The primary objective of the Southern Gobi Regional Environmental Assessment (REA) is to provide guidance for sustainable management of environmental resources in the future development of the Southern Gobi Region (SGR), development that will be led by rapid expansion of mining.

This internal background paper has been prepared to help inform the 2010 environment strategy with respect to a proposed way forward on use of country systems. The World Bank Group environment strategy is built on three pillars: leveraging natural resources for growth and poverty reduction; managing the environmental risks to growth and development; and transforming growth paths. As part of its exploration of these three pillars, the strategy considers the question of environmental co-benefits of climate change actions.

This policy note has two goals. First, to assess whether inclusive business models face specific regulatory hurdles. Second, to recommend policies that creates a business environment conducive to inclusive business. Little research has been conducted on the first goal. This note analyzes survey answers from companies that applied to the G20 Challenge. These companies were asked to rank regulatory obstacles and explain whether these obstacles created significant hurdles to their ability to serve the base of the pyramid.

The Bank's environmental agenda has evolved gradually since the 1970s. During the 1970s and 1980s, the main focus was on mitigating the potential environmental damage associated with investment projects using environmental impact assessments (EIA). This approach was formalized in the Bank's environmental assessment (EA) requirements, which today consist of a set of individual environmental policies and procedures.

Since 2005, a growing number of vulnerable communities and nations have used the human rights lexicon to argue their case for an urgent and ambitious response to climate change. The purpose of this Social Development Department Working paper is to examine the emergence of a new discourse linking climate change and human rights, and to assess its social and political implications, particularly as they relate to development practitioners.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been described by one senior African diplomat at the United Nations as a 'state in the making; it is not yet a state.' Further, this 'state in the making' also is a state that, with few exceptions, has been in decline since the early 1970s. The colonial era, from 1885 until 1958, was a period of nearly uninterrupted state construction; the hegemony of the Belgian colonial apparatus steadily deepened.

Mongolia has very significant natural resources and a large part of the population is dependent on them for their daily living. The impact of the state of the environment on the living standards of herders is obvious, but also Mongolians living in the capital Ulaanbaatar have learned that air pollution, especially in winter, and other environmental problems have a deep impact on their living standards. The Government of the Netherlands has established a Trust Fund at the World Bank to support environmental activities in Mongolia.

Together with reductions in indirect taxes on food imports, cash for work programs were one of the main responses implemented by African governments following the food, fuel, and financial crisis of recent years. The main objective of those programs was to help the poor cope with the various shocks by increasing their net earnings through community-level work paid for under the programs. Yet it is unclear whether these cash for work programs indeed reached their intended beneficiaries and to what degree they generated other, potentially long-term beneficial impacts.

In this paper authors present a preliminary approach to the evaluation of policies and projects based on current thinking on cost benefit analysis and real option methodology and the authors' recent work on the same subject. Authors start from the assumption that economic agents undertake investment projects in order to create and exploit opportunities for increasing profits, growth, wealth and, ultimately, their welfare. These opportunities are options, rights and not obligations to take some action in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and the practical successes that a selected number of countries are experiencing in moving towards 'climate-smart' agriculture while also meeting the food requirements of a growing population, broader economic development and green growth objectives. It complements papers prepared in 2010 on technologies and policy instruments, research, and farmers' perspectives.

In 2012, the Mexican Presidency of the G20 introduced inclusive green growth as a cross-cutting priority on the G20 development agenda. The second meeting of the G20 Development Working Group (DWG), hosted by the Government of the Republic of Korea, took place in Seoul the 19th and 20th of March 2012. As agreed during the first DWG meeting, this second meeting focused on the priorities for their presidency in the first half of 2012: infrastructure, food security and inclusive green growth (IGG).

This publication is the result of an initiative to promote an exchange between Brazil and African countries on lessons learned about the role of community forestry as a strategic option to achieve the goals of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). The initiative was supported by the World Bank with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and coordinated by the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS) with support from the National Forestry Agency International (ONFI).