This paper describes how management and information failures can retard transitions from the traditional use of biomass fuel by low income rural consumers and micro-producers.

It has been widely reviewed, reported, and vociferously condemned that the World Bank Group (WBG) is investing heavily in coal. In South Africa, Botswana and India, the Bank has issued over $4 billion in loans for new coal-fired power plants since 2008. As a result, the Bank’s brand name is now tied to more than a billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next four to five decades.

In the past two decades, rapid population and economic growth on the U.S.–Mexico border has spurred a dramatic increase in electricity demand. In response, American energy multinationals have built power plants just south of the border that export most of their electricity to the United States. This development has stirred considerable controversy because these plants effectively skirt U.S. environmental air pollution regulations in a severely degraded international airshed.

Choice experiments, a stated preference valuation method, are proposed as a tool to assign monetary values to environmental externalities during the ex-ante stages of environmental impact assessment. This case study looks at the impacts of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity’s Toro 3 hydroelectric project and its affects on the Recreo Verde tourism center in San Carlos, Costa Rica.

One of the policy goals motivating programs to increase renewable energy investment is that renewable electric generation will help reduce emissions of CO2 as well as emissions of conventional pollutants (e.g., SO2 and NOx).

While Africa has contributed marginally to climate change, the continent will be disproportionately affected by it, particularly the agricultural sector. Climate change demands policy action to address mitigation and adaptation needs, and it poses opportunities in implementation of international instruments.

This study undertakes a decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of carbon emissions change in the Swedish business and industry sectors 1993 - 2006. On aggregate, energy intensity decreased, but this does not seem to have been very important for reducing emissions. Rather, fuel substitution seems to have been more important, which is in line with findings from the decomposition literature on Sweden.

Dependency of urban Ethiopian households on rural areas for about 85 percent of their fuel needs is a significant cause of deforestation and forest degradation, resulting in growing fuel scarcity and higher firewood prices.