South America. It is not a 'how-to guide' or a licensing implementation toolkit, but rather identifies certain common features of successful mining licensing regimes worldwide that other national or sub-national jurisdictions might usefully incorporate in new mining laws and regulations or revisions or existing ones.

This report synthesizes the findings for the energy sector of a broader study, the Brazil low carbon study, which was undertaken by the World Bank in its initiative to support Brazil's integrated effort towards reducing national and global emissions of greenhouse gases while promoting long term development. The main aim of the study is to examine the potential for abating Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Brazil in the energy area and to assess the relative costs of doing so for the time frame 2010-2030.