climate change

As COP29 approaches, development economics can provide useful tools and insights to help tackle climate change.

New evidence from Bangladesh shows that aligning business owners' profit motives with environmental and health goals can effectively reduce the harm caused by pollution from brick kilns.

New research uses mobile phone transaction data to shed light on the nature of religious adherence in Afghanistan, revealing that religiously motivated insurgent violence reduces religiosity while climate-induced income shocks increase religiosity.

While wealthier countries have historically contributed the most to climate change, the Global South is now under pressure to take costly action. How will balancing between emissions reductions and economic growth affect long-term outcomes in developing countries?

Carbon offset programmes allow polluters to pay others to reduce emissions on their behalf. In theory, this can achieve the same emissions reductions at a lower cost, but only if the payment actually incentivises the recipient to cut emissions. If of...

High external debt levels worldwide have forced ecologically-rich nations to exploit their natural resources to generate revenue. Debt-for-nature swaps offer a promising solution to this problem, but remain challenging to implement in practice.

Population displacement may become an obvious adaptation margin to climate change in vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa. How large will future climate-induced migration flows be? What could the associated welfare losses be, and what can polic...

Evidence from Ecuador suggests that natural disasters have important but short-lived impacts on production and market conditions in developing countries that vary depending on firm differences in efficiency. From a development perspective, frequent s...