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 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.

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.

Backed by sound economic policies and until the global crisis, a buoyant global economy, many developing countries made significant movement toward achieving the 2015millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly those for poverty reduction, gender parity in education, and reliable access to safe water. But even before the global economic crisis, progress in achieving some MDGs, especially those on child and maternal mortality, primary school completion, hunger, and sanitation, was lagging. The global food, fuel and economic crises have set back progress to the MDGs.

Botswana represents one of the few development success stories in Sub-Saharan Africa. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth averaged almost 9 percent between 1960 and 2005, far above the Sub-Saharan Africa average. Real GDP per capita grew even faster, averaging more than 10 percent a year -- the most rapid economic growth of any country in the world. The crucial question is: Why has Botswana grown the way it has done, and what lessons does it offer?

This paper analyzes the role of the leadership in the economic growth in Rwanda, a country that was seriously affected by civil war and the 1994 genocide. It appears that the will and the clear vision of the leadership in Rwanda were one of the central pillars of the very good economic and social performances in Rwanda. This is particularly important because the country has almost no natural resources and the economy and its fundamentals were completely destroyed by the 1994 genocide.

The Global Invasive Species Program (GISP) is an independent, not-for-profit association whose mission is to conserve biodiversity and sustain human livelihoods by minimizing the spread and impact of invasive alien species (IAS) and which is presently located in the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) in Nairobi, Kenya. Its current membership is limited to the four founding members of GISP.

This note discusses the development dimensions of forced displacement, and the potential role of the World Bank to address these dimensions and contribute to durable solutions for group's who have returned from or are in displacement situations. For the purposes of this note, forced displacement refers to the situation of persons who are forced to leave or flee their homes due to conflict, violence, and human rights violations.